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Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

#61

Post by csmuk »

mjn wrote: post #59
csmuk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. This subject somewhat angers me. Yes people like Walmart and Amazon workers need protection form maltreatment. Definitely. This should be built into the law though, not into unions. And no because the existing unions don't really protect people. If you look at RMT, Unison and NUT they regularly pop up just to cause trouble. From a perspective of people having to consume services offered by their staff reg…

Denmark has something that sort of works like this, but imo it works okay and is usually not exploitative, partly because of several differences: 1. It's not completely free to businesses or completely unpaid: the person continues to receive pay in the form of benefits from the unemployment fund, but the company kicks in 17% on top of that as a pension contribution. This is partly to ensure the company takes it serio…

That's great and exactly where we should be. Glad to see some countries have actually hit themselves with the clue stick.

Re: Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

#62

Post by panacea »

pc86 wrote: post #54
panacea wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The employees aren't in jail, they aren't slaves, they have choice." Care to outline the choice they have (you forgot the "s", as belies your worldview)? What are the choices outside of jail, slavery or the work conditions described in the article? I suspect that many of them can't get another job and they need to feed themselves or dependents like children. "The article is sensational." If you disagree with the art…

I flagged and downvoted both of your comments because there is absolutely no reason to resort to intentionally misunderstanding the poster's intent and petty name calling. It's not worthy of a forum where people supposedly think critically about the material presented. This isn't the comments section of some hack political blog.

Whilst I appreciate you outlining which buttons you clicked on this website, perhaps you could engage with the discussion and present your view? There are mechanical-turk computers behind the scenes to interpret your button pressing.

Re: Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

#63

Post by sentenza »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #56
panacea wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Empathy redundancy detected! "Yes, you are a mechanical turk in the strictest sense of the word, being dispatched by your hand scanner to go find something and put it in a cart, but it isn't hard work, just a bit boring." Would you like to be a permanent 'mechanical turk'? As in... you had zero choice in the matter and no chance to change things ever? That's not 'a bit boring'... that's soul crushing (and I mean 'sou…

> Would you like to be a permanent 'mechanical turk'? As in... you had zero choice in the matter and no chance to change things ever? That's not 'a bit boring'... that's soul crushing (and I mean 'soul' in a non-religious sense). Studies have shown that sort of stress causes heart disease over 'good stress' (you're manning the Very Important controls). You have choice. To work there or not to. By the way, welcome to…

No. With current economic circumstances, many have the choice to work there or to not work at all.

In construction jobs you have steadily-changing tasks and work in fresh air/the sun. It might be more physically straining, but it is certainly healthier for your body and mind than working as a human robot at Amazon.

Also: Nobody is complaining that working at Amazon is not the greatest job on the planet. The scandal is that it would take so little effort on the part of Amazon to significantly improve the working experience.

We wouldn't tolerate a sweatshop operating in the western world. So why do we continue to tolerate Henry Ford style assembly line work?

Re: Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

#64

Post by DanBC »

kolektiv wrote: post #43
nicpottier wrote: post #39

"Desk jockey does manual labor and his feet hurt, story at 11" I worked the graveyard shift as a picker at Amazon back around '00. Back then Amazon was so nervous about anybody introducing a bug in the site that all software engineers were put to work either at warehouses or as customer service agents during the holidays. I worked customer service one year and picked for two years, both times during graveyard shifts.…

There are some rather key differences though don't you think? I imagine as a reasonably valued software engineer you weren't likely to face disciplinary action or loss of employment for not picking fast enough, thus negating a huge cause of stress/anxiety. You also had the knowledge of a definite finite term of employment followed by more relaxing/agreeable work, another rather significant difference. You also talk a…

I've had menial jobs. For what they were - menial work to earn a bit of money - they were great. The bullshit on assembly lines is present, but it's different to the bullshit you get in offices.

Good employers can make this kind of menial job a great place to work for many people. Bad employers can very quickly ruin it.

> You also talk about troubleshooting shortages and getting to do things that require problem solving. It sounds from this article (and others like it over the last few years) that this kind of thing, if even still available at all, is not likely to happen to your average seasonal employee.

Yes, bad companies don't listen to their employees. When someone sits at a machine for 8 hours a day, moving a widget, pushing a button, and putting the widget in a box for someone else, that person knows a lot about that process. They can tell you about the lighting or the draft or the position of the bin or the seat or how stuff piles up too fast for them or how they're left waiting for product.

Find these people. Reward them for their insight. Apply those tweaks.

Re: Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

#65

Post by Mikeb85 »

sentenza wrote: post #63
Mikeb85 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you like to be a permanent 'mechanical turk'? As in... you had zero choice in the matter and no chance to change things ever? That's not 'a bit boring'... that's soul crushing (and I mean 'soul' in a non-religious sense). Studies have shown that sort of stress causes heart disease over 'good stress' (you're manning the Very Important controls). You have choice. To work there or not to. By the way, welcome to…

No. With current economic circumstances, many have the choice to work there or to not work at all. In construction jobs you have steadily-changing tasks and work in fresh air/the sun. It might be more physically straining, but it is certainly healthier for your body and mind than working as a human robot at Amazon. Also: Nobody is complaining that working at Amazon is not the greatest job on the planet. The scandal i…

> In construction jobs you have steadily-changing tasks and work in fresh air/the sun.

Here that means you work in minus 40 degree C weather...

And steadily changing tasks? Have you ever done any stints in construction?

Re: Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

#66

Post by VLM »

emilga wrote: post #22
waps wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take it from someone who's tried making it work : grasping is too fucking hard. It looks so simple, a baby could do it. A hand grasping objects. Many things that many people believe robots can do are in this category. The absolute state of the art is balancing (not walking) on 2 legs (which does allow you to move, but ...), and walking on 4 legs (it's not really walking like for example a cat does, but it's better th…

On the problem of grasping, can you please comment on this video [1]? Instead of making a robot "hand", they have filled a balloon with ground coffee beans. "Grasping" and "ungrasping" then simply becomes sucking air out of, and pushing air into the balloon. Is there some downside to this that I'm not seeing? [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKOI_lVDPpw

"Is there some downside to this that I'm not seeing?"

Most real world engineering problems boil down to long term reliability. Its just assumed you'll get your statics and dynamics correct and all that basic stuff, the actual brain power burned on the job is designing stuff that actually works 1M times and tolerates every component being 5% off the exact value or whatever. I think this would be a huge headache in the very long term reliability category.

Re: Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

#67

Post by pc86 »

panacea wrote: post #62
pc86 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I flagged and downvoted both of your comments because there is absolutely no reason to resort to intentionally misunderstanding the poster's intent and petty name calling. It's not worthy of a forum where people supposedly think critically about the material presented. This isn't the comments section of some hack political blog.

Whilst I appreciate you outlining which buttons you clicked on this website, perhaps you could engage with the discussion and present your view? There are mechanical-turk computers behind the scenes to interpret your button pressing.

Despite your lack of respect toward anyone else in this thread, I felt I owed you at least an explanation of why I did what I did.

Re: Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

#68

Post by VLM »

goldenkey wrote: post #34
camus2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low Wage workers need to fight for their rights and working conditions. Nobody is going to do that for them. That's class warfare, and it has never been more important than today.

Not true. The fact of the matter is, low wage jobs usually require less skill , and therefore less education. It is part of our responsibility as those who are better off, to help fight for the rights of not just ourselves, but _all_ laborers

"and therefore less education."

Not exactly true. There's "requires" as in what it takes to do the job, and there's "requires" as in HR has figured out that people who were compliant at being team players with the educational-industrial complex will be more compliant as employees, and supply and demand results in some bachelor degree holders looking for anything at all just so they can eat, such as receptionist or laborer or clerk.

Those who are temporarily better off via luck, privilege, whatever, should fight for the rights of people in cruddy jobs, because its mere luck they haven't ended up there themselves like their classmates ... err, not yet anyway.

From personal experience I think hope is a big issue WRT cruddy jobs. I worked cruddy jobs while I was in school, and I didn't mind running a floor buffing machine at 2am because I knew it was probably one of the worst jobs I'll ever have, and its just for a little while. I would imagine the emotions are quite a bit different if you fully realize a cruddy job is the best job you'll ever get yet its still awful and there is utterly no chance of advancement (better off buying lotto tickets). This is also reminiscent of my experiences in the .mil, where spending my whole life doing that kind of stuff would have been pretty awful, but doing it as a kid for fun was OK.

Re: Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

#69

Post by nicpottier »

panacea wrote: post #60
nicpottier wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuckwit? Asshole? Seriously? You can disagree, that's cool, we can have different opinions, but aren't we supposed to strive to a slightly higher level of discourse on HN? You don't know me, so lay off the ad-hominem, this isn't the forum for it. We apparently disagree on what kinds of choices people have in the Midwest. We are coming from different places in our experience, and I happen to think I hold the edge on t…

I apologise for the name-calling. (Particularly the egregious terms I used... and it's no excuse that in my circle of friends we use them in conversation, but subtleties are lost in translation, even amongst English speakers) My broader point is this (if you care beyond taking offence at the language I have used), people desperate for a job to feed themselves and their dependents, should not have to subjugate themsel…

I wasn't asking you to respect my feelings, I was simply asking you to engage in a discussion.

I get where you are coming from, I really do, I just don't think this is the Big Evil Megacorp (TM) you are looking for. Yes, being a full time picker wouldn't be my first choice as a job, but that goes for a lot of jobs out there, many of which I did for a time.

Not all jobs are fulfilling, not all jobs are fun, really only a tiny fraction are. As "knowledge workers" we have the incredible luxury of having jobs that have incredible flexibility and are engaging. But most jobs have to pay you because nobody would voluntarily do the work otherwise, and ya, that's called work.

The Amazon warehouses are just that, warehouses, where shit gets picked, put into boxes and shipped. To me, they seemed fine, no more or less bad than I expected. I think some people are better at coping with that kind of job than others, my brother did the same stint one year and went berzerk, for me it wasn't so bad, I found some form of fun in it.

It isn't a super amazing fulfilling job where you belch unicorn rainbows after every shift, no. But it isn't some forced labor camp either. The testament to that is that Amazon sent off its own super hippy, liberal and educated workforce to witness it year after year.

I have empathy, I'm just pointing out that an alternate reality might be that this reporter spent two weeks investing in this article and then left and had to write something.. so he did. It is a lot less interesting to write "Amazon warehouse work is boring but gives you good calf muscles" than it is to go on about mental illness.

PS. I can tell you if you cared about mental health, working as a software dev during those days was WAY more stressful than any warehouse job. Pressure cooker to the extreme.

Re: Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

#70

Post by throwaway1979 »

thelettere wrote: post #50

I worked at an Amazon warehouse in Texas as a seasonal employee about a month ago. It was an absolutely miserable experience - and I say that as someone who has worked plenty of low-end manual jobs. I only lasted a month. Shifts were 10 hours and had two 15 minute breaks and a 30 minute lunch. The floor is large and there is no cafeteria, so it usually was more like a 15 minute break after you walked over to the brea…

Wow ... this story reminds me of Marshall Brain's Manna story.

I don't understand how much money a company would lose if they changed the hours to 3 or 4 hours per person. Fine, they'd double or triple their workforce and have to deal with more HR/paperwork. But the costs don't increase. This makes me wonder if the reason is not cost but control. If company X is the only thing in your life, you will likely be a more "compliant" worker. This kind of stuff scares the heck out of me :(

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