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Amazon to employees: Quit your job, we’ll help you start a delivery business
- maxxxxx 7y agoThis seems like a terrible career move. You have one big customer who has full power over you. Soon they’ll get squeezed left and right. The only way I could see this work would be if they could deliver for other companies like Walmart.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- seem_2211 7y agoI agree with your sentiment, although I'd be worried if my income was "diversified" by working for Amazon and Walmart.
- yeahitslikethat 7y agoUber doesn't work. Lyft doesn't work. Airbnb doesn't work. Why would it work for delivery?
- maxxxxx 7y agoIt works great for these companies and it will work great for Amazon.
- yeahitslikethat 7y agoExactly. It's disgusting. Totally unethical.
- TheSoftwareGuy 7y agoI think your definition of "work" is different than most other peoples
- yeahitslikethat 7y agoWork as in a win-win for both the employer and the employee. And perhaps you mean "most other peoples" [who are on hackernews]
- tathougies 7y agothe thing is that a company can take on another customer without repercussion, or employ someone else to do the job. This is what people always fail to understand when discussing contracting v employment. As a contractor, if I get bored of the work, I can hire someone else to do it. Try explaining to your employer that you've hired someone else to do your job for you.
- maxxxxx 7y agoThat’s only true if you run a real business. If you do delivery for amazon or drive for Uber most likely your margins are too low to hire someone and I would expect them to have something in the contract that forbids this.
- benologist 7y agoThey already prevent it somewhat with a combination of selfies and facial recognition - https://mashable.com/article/amazon-flex-delivery-driver-selfies/ https://mashable.com/article/amazon-flex-delivery-driver-sel...
- tathougies 7y agoIt'll be interesting to see what would happen if these contractors file their taxes as employees. I sure hope one does.
- maxxxxx 7y agoYou need the backing of somebody who can pay for lawyers. I am sure that amazon is ready for such a challenge.
- barrkel 7y agoIf they did have something like that in the contract, it would make the contractors employees, with tax and benefit implications.
- downrightmike 7y agoIt seems like they may have reached critical mass with the US Post Office and the gig delivery drivers. And they have since rolled out gray vans, maybe they see how expensive all that sunk cost is. And it would be better for someone else to pay it.
- spir 7y agoInteresting, I wonder if this could be used to dodge the "employee vs contractor" problem that companies like Uber have. Instead of having 100k contractors that might be employees, convert 100k contractors into 40k small transportation businesses with an average of 2.5 employees each.
- maxxxxx 7y agoI am sure that’s the plan. No health insurance. Easy to get rid of. But they still have total control over them.
- tathougies 7y agoA contractor is a business,
- Infernal 7y agoDoes FedEx not do this already?
- sethhochberg 7y agoFedEx Express / Freight is traditional (union) employees. FedEx Ground are nonunion independent contractors.
- SomaticPirate 7y agoSounds like Amazon is making the smart business move and outsourcing one of the hardest parts of its logistics chain to contractors. The $10,000 looks like an attempt to bootstrap the market. I think this is Amazon saying last mile delivery is a huge concern for the company.
- matz1 7y agoIn the future everyone should be a contractor anyway. Health care should be decoupled from employer.
- jmathai 7y agoThat future is not here and it's naive to think full-time and contract employees should be the ones leading the charge :).
- urbanjunkie 7y agoLearn English.
- AYBABTME 7y agoThat's an interesting anti-union strategy.
- mola 7y agoAnd in a few years we'll get to see why unions came to existence, yay. Hooray for forgetting about history.
- Loughla 7y agoHonestly, do people not learn about labor history somewhere in school?
- braindouche 7y agoIn public schools in the US? No, not really.
- nimbius 7y agoI always wonder if people take into full consideration this gig-economy reskin of commercial driving or not. I maintain a CDL for work I perform at a large truck service center and its involved. Do "amazon drivers" or "uber drivers" even have a commercial drivers license or insurance? - do they receive regular CDL related physicals that are required by DOT? - do they receive an automatic drug screen after an accident? - do they perform the pre-flight check on their vehicles before getting underway? - are their vehicle logbooks and inspections current? can they produce them if pulled over? - do they maintain acccurate weight, and accurate logs of vehicle maintenance? being a commercial driver is much, much more than just clicking "yes" on amazon and hoping for the best.
- matz1 7y agoI think the government should change the regulation (less regulation) to make it easier for people to be commercial driver.
- ryanobjc 7y agoA cdl allows one to drive either 50 tons of truck or a bus full of people. Do tell me, the current negatives of the regulation regime, and the benefits of the new one? Also don’t forget to provide a realistic analysis of future safety failures and ways in which the old regulations would have prevented that, and why the new ones don’t and why that’s ok.
- matz1 7y agocurrent negatives ? Increased cost of doing business Will there slight increase in safety failures ? maybe, I accept that.
- himeexcelanta 7y agoA fatal accident can cost a trucking company over 1mil USD. The ATA (American Trucking Association) lobbies heavily to allow under 21-year-olds to carry freight over state lines. There’s no talk about in the upper echelons of US trucking to relax medical, drug, safety, or experience requirements; these companies know it will put them out of business if they hire drivers who get into accidents or even get people killed. There is currently a HUGE lack of qualified, safe trucker drivers in the US. Your suggestion would drive up the cost of freight in the US, and would cost lives. Further, companies like Amazon will have enough money and influence to absorb the cost of unsafe drivers, while most registered US motor carriers (the vast majority of which are under 100 trucks) will be put at a huge disadvantage vis a vi Amazon. The last thing society needs is Amazon yet again pushing others out of business by being able to race to the bottom and lose money in the short to medium term.
- docker_up 7y agoThis is most certainly a trap. They're going to start their business, and then Amazon is going to drop the prices they pay them, and the employees will be trapped because of investment of their own money and sunk costs. DO NOT DO THIS!
- giardini 7y agoAmazon once again being a corporate tool and trying to squeeze everyone else involved: this time their employees and the USPS.
- akulbe 7y agoThe picture from someone who's done doesn't look so good. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/amazon-flex-workers/563444/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/amazo...
- peter_d_sherman 7y agoThere is a great idea present here, which is simply this: Caching items to be delivered locally, but in whatever facilities a local delivery partner would provide (small home, small office, etc.). I used to think that large retail store partners were the solution to this problem (that is, scaling deliveries beyond centralized warehouses, no matter how large). But, this is clearly a much better solution because it opens a slew of additional storage/delivery possibilities to be determined by the local delivery providers... It's sort of like taking a grand problem and outsourcing it to thousands of individuals or small businesses who then solve a small piece of that grand problem in whatever creative ways they can. (Also virtuous in this solution: Autonomy -- authority is presumably pushed downwards to the local providers for various package types, rather than being all centralized at Amazon's warehouses...) So, brilliant Amazon, absolutely brilliant!
- rtkwe 7y agoThere's nothing in there about eliminating the local warehouses in favor of storing a smattering of items locally in the partners houses/where ever. All this is is replacing the swarms of Amazon vans (and the costs and depreciation of those vans) with their new 'partners' vans. They're basically having people start tiny UPSs or DHLs for a (hopefully for their sake) very small area.
- peter_d_sherman 7y agoI apologize for asking, but how was it inferred from my comment that local or other warehouses would be eliminated? To imply that they would was not my intention. Amazon has a variety of Amazon-owned store/ship locations, that includes Amazon's warehouses. Local partner store/ship or even just local partner ship locations do not detract from that in any way, although, Amazon could, at its discretion, choose a subset of products to cache at partner's locations, IF the partners had storage space and were willing and amenable to that arrangement...
- rtkwe 7y agoWhat I should have said is they're not talking about the distributed warehouse model where all these small partner companies would be storing little bits of inventory.
- ThePhysicist 7y agoA bunch of delivery companies did this in Germany around 10-15 years ago, basically helping people to start their own companies and then hiring them back via an exclusive business partnership to do deliveries for them. By doing that they conveniently transferred all the risk and hidden costs like depreciation of the delivery vehicle, maintenance, sick & holiday pay as well as social security & retirement fees to their "business partners", which were often not able to properly understand what they got themselves into. This practice also spread to other industries like cleaning and building maintenance and became so abusive that a new law was introduced to counteract it, giving rise to a new legal term: Scheinselbständigkeit (false self-employment). The law basically states that if you are a one-man business that operates exclusively for a single client over an extended period of time you will gain the status of an employee of that company. Hence I'm not surprised Amazon is trying to pull this off as well, I don't think they'll have much success with it though, at least in Europe (I hope).
- benrmatthews 7y agoThis is known as IR35 in the UK and is currently being implemented in the public sector. Will be enforced in the private sector too shortly, especially if companies like Amazon try to pull of things like this.
- donmcronald 7y agoThere’s also insurance, accounting, etc.. Even the little things like phone bills add up when your “business” has $50k in revenue like the Uber driver I saw on Reuters the other day.
- peter-m80 7y agoIn Spain we call this "fake freelancer".