I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine • Hacker News Board

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#41

Post by DanI-S » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 2:14 AM UTC

SurfScore wrote: post #12

It always comes down to price. The vast majority of people in the world aren't so self-righteous that they'll pay $10 more for something that was produced "the right way." This has always been the nature of these kinds of businesses, and until robots and technology take those jobs away completely (which opens up a whole other can of worms), it will just keep happening

The author mentions that picking 800 items filled 52% of her daily quota. An extra 5c shipping cost per item could thus double her salary, or pay for an entire extra employee.

There's no need for this kind of brutal efficiency. It is detrimental to our society and our economy. Workers who develop crippling health conditions and can never afford to retire are a massive burden on our systems of welfare.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#42

Post by hristov » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 2:15 AM UTC

tsotha wrote: post #26

I worked at a company developing the warehouse management software. This was back in the mid '90s, but we didn't have a single customer that ran his warehouse like the one in the article. Picking is a crappy job, and everyone knows it, so pickers weren't expected to move too fast. If you showed up to work for a few weeks as a picker you'd get promoted to another position. Most of the people who got hired were ex-cons…

The economy changed. The mid to late nineties were the years of the Clinton relative prosperity when unemployment was low jobs were not that hard to get so one could not treat people like shit, especially in low level jobs.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#43

Post by paulhauggis » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 2:16 AM UTC

Amazon is the worst e-commerce company I've ever dealt with. They treat their marketplace sellers like garbage.

I have been selling for the past 5+ years. They put a review on my account and when I called them to find out some more information about it, I was met with a call center rep in India who gave me absolutely no help.

They don't actually have call support for marketplace sellers. You have to email them. When you do, you get mostly automated responses.

After this ordeal, I finally left them for good. I still can't believe people are giving Amazon this much money (most categories are between 8-16% commission) to sell their goods (plus $40/month if you have a pro-account).

It's a slap in the face when you can't even talk to someone when you have any sort of account issue. On top of this, Amazon doesn't even abide by the same harsh rules they expect all of their 3rd-party sellers to follow.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#44

Post by ericd » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 2:24 AM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #14

ericd wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions are disastrous for the competitiveness of a company on the global market. We do need worker protections of some form (perhaps greater informational transparency about working conditions would help?), we don't need the techniques that unions use to obtain unsustainably high wages for their workers.

Just because it's hard to monetize and profit from concepts like the health and well-being of employees doesn't mean that we as a society should put that value at zero. The "competitiveness of a company on the global market" isn't the be-all, end-all. The phrase itself belies your point: if we as a society wanted to, we could place tariffs equivalent to the cost of providing a humane workplace for packaging workers,…

Competitiveness is extremely important, and you highlight a way to sort of obtain that, but you can only control competitiveness in the domestic market with tariffs unless you basically oppress third worlders (how it will be viewed, anyway) by strong-arming nations to pass similar tariff laws.

The value of domestic manual labor simply isn't that high anymore except in hard-to-outsource cases, and unless we change our society to involve more wealth redistribution, those who can only perform manual labor will not enjoy a similar standard of living to those with greater leverage.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#45

Post by hristov » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 2:25 AM UTC

ericd wrote: post #3

ck2 wrote: post #2

It's interesting how we put down companies for their abusive labor conditions in China but at least 50% of the population will rally behind forces that prevent any sort of government regulation or unions that help prevent this kind of abuse "in the homeland". Oh and I don't just mean the right wing, fun fact, Hillary Clinton was a bigtime lawyer for walmart to help them prevent unions. Walmart even has a swat-like te…

Unions are disastrous for the competitiveness of a company on the global market. We do need worker protections of some form (perhaps greater informational transparency about working conditions would help?), we don't need the techniques that unions use to obtain unsustainably high wages for their workers.

Not always the case. Many of the German and Japanese companies that have been kicking our asses on the global market have much more powerful unions than their respective US competitors.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#46

Post by scarmig » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 2:25 AM UTC

jfoutz wrote: post #23

nostromo wrote: post #7

It strikes me that these sort of manual warehouse picking jobs will be completely gone in a few years as robots automate the picking process (as seen here with Diapers.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXOW6v0c8s )

Indeed. 4000 people @ 11/hr for a month? even without overtime that's 1.7 million. The automation can't be nearly that expensive.

Let's assume that you would need 1000 machines to have as much throughput as 4000 people.

WAG, but I'd wager that each of those machines would cost $500k.

That means 100 million in immediate outlays. WAG 2: fuel/electricity/maintenance is $200/month, and you need a team of 20 engineers to watch over them at $10k/engineer/month. So recurring costs come to $400k.

Which brings us to: 100M/1.3M = 77 months, or between 6 and 7 years.

That, however, doesn't take into account the opportunity cost of the initial $100,000,000 outlay. That brings it up to around a decade.

So, a decade to break even.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#47

Post by nikcub » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 2:28 AM UTC

jfoutz wrote: post #23

nostromo wrote: post #7

It strikes me that these sort of manual warehouse picking jobs will be completely gone in a few years as robots automate the picking process (as seen here with Diapers.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXOW6v0c8s )

Indeed. 4000 people @ 11/hr for a month? even without overtime that's 1.7 million. The automation can't be nearly that expensive.

you have underestimated both the cost of people and the cost of robots

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#48

Post by lukifer » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 2:31 AM UTC

temphn wrote: post #11

lukifer wrote: post #6

These conditions aren't unique to warehouse jobs; the customer call-center industry is similar in many ways. Time is tracked down to the second, you are being recorded and/or monitored at all times, tardiness and absenteeism are ruthlessly enforced with no excuses, and there is relentless pressure to "hit your numbers", which are often nearly impossible. And of course, you're still expected to "always put the custome…

> costs of corporate capitalism But under non-capitalist systems such as in the USSR you were machine gunned or bayoneted for refusing to work (starting with the Kronstadt Rebellion and ending with Solidarity), and had no option to quit or leave the country. Capitalism hasn't yet completely eradicated all drudgery from the world, but Mother Jones isn't about to acknowledge that it's better that 4000 marginal workers…

There's a reason I used the phrase "corporate capitalism". I meant our particular flavor of government-industrial complex, not markets in general. In my opinion, either pure libertarianism or a hybrid economy of democratic socialism would both be an improvement over the "socialism for the rich" we currently live with.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#49

Post by mbell » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 2:37 AM UTC

ericd wrote: post #3

ck2 wrote: post #2

It's interesting how we put down companies for their abusive labor conditions in China but at least 50% of the population will rally behind forces that prevent any sort of government regulation or unions that help prevent this kind of abuse "in the homeland". Oh and I don't just mean the right wing, fun fact, Hillary Clinton was a bigtime lawyer for walmart to help them prevent unions. Walmart even has a swat-like te…

Unions are disastrous for the competitiveness of a company on the global market. We do need worker protections of some form (perhaps greater informational transparency about working conditions would help?), we don't need the techniques that unions use to obtain unsustainably high wages for their workers.

Unions are disastrous for many of the same reasons that much of my country's (USA) systems are failing in various ways, political corruption.

I still live in a 'union town' (Boston) so perhaps it is different elsewhere, but they certainly push their influence well beyond the scope of worker rights in this city.

It being discovered that you didn't vote on the union line or otherwise 'play ball' with their political or public stance will get you booted from the union. Which in some trades around here makes you unemployable unless you relocate. In other words, they use scare tactics to push their agenda.

Unions had a time and place. There were absolutely deplorable conditions of work in the US for a period of time and unions were a proper solution. Today they just lay the basis for overly cushy jobs and political corruption.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#50

Post by lukifer » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 2:42 AM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #9

lukifer wrote: post #6

These conditions aren't unique to warehouse jobs; the customer call-center industry is similar in many ways. Time is tracked down to the second, you are being recorded and/or monitored at all times, tardiness and absenteeism are ruthlessly enforced with no excuses, and there is relentless pressure to "hit your numbers", which are often nearly impossible. And of course, you're still expected to "always put the custome…

I worked in a call center for two summers to pay for college. It was actually not that bad. I was certainly tracked, monitored, and given aggressive performance targets, but as an inbound CSR you don't have many calls that make you cry. They offered us shifts in the warehouse when we didn't need 100% utilization on the phones. I never took them up on that, despite that juicy extra quarter an hour.

There's a huge degree of variability in the industry; I worked for four different call centers before I broke into web-dev, and some were much worse than others.

The absolute worst ones are the out-sourced centers that handle in-bound calls for multiple other companies. Because they have no stake in the long-term outcome and are paid solely by their numbers (cost per call), they have little incentive to train their staff well, pay well, follow through with customers, etc. Working for Comcast and AT&T directly was degrading and Dilbertesque, but they weren't as bad as the outsourced centers or the warehouse environs described in the article.