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Given all the handwringing on HN in the last month about fake/biased news, it's ironic to see so many comments latching onto this story with "well duh, we alway
by skookum 10y ago
Given all the handwringing on HN in the last month about fake/biased news, it's ironic to see so many comments latching onto this story with "well duh, we always knew Amazon was a terrible employer, and here's more proof!"
I'm not going to try to defend Amazon - it certainly has many employment issues both in the FCs and at HQ. But this story specifically is virtually content-free. Most of it's content is to be found in the first sentence: "At least three tents have been spotted in woodland beside the online retail giant’s base just off the M90 in Dunfermline in recent days" and then later it emerges that they managed to find one occupied tent whose occupant was using the tent to avoid commuting from his home. The rest of the article strings together innuendo and rehashes talking points to try to build the desired narrative and mental picture of a tent city full of freezing, starving Amazon FC workers.
A truthful headline would have been "An Amazon worker sleeps in a tent near Dunfermline site to avoid long commute", but then that would neither have sparked the same moral outrage nor garnered the same number of clicks.
- AWildDHHAppears 10y agoDontcha know!? "Fake News" is what the other guys read. For us, it's Social Justice!
- edderly 10y ago> He added that he had opted to stay in a tent as it was easier and cheaper than commuting from his home in Perth, although his camping equipment had disappeared by Friday afternoon. Perth and the Dunfermline site are roughly 30 miles apart, on public transport the trip would take roughly 2 hours. Sounds like a great idea castigate an employer in a semi-rural area with piss poor public transportation.
- CydeWeys 10y agoHonestly, you're never going to have good public transportation in rural areas. There simply isn't the density to support it. It's a given that efficient transportation in such areas happens via car, which is a huge problem if you're working a job at a place like an Amazon warehouse that doesn't pay enough money to be able to easily afford a car. Some potential future network of public transportation provided via self-driving cars excepted.
- gsnedders 10y agoThere's hourly buses from Perth to Dunfermline and very infrequent direct trains: the real problem isn't the ruralness of it, it's getting out to the industrial estate on the edge of town where Amazon's site is located that makes it take so long.
- CydeWeys 10y agoRuralness is the exact problem, though. That's why the buses are only hourly and trains are infrequent: Not enough population density to justify the increased expense of running more. I live in Manhattan, and trains and buses are waaaay more frequent.
- gsnedders 10y agoRight, but at the same time there's still a very large difference between a token, once-a-day service and an hourly service: an hourly service is sufficient for many to use it for commuting (and while I haven't ever been on the X55, the majority of other buses in the area which have hourly services are heavily used by commuters and I've seen them have to turn passengers away upon occasion).
- smsm42 10y agoI've read an article about some person working in Google sleeping in an RV on a parking lot. So am I supposed to make a far reaching conclusions from this one person to whole company? Looks like lots of people here don't bother to make any distinction between one case of one guy in UK doing something weird and the whole Amazon company everywhere. And then they go around and complain about "fake news" misleading them.
- havill 10y agoIf I recall, isn't there a Google employee that sleeps in a 128ft² truck in the parking lot of the Google HQ campus? http://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-lives-in-truck-in-parking-lot-2015-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-lives-in-truc...