- Expects workers to work compensated overtime during a busy period
- Tracks worker performance
- Expects people to take only their scheduled breaks, and writes them up if they're MIA for 30+ minutes
- Requires workers to show up and work during their scheduled work hours
The humanity! And this poor guy, working a non-specialized manager position attainable with just a high school degree, was only paid a meager $80,000 a year!
More seriously though: the caterwauling over Amazon's cruel and unusual work conditions is getting a little long in the tooth. I had more sympathy when it's peeing in bottles and passing out from heat exhaustion, but if the above is extent of the complaints now...get over it?
> My salary was $80,000, which is on the higher end. They gave me more because I said I wouldn’t accept anything less, since I had a master’s.
In a number of industries, having your mba and being a manager doesn't put you over $80k. Masters even in relevant subjects don't necessarily put your salary that high in industries including teaching, shipping and logistics, warehousing, factory production.
It seems we were reading different articles, then. In any case your synopsis provides a very skewed representation of what the article actually said.
You posted a completely false list of complaints after this
> And this poor guy, working a non-specialized manager position attainable with just a high school degree, was only paid a meager $80,000 a year!
This is a misleading statement focused on hiding the fact that the area manager being interviewed has an MBA. Moreover the manager never complained about his salary. He complained about how he was forced to fire hourly workers and had to be on his feet for 14 hours a day for several weeks unless he was willing to be fired.
Just because the article doesn't explicitly mention peeing in bottles or passing out from heat exhaustion doesn't mean those problems no longer exist, and I don't see any claim that the article somehow comprises "the extent of" complaints about Amazon.
That the source was tangentially involved in the military makes it even more comical. A job that requires its workers to be screamed at, put through torturous physical conditioning and possibly blown up by bombs, but I guess that's nothing compared to working a 10 hour shift in a warehouse.
"I boycott Prime Day, but I do shop on Amazon during Black Friday. I feel bad about it, but at the same time, I don’t think me not shopping will get Amazon to change its practices."
Now, it will be interesting to see how soon Amazon workers unionize and how that'll play out.
> The military is known for being a bastion of sexism, but I had a worse experience at Amazon.
> . . . the managers do not get any sort of break or lunch. Most of us just never ate. Everyone is on their feet for 12 hours a day.
> Associates got a 30-minute lunch break, two 15-minute breaks, and an additional 15 minutes of “time off tasks.”
Working 12 hours per day with a total of only 1 hour of break time, split into three smaller breaks – and all tracked to the minute? And no lunch for managers?
> The associates work 10 hours a day, the managers 14 to 18. It’s mandatory overtime, the hours are not voluntary, and they are all on your feet.
Do you really think this is acceptable?
To be honest, I'm quite sick of the general attitude on HN towards Amazon. I get that it's convenient and usually cheaper than its competitors. But let's not pretend that the way they do business is morally acceptable. It isn't.
This is absurd. Instead of trying to convince yourselves that it's Not That Bad, why not vote with your dollars and support businesses that treat their employees better? From what I can tell, most people reading HN have the means to do so.
(Edited to better follow HN guidelines.)
I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth, so I will not make any flippant summaries of your post. I just want to know what Amazon would have to do to become moral: how long should the breaks be? How should they modify their performance policies? Etc.
I’m very interested to learn about Amazon tech, but instead I see an article just about everyday about how Amazon is some horrible sweatshop.
From my perspective, capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system in history.
By what metric has it “failed” ? Because the bottom few percent live in shitty conditions? Before capitalism, the bottom 90% of people were illiterate subsistence farmers.
There's the rub. Buried near the bottom.
The guy thinks people should not be allowed to be too rich.
Or the fact that people get that rich points to a systemic flaw in the system. Bezos earns 4 million per hour, no matter if he's asleep or awake. It's pretty wild to assume he personally creates that much value. The only other justification is that society is distributing wealth in a skewed fashion.
The fact that capitalism is the best resource allocating framework we found, for managing society, shouldn't prevent us from discussing its flaws.
That is false. It was based on the appreciation of his Amazon stock at a cherry-picked moment in time. He's probably been losing millions per hour lately. In reality, his total compensation is less than $2M and his salary is less than $100K.
The thing that people forget is that democracy is inefficient, but it has less flaws than anything else we have tried in the past. I suspect Capitalism is similarly the least flawed system we've found so far. (don't know enough economic distribution history to be sure).
A lot of people claim socialism is much better, but I am not sure it works well at big scales, looking at say a country like India.
Costco is a union company that's like a walk-in version of Amazon warehouse invented before Amazon. They pay workers well, give them bonuses, and so on. Company makes around $100 billion a year.
If trying to imagine unionized Amazon, walk into a Costco noting how the workers perform and at what stress levels. Better yet, if about vote with your wallet, just buy stuff from Costco and similar companies instead of Amazon to maintain and create more great jobs.
My company is a union company, too. We outperform the competition. They try to poach us all the time, too. The contract allows management to take action against lazy or disobedient employees if they can prove it. Their continued employment is totally due to terrible, ineffective management. All they gotta do is write their name on a piece of paper they present to those workers several times to fire them. Instead, they write up good, compliant workers over technicalities but ignore bad workers that argue back more. The lazy, weak managers get stuff done on paper that way. Although very common in union shops, I virtually never see anyone talk about the management angle on bad employees hard to get rid of.
The other issue is managers backing friends/family, who they buy drugs from, sleep with, and so on. Lots of political backchanneling over the most ridiculous stuff in these big companies. The sales teams are even crazier most of the time but theyre professional bullshitters with incentives to be aggressively outgoing. So, no surprise Im always hearing crazy stories about ex-employees. ;)
https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/03/19/even-costc...
Oh yeah, anonymous.
People want their packages the next day or before Christmas. Amazon is paying them overtime and more for Black Friday. I mean this is the job, like a job that requires you start at 12am. Tiring sure, but weigh the pros and cons and make a decision. Amazon has no problems finding workers, or else they'd pay $30 an hour
There isn't a market solution for every problem. Labor rights abuses are rampant in apparel manufacturing. Are those problems "not serious" enough because people continue to pursue employment there?
If Amazon is doing things legally, and we're not happy, then we need to be upset with Congress, if anyone.
Hard jobs exists, but people get compensated for the long hours, hard work, smell or whatever.
what is your solution, should Amazon shut down, pay them more or what? Kids want their packages before 12/24
I had a temp job like that once. Two twelve hour shifts starting at midnight. I feel asleep at the wheel in the middle of the day on the 2nd day. I lucked out and didn't hit anything, woke up to put my foot on the brakes and rolled to a stop in a parking lot.
> The former Amazon employee, a US Air Force veteran, requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions.
> [...] I was at a fulfillment center in California from [redacted] to [redacted].
> I was an [redacted], inside a new facility that had about 1,000 associates.
Isn't this a lot of info given away?
/edit: in case the original article does the same
I wonder if part of the reason a military vet was hired for the floor manager's job was the expectation that they'd act like drill sergeants towards the employees, while the tracking systems acted as a real-time sword of Damocles-type apparatus.
No one active duty yells at people like a drill sergeant outside of a training environment, except marines bc rah
