Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness' • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by chestnut-tree » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 9:27 PM UTC

Just watched the BBC programme associated with this story. The goods pickers are treated like automatons. The work is pretty gruelling and pretty demoralising too.

Some interesting information in the programme:

- The Scottish Government gave Amazon a £6.8 million grant to persuade it to set up shop in Scotland.

- The Welsh Government gave Amazon an £8.8 million grant + £4.5 million to build a road for it's distribution centre in Swansea.

- Amazon operate a points system for their temporary workers. If you gain three points, you're sacked. A day off sick rewards you with one point penalty. In the programme, the undercover worker was late by two minutes which gave him a half point penalty.

Quote from Professor Michael Marmot (University College, London) who was featured in the programme:

"If you say to me there are always going to be menial jobs, yes of course, but we can make them better or worse and it seems to me that the demands for efficiency at the cost of an individual's health and well-being - it's got to be balanced"

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

#92

Post by waps » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 9:29 PM UTC

emilga wrote: post #75

VLM wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Thanks. I did not know this.

What you see in that movie, the uncooked egg pickup, is becoming somewhat of a litmus test. Trying to reliably instruct a robot to put some 20 eggs from one basket into another without breaking any, and without prior knowledge of the position of the eggs and so on, that'll mean a lot.

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

#93

Post by tluyben2 » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 9:57 PM UTC

fit2rule wrote: post #85

tluyben2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheaper I understand, however, it doesn't seem very healthy work. I worked with people doing it full time at that time (and apparently not much has changed); most of those had damaged hips from walking the same way behind the carts they pushed for 10-15 years. And I can see why this would mentally affect you, although I must say that most of them actually liked it. I was setting up a software business and was telling…

>Cheaper I understand, however, it doesn't seem very healthy work. My family works its own garden. We have a modest plot, which we push into production very comfortably, for about 8 months a year. This plot, which was once a 'pleasure-garden' around our house, replaces a family of 4's vegetable-nutrient needs at the grocery for about 6 months a year. Its a lot of work, mostly for my wife, but if I "didn't have to wor…

Gardening feels healthy though. We live of our own fruit/veg almost whole year round. I think it's fun and besides my dogs, we can almost live on what we create ourselves.

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

#94

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Nov 26, 2013, 2:37 AM UTC

contextual wrote: post #46

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.

Spoken like a person of privilege, someone completely out of touch with the challenges of the poor. Have you considered that low wage workers may be too exhausted after working two and three jobs a day to engage in "class warfare"? They worry about meeting basic needs for their families like rent and paying for medicines. Their war is survival. Please, step out of your ivory tower and help them.

[deleted]

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

#95

Post by Houshalter » Tue, Nov 26, 2013, 3:38 AM UTC

PeterisP wrote: post #41

Houshalter wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully this becomes more and more automated over time and eventually people won't have to do it at all.

Of course, "people won't have to do it all" also implies "the future doesn't need us". Currently those poor workers are cheaper than the machines that could do the same job. Once the machines become cheaper than a sustenance-wage for a human, there will be literally no jobs for those people, ever. And than means that either by that time we drastically change our distribution of resources - where 'having a job' is not…

The point is the issue isn't amazon treating workers bad. Obviously they'd be even worse off if amazon got rid of them, yet that's considered perfectly acceptable. If you think it's not, then think of all the companies in the world that also don't employ people because technology makes them unnecessary (or they just don't need to in the first place) and place equal blame on them.

The problem isn't with one company, or even just the industries that hire lots of unskilled workers. The problem is our society requires people to depend on their job and the value of their labor as their only source of income. This problem becomes more and more obvious as the value of labor continues to fall with technology and competition with other countries.