9 ms·

Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

86 points by klearvue 13y ago

waps 13y ago
From the article A handset told him what to collect and put on his trolley. It allotted him a set number of seconds to find each product and counted down. If he made a mistake the scanner beeped." "We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we're holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves", he said. Really reminded me of this : http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm Welcome to the future.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Goddamnit, why do the nasty predictions for the future have to arrive early while the nice ones are always late?
  - coldtea 13y ago
    Because everything powered by greed gets fast lane access.
  - pirateking 13y ago
    Salvation is always just around the corner, but we are walking around a rotating platform struggling to even just keep the corner in sight.
    - moocowduckquack 13y ago
      Alongside the platform is a railway tunnel. If you walk down it to the left you will find a bundle of disconnected wiring and a sign reading; "We are sorry to announce that due to unforseen circumstances and the state of the economy, the light at the end of the tunnel has now been switched off". If you were to walk in the other direction however there is brilliant illumination, but that is just the lights of an oncoming train.
      - pirateking 13y ago
        You take the left path. Your inventory contains: flashlight with unknown amount of battery power, shovel, binoculars, old brass ring, matchbox, notebook, pencil. 1. Inspect the wiring. 2. Continue in the dark. 3. Turn back.
    - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
      Salvation is easy. All you have to do is decide that "good" > "bad". The perverse attraction to misery and toil I observe in people, in this fucking thread, that's what pisses me off. What's with this idolatry?
- Nursie 13y ago
  Haven't read that one for a few years, but it always seems more and more spot-on. The 'Australia Project' part is fanciful sci-fi, but the point is clear - the work that all humans have put in for generations is being co-opted by the few in the ownership classes. Ordinary people find themselves treated more and more as replaceable machines then are finally optimised out of the process and disenfranchised entirely. OTOH when you look at much of the non-western world, thinking about problems with concentrated ownership in a post-scarcity society seems a million miles away from the people who still need a clean water supply and a reliable source of food.
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    >OTOH when you look at much of the non-western world, thinking about problems with concentrated ownership in a post-scarcity society seems a million miles away from the people who still need a clean water supply and a reliable source of food. It's really not. The pre-capitalist world had a much more egalitarian international wealth distribution, with India, for example, making up a double-digit percentage of the world GDP. These non-Western poor countries wouldn't be nearly so poor if not for the same capitalistic process that is steadily leaving the Western working classes out in the cold (and now even the Chinese working classes, as they get to be more expensive than robots or Africans).
    - Nursie 13y ago
      Fair enough, I guess it just strikes me as odd to talk about post-scarcity anything when we have poverty on such scales. I guess it can all be an outgrowth of the same phenomena.
      - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
        Well let's be clear: there are lots of Indian villages who would have plenty of drinking water if some Western firm wasn't bribing the government into letting them steal all of it. There are Mexican farmers who would have a good deal more food if NAFTA hadn't ruined them. There are Argentine workers who would have much better wages and easier access to, well, everything, if the IMF had not tried to liquify their entire nation into debt-service payments. Global capitalism is a global problem.
tluyben2 13y ago
I worked as a picker for a few days in a large distribution facility in my home town when I was in high school; this was over 20 years ago. They had rails everywhere through the complex which seemed to do nothing; when I asked what that was, they explained that they, together with the biggest IT company in NL, made software and robots to do our work automatically. It would be put in production the next year. It hasn't still. Why are humans still doing this work? Surely this can be automated, especially as companies have been working on that idea for well over 20 years, probably more?
- coldtea 13y ago
  >Why are humans still doing this work? They are cheaper. And it keeps them occupied.
  - tluyben2 13y ago
    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 about that ; they were just saying 'why not work here, no stress, it's great! never any stress and fixed paycheck'. That sounds different than the Amazon one, but you cannot really do that in NL ; you can set a 'realistic, sustainable minimum' amount of work they have to do, but that differs per person; you cannot fire or reprimand someone for not 'making the beep' if that means you have to walk faster than normal or even run for it. So everyone would be quite relaxed and yet everything gets done with the people happy. So cheaper but unhealthy maybe? Also; I don't know much about the robots involved and what they would cost and how much prices are going to drop; seeing that humans are wasting quite a bit of space on the floor and have other issues, I'm not sure if it's cheaper? I'm sure Amazon calculates that often though , so I guess it is. Occupied; I see that as a reason, but that's an issue anyway; we cannot keep doing it that for that reason (and they don't, but as you say). If the work can be done by machines, it will be done with machines.
ck2 13y ago
Average people get all upset about unions when they see them applied to jobs that don't seem too too demanding. But places like Walmart and Amazon are exactly why unions should exist, to counterbalance the inhumane over-optimization and maltreatment of people. Amazon could probably make work less toxic by hiring 10% more people, but that would make things cost a few cents more.
- csmuk 13y ago
  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 regularly, they want masses of additional pay and do not improve standards along the way at all. They are simply allowing the incompetent to be propped up by the good staff. Also, the professional minority who agree that this is the case are forced to be dragged into union ballots and vote with other staff in favour of strike action regularly in fear of retaliation from their colleagues. Also let us not forget a much greater threat of exploitation: being forced to work with no pay under the guise of "training". This is happening a lot in the UK a the moment as the Job Centre has been pushing for people to do this by threatening to cut their benefits if they don't do it. The result is people being forced to work for no compensation and having to pay for travel expenses out of their own (literally destitute) pocket. The employers don't have to pay the staff either. The result of this is a dangled carrot of "if you do this, after 6-12 months we'll give you a permanent paid position". This inevitably results in being laid off as not needed immediately when they agreed to take you on. There are even posters going up in Job Centres telling people "try staff for free": http://imgur.com/SdWpgvx http://imgur.com/SdWpgvx Edit: Also I've spoken to some business associates (the sort who worship the fully paid up Lord Fuckwit Sugar himself) and are applauding this as a great way of building their businesses. This is simply unethical. I've been pretty much excluded for mentioning the inevitable "abhorrent slavery" point, not that I care.
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
henrik_w 13y ago
Here is another scary read: "I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave" http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-f...
radical_blogger 13y ago
at least the british press still cares enough about the average british worker to write an article like this. The american press would only write an article like this if such conditions disparately impacted minority race workers. Pretty soon the british press will do the same. It just gets worse and worse. I see no light at the end of the tunnel. The citizens of america do not even ask the right questions.
- camus2 13y ago
  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.
  - goldenkey 13y ago
    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
    - VLM 13y ago
      "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.
nicpottier 13y ago
"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. This involved flying out to the middle of nowhere from the Seattle headquarters and living out of a hotel. Honestly, it was a lot of fun. Seeing those parts of the operation was fascinating, and Amazon encouraged you to look for inefficiencies and offer solutions or think about how you could fix things once you got back behind a keyboard. Our shifts were exactly the same as the full time workers, but they were faster than us, especially at first. Your feet do indeed hurt and you do indeed walk a ton, but that is more because you've been sitting on your ass for 12 hours a day instead of actually using your body. 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. If you take it seriously and get good at troubleshooting shortages, then you start getting to do things that require a bit more problem solving, but even the really menial stations aren't terribly bad. In short, this is just a bunch of whining that manual labor is hard work and not terribly engaging. The conditions themselves are plenty good, hard to imagine them being better while doing the same job. They are nothing, nothing at all like the conditions any number of people work every day to manufacture your shoes, t-shirts and electronic equipment. You get to move around, you aren't on an assembly line, the work is varied in its environment. So shut your trap and get back to picking, there's product to get out to customers.
- kolektiv 13y ago
  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 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. The fact that other people have it worse in various sweatshops around the world is hardly relevant, or particularly edifying. We are quite capable of seeing problems as a matter of degree I would hope. Your comment comes across as a little like the CEO who spends a day on the factory floor and proclaims that he had a marvelous time and everyone treated him wonderfully. Unsurprising, but hardly enlightening...
thelettere 13y ago
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 breakroom and nuked lunch. That in and of itself was not so bad - I've had food service jobs where we had no breaks at all. But that combined with the actual job duties, combined with the conditions, combined with rigid management, and 1984 "ministry of truth" style propaganda - all that added up to an absolutely miserable experience. It's very hard for me to really communicate why it was so miserable, because I don't fully understand it myself - but I will try. But I will say that I've spent time in prison - and I would choose prison any day over returning to work at Amazon. I applied online, went on an interview and started a month later. I had a few months free and being a long time Amazon customer and admirer I thought it would be an interesting job to check out for a little bit. I heard it was a warehouse for just books and dvd's, and that it was a brand new warehouse that was just opening up. I read a long PR piece talking about how Amazon had every year changed the design of the warehouses based on what they had learned from the warehouses built previous years. So this was a brand new design that was supposed to be more efficient and also more thoughtful of workers. I was assigned a shift - Sunday to Wednesday 6am to 5:30 pm. I was not given an option, and when I finally found an HR contact a week before I started to ask if it was possible to change shifts I never heard back from them. So I was like whatever and went to orientation. It was me and 6 others. By the time I left the job a month later, only 3 remained of that original group. The first to leave and the one I got to know the best was an ex-hooters girl who was my age (31) who was sick of waiting tables and wanted to work for a company she could move up in. She left a week and a half in after having severe allergies in response to the thick coating of dust throughout the warehouse and on all the shelving we were working "stowing" product on. It turned out it wasn't just books and dvd's - in fact that was a small percentage of what I worked with. Mostly it was cheap consumer goods - the kind I despise and that is slowly killing our planet. The shelves often reeked of toiletries and chemicals and perfumes of various kinds, mixing with the dust to inspire a sickly feeling. FYI exposure to dust and chemicals are conductive to good health. The job was simple: take some carts of newly shipped product and "stow" them on the shelves: i.e. find space on the shelving where it fits and scan it into the system so it shows up as being available and ready to ship on the online website. It was fairly easy in some ways - the problem was doing that for 10 hours with hardly any interruption, and being surrounded by all that dust and smell and crappy mindless consumer goods. I didn't feel good about what I was doing. I had 3 days off, which I thought at first was great - but it would usually take me those 3 days to just recover from what I experienced in the 4 I was at work. (Note: if I was given some freedom as to when I did the job, or the timing or duration of breaks, or how long my shifts were - this would not have been that bad a job. I can put up with shit for a few hours - but not 10 without a real break to speak of. And that was it - it was either work within these rigid parameters or not work at all. And so I chose the latter.) It was a mindless monotonous job, but to make matters work, all over the place Amazon had signs saying "Have fun". Every morning and afternoon after we had our group meeting they repeated this over and over again before we went off to work. Trust me, no one was having fun. Maybe a few in management, but certainly none of the direct workers. It was insulting. I could go on, but I'm bored. I will finish with something I came across recently, which can be compared to my experience. How bad you consider the job depends on what you compare it to. If you believe that someone living is misery (or, to put it more mildly, doing uninspiring and unimproving labor) is worth it for someone else to receive at a cheap price what in many cases is an unneedful trinket, then my point is mute. But if human happiness and potential is valuable, then this is not a job worthy of human beings. John Ruskin said it much better than I: "We have much studied and much perfected the great civilised invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. Truly speaking it is not the labour that is divided; but the men: – Divided into mere segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin. "Only in right understanding on the part of all classes of what kinds of labor are good for men, raising them & making them happy, and by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour can this evil be met." Prior to working there, I had begun taking seriously the treatment of the animals whose products I ate - milk products, eggs, meat ect. Part of what inspired me to work at Amazon was to see what I was supporting when I purchased from them. Needless to say, I will never again buy a physical product from Amazon - and am trying to ween myself off their digital products. We are far past the time when such demeaning labor should be supported.
ada1981 13y ago
Which headline is more likely in the next 5-10 years? "Amazon improves lives of 5,000 manual pickers by introducing fully automated robotic supply chain. Workers now free to find other employment." Or "Profit crazed Amazon to employ 5,000 android robot zombies, lays off entire human workforce." Manual labor of this sort isn't exciting or creative for most people. You don't really have room for creativity with this sort of job unless you are iterating on the system level -- and I'm most certain they have a way for pickers to contribute ideas to that. Then again, people play Candy Crush saga for hours a day and PAY for the privilege.. At least these guys get paid and get to walk around. Once the cost of automating people out completely is less than human labor, it will happen almost instantly.. That is the bigger social issue folks should be looking at -- what will we do when General Human Labor is more expensive than General Machine Labor? Combine this with General Artificial Intelligence and human labor becomes worth less and less.. As someone formally trained as an Urban Planner, this was the biggest issue I saw in grad school as a rapidly approaching social concern.
mabbo 13y ago
Signs that today is not going to be a good day: The BBC do an article where a well respected health researcher has analyzed the software that you write the interface for, and described it as "all the bad stuff at once".
chestnut-tree 13y ago
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"

86 points by klearvue 13y ago

waps 13y ago

From the article A handset told him what to collect and put on his trolley. It allotted him a set number of seconds to find each product and counted down. If he made a mistake the scanner beeped." "We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we're holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves", he said. Really reminded me of this : http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm Welcome to the future.

eli_gottlieb 13y ago
Goddamnit, why do the nasty predictions for the future have to arrive early while the nice ones are always late?
- coldtea 13y ago
  Because everything powered by greed gets fast lane access.
- pirateking 13y ago
  Salvation is always just around the corner, but we are walking around a rotating platform struggling to even just keep the corner in sight.
  - moocowduckquack 13y ago
    Alongside the platform is a railway tunnel. If you walk down it to the left you will find a bundle of disconnected wiring and a sign reading; "We are sorry to announce that due to unforseen circumstances and the state of the economy, the light at the end of the tunnel has now been switched off". If you were to walk in the other direction however there is brilliant illumination, but that is just the lights of an oncoming train.
    - pirateking 13y ago
      You take the left path. Your inventory contains: flashlight with unknown amount of battery power, shovel, binoculars, old brass ring, matchbox, notebook, pencil. 1. Inspect the wiring. 2. Continue in the dark. 3. Turn back.
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    Salvation is easy. All you have to do is decide that "good" > "bad". The perverse attraction to misery and toil I observe in people, in this fucking thread, that's what pisses me off. What's with this idolatry?
Nursie 13y ago
Haven't read that one for a few years, but it always seems more and more spot-on. The 'Australia Project' part is fanciful sci-fi, but the point is clear - the work that all humans have put in for generations is being co-opted by the few in the ownership classes. Ordinary people find themselves treated more and more as replaceable machines then are finally optimised out of the process and disenfranchised entirely. OTOH when you look at much of the non-western world, thinking about problems with concentrated ownership in a post-scarcity society seems a million miles away from the people who still need a clean water supply and a reliable source of food.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  >OTOH when you look at much of the non-western world, thinking about problems with concentrated ownership in a post-scarcity society seems a million miles away from the people who still need a clean water supply and a reliable source of food. It's really not. The pre-capitalist world had a much more egalitarian international wealth distribution, with India, for example, making up a double-digit percentage of the world GDP. These non-Western poor countries wouldn't be nearly so poor if not for the same capitalistic process that is steadily leaving the Western working classes out in the cold (and now even the Chinese working classes, as they get to be more expensive than robots or Africans).
  - Nursie 13y ago
    Fair enough, I guess it just strikes me as odd to talk about post-scarcity anything when we have poverty on such scales. I guess it can all be an outgrowth of the same phenomena.
    - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
      Well let's be clear: there are lots of Indian villages who would have plenty of drinking water if some Western firm wasn't bribing the government into letting them steal all of it. There are Mexican farmers who would have a good deal more food if NAFTA hadn't ruined them. There are Argentine workers who would have much better wages and easier access to, well, everything, if the IMF had not tried to liquify their entire nation into debt-service payments. Global capitalism is a global problem.

tluyben2 13y ago

I worked as a picker for a few days in a large distribution facility in my home town when I was in high school; this was over 20 years ago. They had rails everywhere through the complex which seemed to do nothing; when I asked what that was, they explained that they, together with the biggest IT company in NL, made software and robots to do our work automatically. It would be put in production the next year. It hasn't still. Why are humans still doing this work? Surely this can be automated, especially as companies have been working on that idea for well over 20 years, probably more?

coldtea 13y ago
>Why are humans still doing this work? They are cheaper. And it keeps them occupied.
- tluyben2 13y ago
  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 about that ; they were just saying 'why not work here, no stress, it's great! never any stress and fixed paycheck'. That sounds different than the Amazon one, but you cannot really do that in NL ; you can set a 'realistic, sustainable minimum' amount of work they have to do, but that differs per person; you cannot fire or reprimand someone for not 'making the beep' if that means you have to walk faster than normal or even run for it. So everyone would be quite relaxed and yet everything gets done with the people happy. So cheaper but unhealthy maybe? Also; I don't know much about the robots involved and what they would cost and how much prices are going to drop; seeing that humans are wasting quite a bit of space on the floor and have other issues, I'm not sure if it's cheaper? I'm sure Amazon calculates that often though , so I guess it is. Occupied; I see that as a reason, but that's an issue anyway; we cannot keep doing it that for that reason (and they don't, but as you say). If the work can be done by machines, it will be done with machines.

ck2 13y ago

Average people get all upset about unions when they see them applied to jobs that don't seem too too demanding. But places like Walmart and Amazon are exactly why unions should exist, to counterbalance the inhumane over-optimization and maltreatment of people. Amazon could probably make work less toxic by hiring 10% more people, but that would make things cost a few cents more.

csmuk 13y ago
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 regularly, they want masses of additional pay and do not improve standards along the way at all. They are simply allowing the incompetent to be propped up by the good staff. Also, the professional minority who agree that this is the case are forced to be dragged into union ballots and vote with other staff in favour of strike action regularly in fear of retaliation from their colleagues. Also let us not forget a much greater threat of exploitation: being forced to work with no pay under the guise of "training". This is happening a lot in the UK a the moment as the Job Centre has been pushing for people to do this by threatening to cut their benefits if they don't do it. The result is people being forced to work for no compensation and having to pay for travel expenses out of their own (literally destitute) pocket. The employers don't have to pay the staff either. The result of this is a dangled carrot of "if you do this, after 6-12 months we'll give you a permanent paid position". This inevitably results in being laid off as not needed immediately when they agreed to take you on. There are even posters going up in Job Centres telling people "try staff for free": http://imgur.com/SdWpgvx http://imgur.com/SdWpgvx Edit: Also I've spoken to some business associates (the sort who worship the fully paid up Lord Fuckwit Sugar himself) and are applauding this as a great way of building their businesses. This is simply unethical. I've been pretty much excluded for mentioning the inevitable "abhorrent slavery" point, not that I care.
- yummyfajitas 13y ago

henrik_w 13y ago

Here is another scary read: "I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave" http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-f...

radical_blogger 13y ago

at least the british press still cares enough about the average british worker to write an article like this. The american press would only write an article like this if such conditions disparately impacted minority race workers. Pretty soon the british press will do the same. It just gets worse and worse. I see no light at the end of the tunnel. The citizens of america do not even ask the right questions.

camus2 13y ago
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.
- goldenkey 13y ago
  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
  - VLM 13y ago
    "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.

nicpottier 13y ago

"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. This involved flying out to the middle of nowhere from the Seattle headquarters and living out of a hotel. Honestly, it was a lot of fun. Seeing those parts of the operation was fascinating, and Amazon encouraged you to look for inefficiencies and offer solutions or think about how you could fix things once you got back behind a keyboard. Our shifts were exactly the same as the full time workers, but they were faster than us, especially at first. Your feet do indeed hurt and you do indeed walk a ton, but that is more because you've been sitting on your ass for 12 hours a day instead of actually using your body. 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. If you take it seriously and get good at troubleshooting shortages, then you start getting to do things that require a bit more problem solving, but even the really menial stations aren't terribly bad. In short, this is just a bunch of whining that manual labor is hard work and not terribly engaging. The conditions themselves are plenty good, hard to imagine them being better while doing the same job. They are nothing, nothing at all like the conditions any number of people work every day to manufacture your shoes, t-shirts and electronic equipment. You get to move around, you aren't on an assembly line, the work is varied in its environment. So shut your trap and get back to picking, there's product to get out to customers.

kolektiv 13y ago
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 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. The fact that other people have it worse in various sweatshops around the world is hardly relevant, or particularly edifying. We are quite capable of seeing problems as a matter of degree I would hope. Your comment comes across as a little like the CEO who spends a day on the factory floor and proclaims that he had a marvelous time and everyone treated him wonderfully. Unsurprising, but hardly enlightening...

thelettere 13y ago

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 breakroom and nuked lunch. That in and of itself was not so bad - I've had food service jobs where we had no breaks at all. But that combined with the actual job duties, combined with the conditions, combined with rigid management, and 1984 "ministry of truth" style propaganda - all that added up to an absolutely miserable experience. It's very hard for me to really communicate why it was so miserable, because I don't fully understand it myself - but I will try. But I will say that I've spent time in prison - and I would choose prison any day over returning to work at Amazon. I applied online, went on an interview and started a month later. I had a few months free and being a long time Amazon customer and admirer I thought it would be an interesting job to check out for a little bit. I heard it was a warehouse for just books and dvd's, and that it was a brand new warehouse that was just opening up. I read a long PR piece talking about how Amazon had every year changed the design of the warehouses based on what they had learned from the warehouses built previous years. So this was a brand new design that was supposed to be more efficient and also more thoughtful of workers. I was assigned a shift - Sunday to Wednesday 6am to 5:30 pm. I was not given an option, and when I finally found an HR contact a week before I started to ask if it was possible to change shifts I never heard back from them. So I was like whatever and went to orientation. It was me and 6 others. By the time I left the job a month later, only 3 remained of that original group. The first to leave and the one I got to know the best was an ex-hooters girl who was my age (31) who was sick of waiting tables and wanted to work for a company she could move up in. She left a week and a half in after having severe allergies in response to the thick coating of dust throughout the warehouse and on all the shelving we were working "stowing" product on. It turned out it wasn't just books and dvd's - in fact that was a small percentage of what I worked with. Mostly it was cheap consumer goods - the kind I despise and that is slowly killing our planet. The shelves often reeked of toiletries and chemicals and perfumes of various kinds, mixing with the dust to inspire a sickly feeling. FYI exposure to dust and chemicals are conductive to good health. The job was simple: take some carts of newly shipped product and "stow" them on the shelves: i.e. find space on the shelving where it fits and scan it into the system so it shows up as being available and ready to ship on the online website. It was fairly easy in some ways - the problem was doing that for 10 hours with hardly any interruption, and being surrounded by all that dust and smell and crappy mindless consumer goods. I didn't feel good about what I was doing. I had 3 days off, which I thought at first was great - but it would usually take me those 3 days to just recover from what I experienced in the 4 I was at work. (Note: if I was given some freedom as to when I did the job, or the timing or duration of breaks, or how long my shifts were - this would not have been that bad a job. I can put up with shit for a few hours - but not 10 without a real break to speak of. And that was it - it was either work within these rigid parameters or not work at all. And so I chose the latter.) It was a mindless monotonous job, but to make matters work, all over the place Amazon had signs saying "Have fun". Every morning and afternoon after we had our group meeting they repeated this over and over again before we went off to work. Trust me, no one was having fun. Maybe a few in management, but certainly none of the direct workers. It was insulting. I could go on, but I'm bored. I will finish with something I came across recently, which can be compared to my experience. How bad you consider the job depends on what you compare it to. If you believe that someone living is misery (or, to put it more mildly, doing uninspiring and unimproving labor) is worth it for someone else to receive at a cheap price what in many cases is an unneedful trinket, then my point is mute. But if human happiness and potential is valuable, then this is not a job worthy of human beings. John Ruskin said it much better than I: "We have much studied and much perfected the great civilised invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. Truly speaking it is not the labour that is divided; but the men: – Divided into mere segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin. "Only in right understanding on the part of all classes of what kinds of labor are good for men, raising them & making them happy, and by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour can this evil be met." Prior to working there, I had begun taking seriously the treatment of the animals whose products I ate - milk products, eggs, meat ect. Part of what inspired me to work at Amazon was to see what I was supporting when I purchased from them. Needless to say, I will never again buy a physical product from Amazon - and am trying to ween myself off their digital products. We are far past the time when such demeaning labor should be supported.

ada1981 13y ago

Which headline is more likely in the next 5-10 years? "Amazon improves lives of 5,000 manual pickers by introducing fully automated robotic supply chain. Workers now free to find other employment." Or "Profit crazed Amazon to employ 5,000 android robot zombies, lays off entire human workforce." Manual labor of this sort isn't exciting or creative for most people. You don't really have room for creativity with this sort of job unless you are iterating on the system level -- and I'm most certain they have a way for pickers to contribute ideas to that. Then again, people play Candy Crush saga for hours a day and PAY for the privilege.. At least these guys get paid and get to walk around. Once the cost of automating people out completely is less than human labor, it will happen almost instantly.. That is the bigger social issue folks should be looking at -- what will we do when General Human Labor is more expensive than General Machine Labor? Combine this with General Artificial Intelligence and human labor becomes worth less and less.. As someone formally trained as an Urban Planner, this was the biggest issue I saw in grad school as a rapidly approaching social concern.

mabbo 13y ago

Signs that today is not going to be a good day: The BBC do an article where a well respected health researcher has analyzed the software that you write the interface for, and described it as "all the bad stuff at once".

chestnut-tree 13y ago

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"