Amazon has used tricks, algorithms, and surveillance to discourage warehouse employees from unionizing, according to a paper published in the journal Socius.
AI is just the wall these asshole stand behind to be cruel and lawless. It doesn’t absolve you from blame, it’s not intelligent it’s a tool, like a gun and if you point it at people and it hurts them you should be jailed.
Me 8 years ago:
I’m absolutely not getting a job at amazon, or ups, or usps. I’m not taking a job where you don’t have permission to pee. I’m a human being. I don’t care if I’m the president of the united states giving a state of the union address live on tv. If I have to pee, I’d tell the camera “Hey America, go grab a snack or something. I’ll be right back in like 2 minutes.” Fuck it, if I gotta pee, that’s just what I’m going to do. Fuck your profits for 3 minutes. I’M expelling waste.
And then my sister is like “it’s not that bad.”
Then me reading news 6 years ago that an amazon worker died of a heart attack and his coworkers didn’t even stop to call 911.
My sister thinks I made that up.
USPS is unionized. No cameras, Way less micro-management, and you can pee when you want to.
USPS isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. I know multiple regional managers and local district managers as well as post masters. It’s a very tough demanding and long job.
A single delivery driver can deliver 630am till 1030pm and still not have all the mail out. While head quarters will deny adding drivers to routes or changing anything to ease the loads.
Don’t get me started on mentioning package theft, insurance claims, and other related issues.
It really is that bad though, I used to think I was insane when I worked customer service call centre roles and they’d say (like all places I worked), without laughing, that we should get there 15 minutes before our shift to load all our systems. So basically work 75 mins for free each week. Whilst at the same time they pay as little as legally required and monitor your toilet breaks about 9 mins a day.
So naturally I am against this and push back and they say you gotta do it. And I’m like like fuck I do bro I could leave this job now and get another one tomorrow. In the end I was ready to die on this hill so I go in 15 mins early and at the end of the day I log off 15 mins early to get my coat on. Suffice to say I was no longer required to log in early. Most people did it though.
Now to contrast this I am a software developer who has got lucky at a small company, tiny actually. They really care about the staff and the clients. I’m sick quite a lot more than the average person and I overthink things but I am told that WE come first we don’t live to work we work to live. Recently we all got pay rises and our hours reduced. There is no micro managing, no targets and no pressure. Only the pressure my stupid brain puts on myself.
So uhhhhhh…I’m not a software developer, but are you guys hiring? I don’t know. I’ll dress up in a clown suit and do unfunny things. Maybe I can mime a satire of what it’s like working at other jobs. Like drinking coffee, looking exhausted, typing on a keyboard, looking exhausted, talking on the phone, looking exhausted, sorting through filing cabinets, hanging yourself with a noose…uh…I mean…looking exhausted.
My point is, your job sounds amazing, and I want to work there even if I don’t have any skills or qualifications. Let’s make this happen.
Hey, if I was in charge I would hire you right now.
Whenever I talk about my job I have to stress so much that I am lucky af. I don’t believe I deserve to be where I am because frankly I was a mess at life until late thirties and made a mountain of poor life choices.
My point in this is to say that change is possible for anybody, given enough determination, a massive dose of luck and being in the right place to actually get my life on track. I am not special and I’m not particularly smart, just like solving problems.
If you’re interested I did a couple of coding boot camps and although I had a lot of experience from just making things for myself I believe anybody can up skill.
As someone who worked there for a year, the nice thing about Amazon is that managers don’t harass you—even if you come in late every single day—and the 40 hours of paid personal time granted every week is great too. It’s the kind of job where you can just put on your headphones and zone out, and never have to come in on days when you don’t feel like it. Just call off in the app.
Still wouldn’t recommend that anyone works there. Everything else about the job sucks.
40 hours of personal time granted every week is great too
Wtf is this? You have 168 personal hours every week. It is not at the decision of your employer.
Before the internet, people would say some ignorant shit and we’d all just carry it around like a nugget of gold.
People still say ignorant shit, but now at least we can mark them for their nonsense and ignore their opinions.
Best way I’ve ever heard it described was that before the Internet, every village had it’s idiot… “Hatians are eating pets? What? Oh, you were talking to Jerry.”
Now, all the village idiots have glommed into each other and retweet the insanity back and forth until it takes on a life of it’s own. “Buttery males!” and “adrenochrome extractions happening in basements of pizza places” etc etc etc.
I hate how AI is being used to fuel toxic workplace culture.
Amazon doesn’t sell anything you can’t buy somewhere else for the same price. You have no excuse to keep using Amazon. Correction, I’m sure people who buy from Amazon have excuses, but they aren’t good ones.
There actually are things that one just cannot find elsewhere easily, and most of the places that reliably carry them locally are places like Walmart which aren’t better. That said, it’s always the very last place I look.
With all this nonsense I’m going to start asking local stores if they can order stuff for me, though, and just be extra patient. For example, it’s wild how little there is for mandolins at local music stores but at least the British strings I’m going to try switching to are there so that’s something.
Wow, had no idea amazon was the only online marketplace. If we didnt have amazon, wed have to go back to thrift stores or some shit until some genius figures out how to take orders and ship goods far away again.
Also, musicians love to talk about music, and tend to work in music stores. Start calling around, they dont need to be local, most will ship to you.
To be honest, since most places ship from their physical locations(which may not have stock or carry something at all due to demand) and Amazon’s incredibly predatory practices it means that they are pretty much the only option. I’ve gotten stuff from Etsy as well(but it doesn’t help for, like, water filters and certain appliance parts), and I really have always tried to avoid Amazon, but there are just some things where they’re the only ones where I can buy some of this stuff.
And like I said, I’m gunna have to just start asking outright for stuff even if whatever store doesn’t carry it normally. It’ll take some patience but I’ll live.
This is not true. Many of the parts I buy off of Amazon are not only cheaper, but I can get them faster as well. I wish this were not true, but I cannot spend half of my week driving for hours on end to pick up equipment at a higher price.
This is not true. Many of the parts I buy off of Amazon are not only cheaper, but I can get them faster as well.
Only the faster part is true, and only if you use prime, else you can buy from everywhere else and have the same price and delivery time.
Cheapest only if you buy a rip-off, buying some item of a certain brand have the same price on Amazon then the brand shop (if not higher on Amazon sometimes)
There was a “don’t use Amazon for a week” boycott thing at the beginning of March. It shocked me how quickly I lost the urge to just go order stuff the moment I thought of it. After the week was over I just kept not ordering stuff (with the exception of a subscription that came through).
Definitely at least helped me cut back.
“Accused”? It couldn’t be more obvious.
It’s nothing new; I worked in a call center 15 years ago where the algorithms were designed to work them as hard as possible and steal commissions because they were too tired to pay attention. I should know because they told me to do that, I refused, and was fired for it.
Same old trick in a new venue. This has been happening for a long time in Asian warehousing, but has hopped the pond this last decade or so. Worker’s efficiency is set to a certain rate of efficiency, then they’re reprimanded/fired for failing to meet it. The catch is that it’s a challenging pace to begin with, and the window for successful completion almost-imperceptibly narrows, eventually becoming so ludicrously small that they must injure or maim themselves trying to beat it or even match the pace. Once they quit or cripple themselves, the company simply slides in a new candidate who doesn’t yet understand just how Hellacious the work is.
I worked in a British Amazon during the pandemic, the minimum pick rate for one order type was 59 items per hour….its achievable, yeah, if the stars line up. But your minimum is more or less the maximum, if you get me?
This is exactly the kind of problem I’m talking about, the metric is absurd. 1.02 seconds/item is a level of efficiency seldom seen outside of robots, applying it to human beings is sadistic, especially considering the consequences for failure. I’m convinced that these sorts of setups have been contrived to establish leverage against workers early on as a means to hold their “already coached/this is your last strike” status over their heads for the entirety of their employment.
I don’t envy Amazon workers that predicament, but it sounds as though you’ve found something different and hopefully better?
