Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

pulse.ng

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 721 posts

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#621

Post by yndoendo »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #81
atrexler wrote: post #23

Long-haul truckers have been doing this for decades for the same reason-- they don't have time to pull over and use the restroom-- and no one is upset about that. I'm sure there are many industries, white and blue collar, where similar norms are expressed. Edit to add: I'm not endorsing the practice in any industry at all, just pointing out that its not a unique problem to Amazon. My comment would have been better ph…

Why shouldn't we be upset about long-haul truckers peeing in bottles? That seems inhumane to me as well.

Truckers have time frames and distance to worry about. Only X distance and or time on the road before being off for Y time.

Say you reach your quota 20 miles away from home. Either you have to wait Y time or have a family member come and pick you up and take you back to the truck. YOU CANNOT DRIVE HOME that 20 miles.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#622

Post by your-nanny »

thegrimmest wrote: post #564
bbddg wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are against things like paid time off, 40-hour work week, weekends off, workplace safety/health standards, ect.?

Can I say "yes" without being down-voted? I'd like the government not to limit free association of moral agents. Two people should be free to work together under whatever arrangement they voluntarily enter into. All our current system of labour and union law has accomplished is the offshoring of suffering. We've not gotten rid of the existence of, nor our reliance on abhorrent working conditions. We've just moved the…

See: the Inclosure Act.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#623

Post by krapp »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #207
isostatic wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

White collar jobs are somewhat different than. We have choice, we have power. The best bet for amazon warehouse employees, and delivery drivers, would be to unionise. This would lead to either 1) More investment in robotics, taking away menial jobs 2) Better conditions for shelf-stackers. Both are good -- as a society we should not be making people work when the work could be done by robots.

Roboticization is great for the long-term, Star Trek style economy. It's the Bell Riots and Sanctuary Districts I'm worried about.

Of course... Star Trek's economy didn't run on robots, it ran on magic wish boxes that would defy the laws of physics in the real world.

Which is why I suspect when it comes to Star Trek's future, we'll get to the dystopia, but not the utopia.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#624

Post by cbanek »

Murdodc089 wrote: post #223
lostapathy wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seeing this as well - and ironically, I live within walking distance of an Amazon fulfillment center. The scummiest part, though, is that when packages get completely lost, half the time I can't request an automatic refund, I have to work with a customer support rep to get it issued. Realistically, it should be completely automated. If Amazon knows my package was lost (in my most recent case, it never even shippe…

"....I have to work with a customer support rep to get it issued" I'm finding more and more (or maybe it's always been this way?) that the onus for correcting or making sure something is correct, is ALWAYS placed on the last person in the chain.....the individual.

This is especially true for medical and insurance problems. You don't pay the individual/customer, and you have no incentive to help them (other than they might go somewhere else a little less bad). For people that haven't had to go through this yet, such as a claim gone wrong, everything seems fine. One example of this has been life insurance companies verifying eligibility only after the person has died and someone has made a claim. It seems part of the business model to make life so miserable for customers that they give up trying to get what they were promised.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-life-insurance-inves...

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#625

Post by Tiksi »

andrepd wrote: post #616
mkolodny wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To... what?

We haven't reached the peak of human wealth distribution systems with a byproduct of the fall of feudalism. Let's rack our brains, I'm sure we can figure something.

Instead of being cryptic and beating around the bush, why not suggest a system if you've already racked your brain and figured something out?

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#626

Post by [deleted] »

Sharlin wrote: post #481
rosser wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How professional technologists are treated by their giant tech employer is utterly orthogonal to how lower-skilled, hourly warehouse workers are treated by the same company. Why do technologists reliably chime in with completely irrelevant details of a technologist's experience of working for a tech company, in response to articles talking about how poorly those companies treat their non-technologist staff? What does…

People are really, really good at assuming that their experience of just about anything is a representative sample. And because their experiences are subjectively pretty important to them (naturally) they must be objectively important and relevant in the grand scheme of things as well.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#627

Post by SubiculumCode »

bbddg wrote: post #445
SubiculumCode wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean to imply doubling forever. Also, yes I assumed that the robot would have to be employed at least initially to earn a wage, so that it could buy materials and components off alibaba.

How much do you think raw materials are going to cost in a world with free labor? What's to stop rich people from just buying up all the resources? With free labor they can use as much resources as they get their hands on. There are structural problems in our society that cannot be solved with new technology.

Space is big. The asteroid belt plus robotics. There is a lot of energy from the sun. There is a lot of iron.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#628

Post by philwelch »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #614
eeZah7Ux wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is conceivably possible for every American to have adequate food, housing, and medical care, to work in safe and humane conditions, and so forth. It is conceivably possible for every human - given the current available resources.

The global GDP per capita is about $10k/yr. Depending on what you mean by "adequate" housing, medical care, safe work, and humane conditions... it might not actually be possible. I think if you use first world standards, you'd have a hard time achieving that even if you could magically redistribute all of the globe's economic productivity.

Also, if you actually want it to work out, you first have to remove all the tinpot kleptocrats and replace them with halfway responsible governments. This doesn't get attempted often, but this was attempted with Iraq, and the attempt cost 2.4 trillion dollars and didn't yield sustainable results.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#629

Post by krapp »

truculation wrote: post #124

What's the typical walking time to the toilet in a large warehouse? Where do the relevant employees keep the bottles (e.g. are they attached to their legs underneath trousers? If not how do they avoid CCTV?) Are break periods mandatory or optional?

>What's the typical walking time to the toilet in a large warehouse?

I work in one of the largest FCs in the network and even when I've had to walk up or down flights to find a bathroom that was empty (only one per side per floor, and one toilet) I didn't pass the ten minute limit before getting flagged for time off task.

Although it is annoying having fifteen minutes of a thirty minute break be taken up by walking to and from the breakroom, and the expectation of having to arrive early enough to scan into a Kiva on time, pod gaps or no.

I don't doubt at all that this happens, though, or that Amazon drives some people to this kind of behavior. I think it depends on the facility and the management.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#630

Post by sharpercoder »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #428
rland wrote: post #424

Is this worth it? Is this worth having the ability to pick between 10,000 different toasters via internet and have them delivered to your doorstep in 2 days? Sometimes I look at society as a complete organ, with a hypothetical ability to make cohesive decisions for itself. And I think, it is making extremely self-destructive choices. All for the sake of satisfying the urge to buy more, at lower prices, with more conv…

We can have both. Amazon isn't going to implode if they pay some extra pennies for reasonable working conditions.

We don't need both. 10 toasters is more then enough to fulfill our needs.
Post reply on HN