12 ms·
Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse
- atonse 9y agoIs it just me or is Amazon turning out to be even more evil than Walmart ever was? It's just cuz they're an "innovative" tech company, that we let them get away with it?
- gotofritz 9y ago"is turning out"? It's been a long time...
- atonse 9y agoGood point. It's just that things keep getting worse and worse. And we are enablers of this BS (I sure am.)
- llamataboot 9y agoTo be fair, it's a systemic problem with the economic system - it's always a race for more efficiency which often comes at the legal limit (or even worse) of exploitation. It's very hard to solve systemic problems through individual choices - unless that choice comes from very high up (ie; the working conditions at Etsy before it went public). About the only bright part of Amazon at this point is that they clearly hope to eliminate these jobs entirely through automation - of course then we have the social issue to deal with of how we make sure the benefits of automation transfer to society as a whole and not just the shareholders of Amazon.
- jrs95 9y agoWere they ever very innovative? Their initial success was pretty much based on having a bunch of investment capital and using it to kill their competition and grab market share without making profits for many years. Is it really very difficult to become an 'innovative' giant corporation when you've captured a huge part of the market like that?
- atonse 9y agoThings like Prime free delivery at that scale, fulfillment services, AWS were all innovative (even though I'm sure none of them were the first-ever.)
- wils1245 9y agoFor me, their innovation was that they were the first online retailer that inspired rock solid confidence in their delivery. If I order something on Amazon, it’s at my door in two days. Every time. I don’t need to check my shipping status, and with their pricing model obscuring shipping costs, I don’t need to think about the practicalities of shipping at all. As the article demonstrates, this luxury comes with a high social cost.
- hinfaits 9y agoFrom about 100 packages, I've had a handful come past the "guaranteed date", one that was entirely wrong (someone else's items), and worst of all, one that was missing an item that took a huge argument with a CSR to get a refund over. I wouldn't call them rock solid. Even if they were, it's not something that has to, or justifies, mistreating employees.
- JoeDaDude 9y agoThey did "invent" and patent [1] the 1-click buying button. The patent has expired, however, they also had a trademark on the phrase "1-Click". {1] https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=US&NR=5960411&KC=&FT=E&locale=en_EP# https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC...
- dboreham 9y agoBuying stuff from pretty much any other online retailer is still a frustrating and bad experience. E.g. Williams Sonoma will accept an order then just never ship it and when you call asking what's up the rep shrugs. I'm struggling to name one other retailer that nails service like Amazon. Perhaps Apple, but I buy something from them perhaps every two years.
- Taylor_OD 9y agoIt's easier to ignore because you don't have to walk into a physical store and see the effects. Instead you see a nice webpage that can ship things to your house in hours.
- heinrichf 9y agoNPR podcast episode touching this question: https://cpa.ds.npr.org/kuow/audio/2017/11/PRIMED_Episode4_0.mp3?siteplayer=true&dl=1 https://cpa.ds.npr.org/kuow/audio/2017/11/PRIMED_Episode4_0.... (Is Amazon your guilty pleasure?) https://www.npr.org/podcasts/557820907/prime-d https://www.npr.org/podcasts/557820907/prime-d
- davidddavidson 9y agoAnd this radiolab episode: http://www.radiolab.org/story/brown-box/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/brown-box/
- user5994461 9y agoWarehouses were always terrible, borderline cruel at some places. Amazon didn't invent them.
- Apocryphon 9y agoI thought labor conditions at Costco were supposed to be pretty good.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jjeaff 9y agoCostco is not a warehouse job. It's a fancy, high end grocery store made to look like a warehouse.
- mgleason_3 9y agoHmm, I’ve seen quite a few warehouses and they’ve mostly been clean, decent places to work. Not the highest skill or wage work, but certainly not terrible or cruel. But, they weren’t major shipping depots for Amazon either. Mostly small/mid-sized. In one, a subcontractor doing installations for DTV, the warehouse staff workload was pretty light. Sure, they’d hump a bit in the morning and evening to the installers checked out and back in, but the rest of the day was light. Certainly no overtime. And CALOSHA is quite strict in their rules. I don’t recall a single injury in the warehouse. Now the installers generally worked quite hard - the good ones completing installations 3-4 per day.
- user5994461 9y agoThe workloads vary by time and domain. Amazon has huge volume, huge peaks, and everything is an individual item. The work environment has to be crazy to keep up to the goal. I think the closest I have seen is the office supply chain. When you buy a notebook in a shop like office depot, there is a warehouse upstream that can the same order, it will package the notebook and deliver it the next day to the shop to refill. It's similar to Amazon in that they deliver small items of minimal value, one by one. Bulk warehouses and specialized products should have better conditions because they can have higher margin and/or less units of volume to manage.
- Shivetya 9y agowarehouse work has never been glamorous. it is grunt work. in a digital age where throughput gets measured and people become numbers in a chart it is easy to lose track of what reasonable is. what works elsewhere may not be appropriate. Amazon gets called out because they are the biggest not because they are the worst. Same reason large fast good gets called out but local diners get a pass. the drudgery and low pay may be the same but the name recognition is not. On a side note, As for Wal Mart, they were called out for similar reasons but also both are called out because setting wage floors especially through the of min wage laws in the US affect government payouts for unionized contracts.
- xiphias 9y ago“We offer great jobs and a positive environment with opportunities for growth. As with most companies, we expect a certain level of performance. Here in Europe we have similar jobs, but calling it a positive environment is a straight out lie. The problem is not that the work is hard, but that the company is lying about the effects the work has on the workers.
- stevenwoo 9y agoAlso for Wal Mart and other low paying/low benefit service jobs, the oft repeated theory that American taxpayers essentially subsidize it (and the profits that accrue to management/shareholders) and federal benefits such as medicaid/welfare/food stamps make it possible employers to pay such low wages. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/15/we-are-spending-153-billion-a-year-to-subsidize-mcdonalds-and-walmarts-low-wage-workers/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/15/...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dizzystar 9y agoWarehouses are dirty, dangerous, and filthy. Every one has expectations for speed. People are a liability, not an asset. I knew two people who worked at an Amazon warehouse. They both said it was pretty chill and easy. It's a matter of perspective and contrast.
- module0000 9y agoBy "let them get away with it", do you mean handed them your money in exchange for goods? This isn't their fault....just saying.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- supermdguy 9y agoMore readable version: https://gist.github.com/superMDguy/3d8b2cef1a41d49bc8ad6c454846cdc0 https://gist.github.com/superMDguy/3d8b2cef1a41d49bc8ad6c454...
- hub2017 9y agoIt's like Uber - UK public is supposed to take care of those people once the corporation discards them due to health or unplanned kids. To add insult to injury the tax money would have to be spent once max robotisation hits as well. It's a loose-loose situation really.
- peterwwillis 9y ago"My own story of how I became a human robot could not have been darker. Shifts began in the gloom at 7.30am and ended at 6pm, long after the sun had gone down." Oh, heavens. That almost sounds like a high school teacher's schedule. "Two half-hour breaks were the only time off my feet" Kind of like working in a supermarket? "toiling for up to 55 hours a week" The horror?? "[the warehouse] is so vast that just walking to the toilet could take more than five minutes" Ok, this is actually absurd, and I would expect against some kind of regulation. If they don't have adequate facilities how can they expect efficient work, anyway?
- eclectic 9y agoThey should provide adult diapers to the workers.
- brianwawok 9y agoIs 5 minutes absurd? I worked at random factories in the day, 5 minute walk to the crapper was about right. Now the difference was I didn't get fired because my productivity went down .1%, which is the problem with the hyper data Amazon warehouse worker...
- peterwwillis 9y agoYeah, that is the main problem. If it takes you even 10 minutes to get to the crapper, fine, as long as the employer is willing to compensate you for that. It's unethical to force workers to choose between taking a crap and keeping their pay or their job. You can't just choose not to take a crap.
- rotub 9y agoThis does not surprise me.
- dopamean 9y agoYou know what would be awesome? If tech was used to not just "revolutionize" how consumers get their products but also how employees were treated at these companies. So often it seems lately that tech giants are built in a super old fashioned way: on the backs of cheap labor.
- fjsolwmv 9y agoAutomation means fewer total employee s, so fewer abused employees
- user5994461 9y agoTreating their employees well is how Google/Microsoft/Facebook are built. It's easy for them, it's office workers who bring super high margins. The business is more valuable by treating people well. Businesses based on grunt work, like Amazon, can't do that. Their existence is based on infinite cheap labor, to execute as much grunt work as cheap as possible.
- Asooka 9y agoSo why can Costco afford to treat their employees humanely?
- user5994461 9y agoCostco doesn't deliver millions of package a day for free to the door of their customers, does it?
- lichenwarp 9y agoTry loading trucks at UPS and you'll think this is nothing.
- Asooka 9y agoAnd children in Africa suffer from parasites that literally eat their eyes out. Somebody always has it worse (maybe except children in Africa), that in no way means we should refrain from trying to make things better locally.
- lichenwarp 9y agoPerspective, I gotcha.
- tryingagainbro 9y agoOr, pay them $25 an hour and no one will complain.
- nvarsj 9y agoIf you ever need a counterpoint for your capitalist loving friends, this is it. It’s also why regulation is so necessary.
- stevenj 9y agoAs a customer, Amazon is wonderful. But it needs to treat its employees better. Fix this, Jeff.
- stevenwoo 9y agoIsn't the only way to attempt to fix this as a customer is to not be a customer? As a shareholder one could try to change things in other ways.
- stevenj 9y agoI don't see how me simply stopping being a customer in itself would help them treat their employees better. They wouldn't know why I stopped being a customer, unless I tell them. Perhaps a better course of action would be to write a letter directly to Jeff.
- borplk 9y agoIf they believed that it was something to be fixed it would have already been done.
- taway_1212 9y agoIf he fixes it, the prices will rise, making Amazon less wonderful.
- stevenj 9y agoI'm probably in the minority but I'd pay higher prices for better treatment of employees and better quality of product/service (which I do think Amazon needs to improve upon as well in terms of its third party seller operations). I also like going to restaurants where there's a required 20% gratuity that gets distributed to all staff and helps pay for employee benefits. I think the overall service, interactions, and experience are far better at those restaurants and I'm happy to pay for it.
- scarface74 9y ago
- GuiA 9y agoOne asked: “Why are we not allowed to sit when it is quiet and not busy? We are human beings, not slaves and animals.” That’s because Amazon would much rather have robots instead of human beings. In the meantime, it is falling back on humans, but still expecting them to behave as robots.
- token_throwaway 9y agoThis job sounds shitty but have you ever spoken to someone in a domestic role? A postal employee? A trucker? A janitor at your office building? Kitchen staff at a restaurant who do not even have time to take a piss without dropping the ball, let alone timed pee breaks? Lots of jobs are hard. Extremely hard. And often, jobs that are very very hard pay hardly anything. There is a two-way transaction happening here, though - you pick a job that you are qualified for, and you work at it in exchange for money. And if it's not worth the money to you, you find a different job that you're qualified for. As long as people are willing to do this job for this amount of money, it will probably not get better unfortunately. And as companies get bigger, they always morally regress to the mean. Instead of going after companies (playing whack-a-mole), I think empowering people to learn employable skills is a better investment. Also I'm going to remember the fuss about Amazon when their warehouses are 100% robotic, and everyone is mad that it's not creating enough jobs.
- Asooka 9y agoIt's not about being willing, people literally have no choice. It's either starve and be homeless or work this really shitty job. We should regulate the industry so our economy doesn't have to run on brutal human misery. If that means Amazon can't deliver your package in 8 hours, but rather in 2 days, then so be it. Human life comes before profits.
- gwright 9y agoFrom a public policy standpoint, I'd rather provide some assistance to people working part-time or for low wages than to provide 100% assistance to someone who is entirely unemployed. Unfortunately many attempts to regulate the workplace result in fewer jobs and thus more people who need 100% support. One example of this is the effort to raise the minimum wage which, not surprising at all, has resulted in more incentive to eliminate or automate low-end jobs. Advocates for a $15 minimum in the fast food industry, for example, should be prepared for a net reduction in jobs in that industry as automation is rolled out or business models are modified to adjust to the higher labor costs. I'm not saying that all labor regulations are bad but I am saying that the second-order effects of many regulations can make the overall labor situation worse.
- michaelbuckbee 9y agoSetting aside how needlessly brutal some of this seems - these jobs aren't going to be around for long. Amazon's really working hard on automating them away as well - the specific picking job described in the article is part of their well know Amazon Robotics Challenge: https://www.amazonrobotics.com/#/roboticschallenge https://www.amazonrobotics.com/#/roboticschallenge
- 0xbear 9y agoI wish I could send my 13 year old there for a month so he would finally see that education pays, and do his homework properly, and on time.
- fpisfun 9y agoWhen an Amazon warehouse opened in my area relatively recently it seemed that many people were scrambling like crazy to try to get a job there. These seemed to be people who are poorly educated and low skilled but clearly the Amazon job represented a step up for them. I'm not saying that there aren't issues but clearly working for Amazon is still a better alternative than their other options. I personally know of someone who was basically skipping out on child support payments before starting work at Amazon and now is making the payments.
- jjeaff 9y agoIt's the same for lots of low wage jobs. I know people that work at Walmart that I can't imagine being able to hold down a job anywhere else.
- holydude 9y agoI am against excessive taxation or overregulation but companies like Amazon ...no really any company...should be responsible for treating the society fair. Amazon is a behemoth that grew because of its ruthless behavior towards its competitors. I am sure there is more to life than constant race to the bottom when your average american has to compete with someone from china or africa.
- sneak 9y agoHow can you treat someone unfairly when they are not compelled to interact with you at all? Every single person who has a job with Amazon is there because they choose to be.
- pfortuny 9y agoCome on, you are really simplifying. That argument was used in London at the beginning of the XIX century. We all know now it is flawed.
- tnzn 9y agoExcept neoliberals and right-wing libertarians (for most part), as their idiology is based on the belief of an unaltered freedom of choice afaik. The good old myth of pure freedom of choice is not dying anytime soon.
- FC_Associate 9y agoI’m currently working at one of the largest Amazon delivery stations in the US and seeing as there probably aren’t too many low level FC associates hanging out around these parts I’d be happy to answer any questions anyone might have. Keep in mind that I’m at a delivery station, this is a huge warehouse where we receive packages and sort them for delivery, and not one of the warehouses were products are packaged for shipment. Also, I just ended my night shift so I might fall asleep but I’ll be happy to return later to answer any questions. Edit: I should add that I really enjoy working here but when I was first hired I was unemployed and homeless, and I’m currently semi-homeless, so I probably have an overly positive outlook on working here. I’ll try and not paint too rosy a picture though.
- Parcissons 9y agoIs there a reward system for logistic improvements?
- dforrestwilson 9y agoWhat has surprised you most about the job versus your expectations going in?
- FC_Associate 9y agoThere have been quite a few surprises, let me give you a quick rundown. 1. Based on the stories I had heard I was expecting a much more aggressively micromanaged workplace and much stricter metrics on performance. Overall the warehouse managers have been pretty accommodating about allowing us a grace period to get up to speed on what’s expected of us and really aren’t hovering over our shoulders all the time. So long as you get your work done we are mostly left to our own devices. I was expecting a much more “authoritarian” culture. 2. Many things are run surprisingly inefficiently. To be frank, whatever opinion I previously held about Bezos has certainly gone down, and it isn’t because of the way employees are treated. There are a host of things that seem really poorly optimized here and that were apparent to me within a few weeks of starting, and I have zero previous warehouse or logistics experience, and I'm not a smart person. I’ve heard stories that Bezos is extremely hands on but I can’t imagine he would like some of the problems going on. A few examples for you: the devices we use for stowing packages(this is the process of taking them off of a conveyor belt and placing them inside large bags or shelves for the drivers to pick up) are constantly suffering from hardware and software errors. In fact at the moment, due to the number of people we having working the night sort, I think it’s around 180-200 right now, we often don’t have enough scanners to go around. The conveyor belts are also constantly jamming resulting in work having to stop. We are starting to do so much volume, last night we did around 82k packages from 10pm to 5:45am, that we literally are running out of space to put things in our aisles, and running out of bags to stow into. There are also some issues regarding the payroll and HR systems. Our shifts are frequently changing due to the warehouse needing more man hours and this isn’t always reflected accurately in pay or time off accrued. When this happens you need to pay a visit to HR, which btw has always handled things quickly and professionally, but we are told to stay clocked in during this time, as we should be. Sometimes I’ll end my shift and see 20-30 people queued in line for HR. Amazon is paying for this time and it seems to be the result of really poorly implemented back end systems. 3. It’s the freaking night shift at Amazon and like I stated earlier, I myself was unemployed and homeless when I first started, and I was definitely surprised by the quality of my coworkers. Most of us are coming from areas of south LA like Inglewood, Compton, Hawthorne, it doesn’t seem like many of us have any education beyond high school, everyone seems to be living paycheck to paycheck, I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one living out of their car, and many people are working multiple jobs. One of my close coworkers usually arrives after his shift at Walmart ends. Yes, there are slackers and down right mean people, but most people just show up and do a competent job. There is however a rather large group of people who really work their asses off. I suppose it might be down to human nature but when you see your coworkers working hard it makes you want to work hard as well, if for no other reason than so they don’t have to pick up your slack. Really many of us could be taking things a bit easier, management wouldn’t be the wiser imo, but we work so that the guy next to you that has to take his kid to school in the morning gets done on time. I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that things like that surprised me. 4. The free coffee and hot chocolate that comes out of a vending machine is much better than I had anticipated.
- dsschnau 9y agojeff is a punk-ass nerd
- holydude 9y agoThis is on countries like the US and the EU to set a world standard on how the employees should be treated. Everyone competes with everyone and make no mistake the wester europe is not some wonderland paradise where even your average joe is treated well. Western Europe makes hefty profits out of abusing Eastern European labour and markets.
- pkaler 9y agoBrutal? Sounds like a regular blue collar job. I worked as a sparkwatch at a plywood plant in high school. Basically, a welder’s assistant. This is what regular blue collar jobs look like. You work 12 hour shifts. The machinery is hot. There is constant dust in the air. You are on your feet the entire time. It’s 30ºC in the summer. It’s -20ºC in the winter. People in Sillicon Valley and especially the press are just completely out of touch with how the rest of the world works and live.
- wgj 9y agoI worked at a UPS sort facility in the 1980s. Everyone there was definitely a human robot. Up to 130F temperatures were legal in the feeder trucks. All sorters and loaders were monitored by supervisors with stopwatches and clipboards. I can't imagine what it might have been like if not unionized and OSHA compliant. I also don't imagine conditions are much better now.
- tnzn 9y agoIt's brutal with respect to the "new spirit of capitalism" image that the tech industry represents
- Fricken 9y agoIn that case The "new spirit of capitalism" sounds about the same as the "old spirit of capitalism". I'm not sure what the designation "new" is supposed to represent.
- noam87 9y ago> Brutal? Sounds like a regular blue collar job. Which is to say: brutality is regular. While of course the current move towards exposing harassment in the office is important, I don't hear much recognition that the people getting the most benefit are those whose prospects are already cushy to begin with... how much of this is actually "tricking down" to people working in often dehumanizing conditions? I worked minimum wage until my mid-20's, and most of my high school friends didn't do college (or even graduate high school, in some cases); my parents (who both hold degrees) also worked in warehouses and stuff like that for a while when we first immigrated. In many jobs, being treated like trash, bullied, etc. is the norm. Being constantly talked down to and treated like a child is certainly the norm. And the sexual harassment stories are also much more frequent, and much worse. But people at the lower rungs don't have the social capital to take to Twitter safely, jump ship to a different company, etc. Doing so risks losing next month's bills, losing a good reference, etc. So it's just the way it is. And I'm talking here in Canada where we have much better worker protection laws, so I can only assume it's even worse in the US. Same with workplace safety. Sure, on paper you have the right to refuse unsafe work. But don't be surprised if all of a sudden you start getting less hours or get reprimanded for "not being a team player" or some crap.
- tryingagainbro 9y ago>>I found staff asleep on their feet, exhausted from toiling for up to 55 hours a week. What's brutal is their salary, £8.2 an hour, but 55 hours in the busiest season is called brutal? Please.
- DanBC 9y ago55 hours is very long for Europe. European working times directive limits the maximum hours to 48 hours a week, although people can opt out of that.
- nemo3141 9y agoI recently started working as a associate full-time at a large warehouse in US. I have a college degree and have worked as a junior Front End Developer in the past but my work permit expires next year so I stopped looking for a "real" job. I can answer any questions you guys might have as I don't thing there are any warehouse associates to answer directly in this thread.
- krapp 9y agoI don't have any questions, because I'm in more or less the same situation - working at an Amazon FC to pay off my programming degree because it's more stable than trying to get a job in tech right now. But... don't look too closely at the internal tools like the stow app or bintools. You'll weep.
- wmu 9y agoThere were similar stories from the warehouse located in Poland.
- emjoes1 9y agoJust had to chime in and say this was how it was when I worked in a Frito Lay warehouse. Lost 10lbs in my first week (probably water weight) because of the heat and labor required. Also same experience when working at Dixie warehouse. That is par for warehouse work.