10 ms·

The human costs of Black Friday, explained by a former Amazon warehouse manager

121 points by arsn_lsnk 8y ago

pbalau 8y ago
hmm... > 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
- chickenfries 8y ago
  Why would you point that out?
  - choot 8y ago
    To demonstrate their anonymity statement is rendered useless when you go through the other data in the article.
    - oh_sigh 8y ago
      You're assuming some data hasn't been delicately fudged in order to anonymize the source. Maybe he worked there between August 2016 and September 2017. Maybe is a Navy, not AF veteran. Maybe he isn't a he at all. Who knows?
      - damck 8y ago
        This train of thought only made me ask myself if the piece itself is real at all. The wonders of internet
      - pbalau 8y ago
        What if there is somebody else that matches the made up details?
        oh_sigh 8y ago
        If you have a beef with this person, and set it up so your statements seem like they are coming from them, then you are playing with fire. If the person is very adamant that they weren't the leaker, the next question might be "well, who could leak and have a motivation to make their details look like this person's?", which may point to you. If it is just a coincidence that the details of your fudging match a specific person, then they can still deny it. I don't know, but the point of all this is to protect a source, not to protect a random person who might be implicated by bad luck and punished illegally by bad actors.
      - Kaveren 8y ago
        Isn't that worse than just not revealing personal information at all? Fudging dates could be quite bad in particular if it were to become apparent that policy changes were made after the supposed time period. I don't find that the military information was valuable, it could've easily been left out, and the veteran question the author posed could have still been asked if it were rephrased.
        jsgo 8y ago
        While maybe not particularly valuable, it is pertinent when saying "x is worse in place y than in the military": without experience in the military, it would be impossible to say (not saying the words, but for credibility).
        oh_sigh 8y ago
        Yes, when it comes to anonymizing a source, releasing no information is always better than releasing any information, even if that information is a mix of truths and falsehoods. But, releasing a mix of truths and falsehoods or less specific/more generalized truths can only be equally as bad as releasing all specific truths, but it may turn out to be much better. Saying your tenure was September 2016-August 2017 might match 20 people at the company, one of which is your source. Fudging your tenure to August 2016-September 2017 might match 20 people, but not your source. Saying your tenure was 2016-2017 might match 1000+ people, including your source. There are trade offs in all of these methods, but I don't see them as being particularly wrong if you want to provide color to your story without materially affecting it, and can be confident that you aren't helping to identify your source.
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    If internal groups at Amazon want to find this guy, I doubt they will need OPs comment to put them on the trail.
cloakandswagger 8y ago
This article indicts Amazon of the following cruelties: - 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?
- neuronflux 8y ago
  > after I finished serving in the Air Force Reserves in 2014, but then decided to go to graduate school for business administration > 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.
  - throwaway5752 8y ago
    I don't the your part you've quoted undercuts the point at all. If I have a PhD in the area of algebraic topology, I do not expect to get out of band comp for teaching middle school math. If the job only requires a high school diploma, then that's a great salary in most areas.
    - Waterluvian 8y ago
      Here's the crappy thing. We should pay you more to teach middle school math if you're a remarkably better teacher than the rest. In high school some of my favourite teachers were there mostly as a semi-retirement job. My favourite was a retired Intel architect who taught grade 10 electrical engineering. I would have been spoiled rotten if we were able to consistently attract those kinds of teachers.
      - 8y ago
xt00 8y ago
Let’s say the workers unionize as the guy they interviewed suggests, what is the result? Basically they will push to change the system so that people don’t have to work as hard, it’s harder to fire people and have a seniority system. It’s quite possible that it would be better for the workers in that case but I do wonder if amazon could bypass a lot of these issues by just saying that people can’t work more than say 4 days a week during the rush season. So they end up hiring more workers to get the job done but people can’t complain that they are being overworked. I mean I’m not a fan of conspiracy theories but I wouldn’t be surprised if Walmart wasn’t silently cheering all the Amazon hate and pro union talk for their fulfillment centers..
- nickpsecurity 8y ago
  "Basically they will push to change the system so that people don’t have to work as hard, it’s harder to fire people and have a seniority system." 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. ;)
  - 8y ago
onetimemanytime 8y ago
>> The former Amazon employee, a US Air Force veteran, requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions....I was an area manager, inside a new facility that had about 1,000 associates. I oversaw the packers, managing about 55 associates. My salary was $80,000...I said I wouldn’t accept anything less, since I had a master’s. 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
- rchaud 8y ago
  > 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?
  - defertoreptar 8y ago
    Don't you fault the country's laws and enforcement of laws for that? USA has strict labor laws surrounding child labor for example. If Amazon is doing things legally, and we're not happy, then we need to be upset with Congress, if anyone.
  - onetimemanytime 8y ago
    OK, fine. Here I have a job to clean my pub's bathroom. It's a messy job as anyone can guess. Should the person hired drag my name on social media because it was smelly, messy etc after he agreed to take the job for the agreed fee? 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
- stcredzero 8y ago
  I mean this is the job, like a job that requires you start at 12am. 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.
rchaud 8y ago
"Amazon never trained us in how to communicate with associates. We weren’t trained to be understanding of their struggles or communicate with them. It was all about mechanics." 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.
- drharby 8y ago
  No, its not. They picked up military vets because they understand the nature of communicating and effecting mission needs when they are performed under difficult circumstances. No one active duty yells at people like a drill sergeant outside of a training environment, except marines bc rah
  - MRD85 8y ago
    Anecdotally, I've been in the Army close to 10 years now and I cannot recall the last time I heard yelling in a non-jovial or non-combat manner. I've also had multiple experiences where people were stunned after I how I reacted in difficult circumstances. I can definitely see how certain employers would value these traits.
    - SpecialistEMT 8y ago
      Sorry you've been in the army
      - MRD85 8y ago
        I see people have downvoted your comment but I sort of agree with the sentiment. I grew up in a rural town to working-class parents who hated me spending time on computers and wanted me to get a trade. I'm now 33 and halfway to my CS degree that I should have finished 12 years ago. The Army has been good to me but it's not the life I should have lived. Even growing up rurally was hard. I was a very intellectual child and rural areas aren't the best environment for that i.e. family that actively squashes your interest as opposed to encouraging it.
unreal37 8y ago
"Jeff Bezos is obscenely rich, and in any moral society, he would not have that much money." There's the rub. Buried near the bottom. The guy thinks people should not be allowed to be too rich.
- verbify 8y ago
  Or maybe the guy thinks that people who create unhealthy work environments should be fined for it, and that's why Bezos shouldn't be that rich?
- sergiosgc 8y ago
  > 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.
  - abledon 8y ago
    I think a funny thing is all this tech and pleasantries modern life gives us -- order anything from home, buy everything you need and not leave house for 2 months and you can live comfortably watching netflix etc.. -- all of this makes us more apathetic to vote or go protest to change the system. atleast in north america, europe has better mobilization I think, e.g. the protests today in amazon warehouses.
  - aangjie 8y ago
    > The fact that capitalism is the best resource allocating framework we found, for managing society, shouldn't prevent us from discussing its flaws. 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.

121 points by arsn_lsnk 8y ago

hmm... > 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

chickenfries 8y ago
Why would you point that out?
- choot 8y ago
  To demonstrate their anonymity statement is rendered useless when you go through the other data in the article.
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    You're assuming some data hasn't been delicately fudged in order to anonymize the source. Maybe he worked there between August 2016 and September 2017. Maybe is a Navy, not AF veteran. Maybe he isn't a he at all. Who knows?
    - damck 8y ago
      This train of thought only made me ask myself if the piece itself is real at all. The wonders of internet
    - pbalau 8y ago
      What if there is somebody else that matches the made up details?
      - oh_sigh 8y ago
        If you have a beef with this person, and set it up so your statements seem like they are coming from them, then you are playing with fire. If the person is very adamant that they weren't the leaker, the next question might be "well, who could leak and have a motivation to make their details look like this person's?", which may point to you. If it is just a coincidence that the details of your fudging match a specific person, then they can still deny it. I don't know, but the point of all this is to protect a source, not to protect a random person who might be implicated by bad luck and punished illegally by bad actors.
    - Kaveren 8y ago
      Isn't that worse than just not revealing personal information at all? Fudging dates could be quite bad in particular if it were to become apparent that policy changes were made after the supposed time period. I don't find that the military information was valuable, it could've easily been left out, and the veteran question the author posed could have still been asked if it were rephrased.
      - jsgo 8y ago
        While maybe not particularly valuable, it is pertinent when saying "x is worse in place y than in the military": without experience in the military, it would be impossible to say (not saying the words, but for credibility).
      - oh_sigh 8y ago
        Yes, when it comes to anonymizing a source, releasing no information is always better than releasing any information, even if that information is a mix of truths and falsehoods. But, releasing a mix of truths and falsehoods or less specific/more generalized truths can only be equally as bad as releasing all specific truths, but it may turn out to be much better. Saying your tenure was September 2016-August 2017 might match 20 people at the company, one of which is your source. Fudging your tenure to August 2016-September 2017 might match 20 people, but not your source. Saying your tenure was 2016-2017 might match 1000+ people, including your source. There are trade offs in all of these methods, but I don't see them as being particularly wrong if you want to provide color to your story without materially affecting it, and can be confident that you aren't helping to identify your source.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  If internal groups at Amazon want to find this guy, I doubt they will need OPs comment to put them on the trail.

cloakandswagger 8y ago

This article indicts Amazon of the following cruelties: - 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?

neuronflux 8y ago
> after I finished serving in the Air Force Reserves in 2014, but then decided to go to graduate school for business administration > 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.
- throwaway5752 8y ago
  I don't the your part you've quoted undercuts the point at all. If I have a PhD in the area of algebraic topology, I do not expect to get out of band comp for teaching middle school math. If the job only requires a high school diploma, then that's a great salary in most areas.
  - Waterluvian 8y ago
    Here's the crappy thing. We should pay you more to teach middle school math if you're a remarkably better teacher than the rest. In high school some of my favourite teachers were there mostly as a semi-retirement job. My favourite was a retired Intel architect who taught grade 10 electrical engineering. I would have been spoiled rotten if we were able to consistently attract those kinds of teachers.
    - 8y ago

xt00 8y ago

Let’s say the workers unionize as the guy they interviewed suggests, what is the result? Basically they will push to change the system so that people don’t have to work as hard, it’s harder to fire people and have a seniority system. It’s quite possible that it would be better for the workers in that case but I do wonder if amazon could bypass a lot of these issues by just saying that people can’t work more than say 4 days a week during the rush season. So they end up hiring more workers to get the job done but people can’t complain that they are being overworked. I mean I’m not a fan of conspiracy theories but I wouldn’t be surprised if Walmart wasn’t silently cheering all the Amazon hate and pro union talk for their fulfillment centers..

nickpsecurity 8y ago
"Basically they will push to change the system so that people don’t have to work as hard, it’s harder to fire people and have a seniority system." 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. ;)
- 8y ago

onetimemanytime 8y ago

>> The former Amazon employee, a US Air Force veteran, requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions....I was an area manager, inside a new facility that had about 1,000 associates. I oversaw the packers, managing about 55 associates. My salary was $80,000...I said I wouldn’t accept anything less, since I had a master’s. 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

rchaud 8y ago
> 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?
- defertoreptar 8y ago
  Don't you fault the country's laws and enforcement of laws for that? USA has strict labor laws surrounding child labor for example. If Amazon is doing things legally, and we're not happy, then we need to be upset with Congress, if anyone.
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  OK, fine. Here I have a job to clean my pub's bathroom. It's a messy job as anyone can guess. Should the person hired drag my name on social media because it was smelly, messy etc after he agreed to take the job for the agreed fee? 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
stcredzero 8y ago
I mean this is the job, like a job that requires you start at 12am. 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.

rchaud 8y ago

"Amazon never trained us in how to communicate with associates. We weren’t trained to be understanding of their struggles or communicate with them. It was all about mechanics." 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.

drharby 8y ago
No, its not. They picked up military vets because they understand the nature of communicating and effecting mission needs when they are performed under difficult circumstances. No one active duty yells at people like a drill sergeant outside of a training environment, except marines bc rah
- MRD85 8y ago
  Anecdotally, I've been in the Army close to 10 years now and I cannot recall the last time I heard yelling in a non-jovial or non-combat manner. I've also had multiple experiences where people were stunned after I how I reacted in difficult circumstances. I can definitely see how certain employers would value these traits.
  - SpecialistEMT 8y ago
    Sorry you've been in the army
    - MRD85 8y ago
      I see people have downvoted your comment but I sort of agree with the sentiment. I grew up in a rural town to working-class parents who hated me spending time on computers and wanted me to get a trade. I'm now 33 and halfway to my CS degree that I should have finished 12 years ago. The Army has been good to me but it's not the life I should have lived. Even growing up rurally was hard. I was a very intellectual child and rural areas aren't the best environment for that i.e. family that actively squashes your interest as opposed to encouraging it.

unreal37 8y ago

"Jeff Bezos is obscenely rich, and in any moral society, he would not have that much money." There's the rub. Buried near the bottom. The guy thinks people should not be allowed to be too rich.

verbify 8y ago
Or maybe the guy thinks that people who create unhealthy work environments should be fined for it, and that's why Bezos shouldn't be that rich?
sergiosgc 8y ago
> 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.
- abledon 8y ago
  I think a funny thing is all this tech and pleasantries modern life gives us -- order anything from home, buy everything you need and not leave house for 2 months and you can live comfortably watching netflix etc.. -- all of this makes us more apathetic to vote or go protest to change the system. atleast in north america, europe has better mobilization I think, e.g. the protests today in amazon warehouses.
- aangjie 8y ago
  > The fact that capitalism is the best resource allocating framework we found, for managing society, shouldn't prevent us from discussing its flaws. 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.