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I was at a graduate careers fair in a city where Amazon had just opened offices. Naturally, Amazon had a stall at this careers fair. The person running their st

by dpwm 7y ago

I was at a graduate careers fair in a city where Amazon had just opened offices. Naturally, Amazon had a stall at this careers fair. The person running their stall was telling an audience of maybe six or seven other people that Amazon was the kind of company where if you could find a path around their warehouse that would shave even a single second off a warehouse worker's journey, they'd make them walk it. The audience were quite impressed by this. I suddenly found myself the other side of having said "what an awful place to work," and receiving a mix of bewildered and hostile looks from every other person around that stall. I'm pretty sure the claim was hyperbole – the practical side of getting people to walk a particular path would have been my follow-up question, if I'd thought of it in time. Even so, the claim revealed a mentality of workers as robots that I think helped explain some of the news stories of extraordinary conditions of their warehouse workers.

C1sc0cat 7y ago
Um this is standard Time and Motion stuff from 1920's this is SOP for any factory production line going back a hundred years or more.
- dpwm 7y ago
  Yes, and the criticisms of Taylorism are fairly well-developed. In fact, a lot of the criticisms of Amazon's practices are much the same. With Amazon's level of data collection on individual warehouse and logistic workers, it puts them in a place that Taylorists of the 80s could only dream of. At least in the UK, they've found a way to make sure that they are in no way directly financially responsible for any of the externalities of what their approach does to workers, chiefly by pulling tricks like having their workers hired on an agency basis through subcontractors. I'm not saying this is wrong, it's just what they've done. They have spent the money and found a way to operate that is more efficient. It's what they do, and it's how they sold themselves to a group that included me. I also found the whole thing to be a bit contradictory: software engineers at a multiple of the pay of warehouse engineers working on optimizing the warehouse that is probably almost near optimal. Perhaps if I had been quicker-witted, I'd have asked if we found a way to make the software engineers working on shaving a second off the path around the warehouse more efficient, would they make them do it.

by dpwm 7y ago

C1sc0cat 7y ago

Um this is standard Time and Motion stuff from 1920's this is SOP for any factory production line going back a hundred years or more.

dpwm 7y ago
Yes, and the criticisms of Taylorism are fairly well-developed. In fact, a lot of the criticisms of Amazon's practices are much the same. With Amazon's level of data collection on individual warehouse and logistic workers, it puts them in a place that Taylorists of the 80s could only dream of. At least in the UK, they've found a way to make sure that they are in no way directly financially responsible for any of the externalities of what their approach does to workers, chiefly by pulling tricks like having their workers hired on an agency basis through subcontractors. I'm not saying this is wrong, it's just what they've done. They have spent the money and found a way to operate that is more efficient. It's what they do, and it's how they sold themselves to a group that included me. I also found the whole thing to be a bit contradictory: software engineers at a multiple of the pay of warehouse engineers working on optimizing the warehouse that is probably almost near optimal. Perhaps if I had been quicker-witted, I'd have asked if we found a way to make the software engineers working on shaving a second off the path around the warehouse more efficient, would they make them do it.