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Wow, I guess I never really paid attention to the details behind all the Amazon headlines I see. "In April, Amazon announced it would reduce the amount it paid

Wow, I guess I never really paid attention to the details behind all the Amazon headlines I see. "In April, Amazon announced it would reduce the amount it paid for drivers from $17.25 to $16.00 an hour, according to the letter...Weeks later, Amazon announced a series of raises for its drivers around the country as part of a public relations push following a union drive at an Amazon warehouse" "Currently, Amazon delivery drivers are expected to deliver upwards of 400 packages a day on 10-hour routes that often extend up to 12 hours." 400 seems crazy, I wondered about UPS. According to Google "At UPS, the average driver makes about 120 deliveries per day, says Jack Levis, the shipping giant's director of process management"

Robotbeat 5y ago
That’s on the order of 50¢ in wages per delivery. Drones & autonomous/semi-autonomous robots can’t compete against super low wage labor. That’s crazy cheap for a delivery driver! (Low wages hold back innovation and improvements in productivity.)
- dylan604 5y ago
  That's just the labor fees. The vans still need to be paid for and maintained, and they still run on fuel.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    All pretty cheap compared to the labor costs.
  - HarryHirsch 5y ago
    As if the high-tech solution didn't have to be maintained? Anyway, that's what cheap labour does, it leads to stagnation. Why invest in to improve the state of the art when you can throw more bodies at the problem? There's also the other problem: Jeff Bezos strip-mines the workforce and takes the gains to Washington. Meanwhile his underpaid employees can't invest in their own communities.
    - Robotbeat 5y ago
      I truly believe that increasing the minimum wage (at first just to the same as the 1960s, ie about $12.20/hour, and then adjusting for productivity growth since 1969 to about $20/hour), especially if combined with policies to maintain full employment, Will lead to dramatic increases in productivity as companies are finally forced to properly value human labor. The increase in productivity well help pay for minimum wage increases, making them not purely inflationary or even just redistributionary (although it’ll be that, too… tying minimum wage to productivity growth will have the effect of reducing & limiting income inequality).
      - missedthecue 5y ago
        Why do you cherrypick 1969 and not 1955 where the equivalent number would be $5 an hour today?
        Robotbeat 5y ago
        Pretty obvious, isn’t it? Doesn’t it kind of go without saying that we should progress as a society beyond high water marks set over 50 years ago? Heck, I’ll do one better. Why not pick 1890? “Workers should be paid less today than in 1969” is a sort of crazy thing to say out loud, but here we are.
        missedthecue 5y ago
        You take a statistical outlier, apply a metric like pay/productivity, and then tie that to the minimum wage, and make a moral statement that therefore, it should be at xyz level today. That seems like tortured analysis. If you take 1989 which was 20 years after your date, the minimum wage adjusted for today would be $6.78. And there is no reason whatsoever that pay has ever been or should be tied to productivity. Humans haven't evolved to become better or faster or more adept in a workplace. We have technology. I don't see why I should pay employees more than before because simply because I also invested in some technology that makes allows them to get more work done with less effort. I see no logic in that at all.
rightbyte 5y ago
> 400 packages a day on 10-hour routes 40 packages per hour or 90s per package. No wonder the drivers pee in bottles and work unpaid overtime to keep their jobs.
- zouhair 5y ago
  And throw packages like they don't care, as they should.
  - wtf_is_up 5y ago
    How is destroying other people's stuff a reasonable response for you being disgruntled at your employer?
    - GavinMcG 5y ago
      It's not about being disgruntled, it's about not wanting your family to go hungry because you were only able to deliver three hundred packages in ten hours by taking extra care. There's a difference between destroying someone's stuff because you hate your job and just not caring about someone's stuff because you want your job.
      - mavhc 5y ago
        Exactly what the game Papers Please is about
      - IncRnd 5y ago
        > There's a difference between destroying someone's stuff because you hate your job and just not caring about someone's stuff because you want your job. What is the difference, when you said you destroyed the packages in each case?
        nooneknows 5y ago
        The difference is the intention.
Frost1x 5y ago
A lot of corporate gains have been at a cost of squeezing on labor resources in some form or another, either time, lower comp, higher productivity, etc. or some combination of these elements. There has been some innovation in general technology making improvements for labor but a lot is really just doing more, for less, and someone else pocketing the gains. You need look no further than AWS treatment of SEs in their PIP culture to see this. You can only squeeze people so far until they finally step away. The only reason it's being sustained is that people don't have alternative options in many cases and are esentially forced to do it. At some point people will find other options and leave you on your feet but as long as there's a steady stream of desperate people ready to be subjugated to ridiculous working conditions, this will continue.
- mattgreenrocks 5y ago
  > You need look no further than AWS treatment of SEs in their PIP culture to see this. Curious if you or someone else can expound further on this?
  - azar1 5y ago
    https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/internal-amazon-documents-shed-light-on-how-company-pressures-out-6-of-office-workers/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/internal-amazon... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581797
  - IncRnd 5y ago
    I've never worked at Amazon, but I read that as Software Engineers are subjected to progress improvement plans as a way to legally threaten firings in order to make people work extensive hours.
- jmeister 5y ago
  > corporate gains What about customers? They seem to be happy to ignore how the sausage is made, to have stuff delivered to their doorsteps cheap and fast.
whatok 5y ago
Comparing packages to deliveries is apples to oranges. I don't disagree that these jobs are rough but 120 deliveries with an average of 3-4 packages per delivery paints a similar picture.
- nrmitchi 5y ago
  > an average of 3-4 packages per delivery Do you have any source for this? It seems like a really weird assumption to make, especially given that Amazon will already bundle multiple orders into the same package.
  - lostapathy 5y ago
    Conversely, any UPS driver is about guaranteed a handful of business stops that have a dozen to several dozen packages at the stop.
  - burnished 5y ago
    I think their point is that you probably can't compare these two numbers very well because they measure different things, and in the case of Amazon if on average they have 3-4 packages per delivery then the two companies would have very similar numbers. Sidenote, I hate "cant compare apples to oranges" because you eminently can. I'd argue it is much easier to compare things that are very similar! Apples and oranges both have sugars and acids, skins, are recognized as fruits, and are frequently interchangeable. Comparing apples to cranes is much more difficult. "comparing apples to oranges" should mean the comparison is relatively easy to make on a variety of axes!
  - whatok 5y ago
    I should clarify that comment with if you made a naïve assumption of 3-4 packages per delivery then it's a similar workload. I don't doubt that Amazon workers are treated worse than UPS workers but comparing packages to deliveries without normalizing somehow is not productive. The 400 package number from the article is also specifically cited from this company and we have no idea whether that is a nationwide figure while the UPS comment implies that it is.
bradleyankrom 5y ago
I wonder how prevalent those storage lockers are on a typical route … the last few places that I’ve lived have had Amazon or Luxer lockers, ranging from a couple dozen to maybe 100+ individual spaces. The 400/day seems a little more feasible if a quarter or half can be dropped in the same location, but I really have no idea how ubiquitous those lockers are.
specialp 5y ago
Yes and hence like warehouse workers not taking bathroom breaks for fear of being "off-task" Amazon drivers cut corners too. I have seen them blowing through stop signs, and one of them after blowing through a stop sign, ripped a three point turn and came within one foot of my car before my beeping stopped them. I called Amazon and they of course speak of them like they are some completely separate affiliate that has nothing to do with them. This is despite the fact they say Amazon and deliver only Amazon packages.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  They are basically delivery franchises in my understanding.
- at-fates-hands 5y ago
  >> I called Amazon and they of course speak of them like they are some completely separate affiliate that has nothing to do with them. This by design: Amazon has repeatedly said in court that it is not responsible for the actions of its contractors, citing agreements that require them, as one puts it, to “defend, indemnify and hold harmless Amazon.” Just last week, an operations manager for Amazon testified in Chicago that it signs such agreements with all its “delivery service partners,” who assume the liability and the responsibility for legal costs. The agreements cover “all loss or damage to personal property or bodily harm including death.” Amazon vigilantly enforces the terms of those agreements. In New Jersey, when a contractor’s insurer failed to pay Amazon’s legal bills in a suit brought by a physician injured in a crash, Amazon sued to force the insurer to pick up the tab. In California, the company sued contractors, telling courts that any damages arising from crashes there should be billed to the delivery companies. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/us/amazon-delivery-drivers-accidents.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/us/amazon-delivery-driver... The whole article was pretty shocking to read. I rarely, if ever buy stuff on Amazon now that I know how they've attempted to wall themselves off from responsibility of what happens with these companies.
  - mattmcknight 5y ago
    If you or I hire a company to ship a package, we are not generally responsible if the driver the shipper hires runs someone over. This same construct should apply at scale.
crazygringo 5y ago
> 400 seems crazy, I wondered about UPS. In cities, an Amazon delivery driver might be delivering 5, 10, or 20 packages to the same building. And in those areas where Amazon is using its own delivery network, UPS packages (non-Amazon) will be far fewer -- often just 1 or a couple or none per day. So it's not crazy. The Amazon driver might be elivering far more packages but making fewer stops. Also, a lot of those packages are the little white-and-blue padded envelopes, almost more like large letters than packages.
- GoodJokes 5y ago
  Found the Amazon astroturfer. Good try though! Cheers!
- KillahBhyte 5y ago
  There may be some sampling bias as you point out, but it is still crazy from my perspective. I would suspect that UPS and the other major carriers have optimized this task to death. With the right bundling and route optimization for a specific city or set of parcels I could see some level of improvement due to the things you mention. But 200-300% efficiency gains over businesses that have been profitably providing this service for years? Its exceptional enough to warrant being called crazy at first glance. From the article, "The two Portland delivery companies are demanding a cap at 250 packages and 150 stops per 8.5 hour route" Which seems to indicate that they realize that some bundling will occur and accept it as long as there is an upper bounds on both metrics.
  - crazygringo 5y ago
    > I would suspect that UPS and the other major carriers have optimized this task to death. In the end a great deal of it comes down to volume per delivery location. If UPS is delivering 1 package per day per location, there's nothing they can do to optimize (except skip locations certain days, which nobody wants). It sucks for them. Then Amazon comes along with 5 packages per day per location, and it changes the economics completely. By 200-300% is not unreasonable at all. There's a fact that blew my mind when I first learned it -- that apparently UPS actually loses money delivering packages for Amazon, but makes more profit in the end because the added scale makes it even cheaper to deliver packages for other people. E.g., if it's already dropping off an Amazon package at a location, then it's suddenly much cheaper to drop off the non-Amazon package at the same time.
kevindong 5y ago
I don't think you should be directly comparing UPS and Amazon drivers in this instance. Amazon can pick and choose where they have contractors make deliveries (e.g. non rural areas with higher population densities). UPS serves almost everywhere. Additionally, we don't know what hours UPS drivers work in comparison to Amazon drivers.
zamfi 5y ago
Not justifying Amazon’s labor practices by any means, but Amazon delivery != UPS. It’s quite possible that Amazon only runs its own delivery in areas with a high enough order density that 400 packages/day is possible, and UPS doesn’t restrict itself in this way.

Robotbeat 5y ago

That’s on the order of 50¢ in wages per delivery. Drones & autonomous/semi-autonomous robots can’t compete against super low wage labor. That’s crazy cheap for a delivery driver! (Low wages hold back innovation and improvements in productivity.)

dylan604 5y ago
That's just the labor fees. The vans still need to be paid for and maintained, and they still run on fuel.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  All pretty cheap compared to the labor costs.
- HarryHirsch 5y ago
  As if the high-tech solution didn't have to be maintained? Anyway, that's what cheap labour does, it leads to stagnation. Why invest in to improve the state of the art when you can throw more bodies at the problem? There's also the other problem: Jeff Bezos strip-mines the workforce and takes the gains to Washington. Meanwhile his underpaid employees can't invest in their own communities.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    I truly believe that increasing the minimum wage (at first just to the same as the 1960s, ie about $12.20/hour, and then adjusting for productivity growth since 1969 to about $20/hour), especially if combined with policies to maintain full employment, Will lead to dramatic increases in productivity as companies are finally forced to properly value human labor. The increase in productivity well help pay for minimum wage increases, making them not purely inflationary or even just redistributionary (although it’ll be that, too… tying minimum wage to productivity growth will have the effect of reducing & limiting income inequality).
    - missedthecue 5y ago
      Why do you cherrypick 1969 and not 1955 where the equivalent number would be $5 an hour today?
      - Robotbeat 5y ago
        Pretty obvious, isn’t it? Doesn’t it kind of go without saying that we should progress as a society beyond high water marks set over 50 years ago? Heck, I’ll do one better. Why not pick 1890? “Workers should be paid less today than in 1969” is a sort of crazy thing to say out loud, but here we are.
        missedthecue 5y ago
        You take a statistical outlier, apply a metric like pay/productivity, and then tie that to the minimum wage, and make a moral statement that therefore, it should be at xyz level today. That seems like tortured analysis. If you take 1989 which was 20 years after your date, the minimum wage adjusted for today would be $6.78. And there is no reason whatsoever that pay has ever been or should be tied to productivity. Humans haven't evolved to become better or faster or more adept in a workplace. We have technology. I don't see why I should pay employees more than before because simply because I also invested in some technology that makes allows them to get more work done with less effort. I see no logic in that at all.

rightbyte 5y ago

> 400 packages a day on 10-hour routes 40 packages per hour or 90s per package. No wonder the drivers pee in bottles and work unpaid overtime to keep their jobs.

zouhair 5y ago
And throw packages like they don't care, as they should.
- wtf_is_up 5y ago
  How is destroying other people's stuff a reasonable response for you being disgruntled at your employer?
  - GavinMcG 5y ago
    It's not about being disgruntled, it's about not wanting your family to go hungry because you were only able to deliver three hundred packages in ten hours by taking extra care. There's a difference between destroying someone's stuff because you hate your job and just not caring about someone's stuff because you want your job.
    - mavhc 5y ago
      Exactly what the game Papers Please is about
    - IncRnd 5y ago
      > There's a difference between destroying someone's stuff because you hate your job and just not caring about someone's stuff because you want your job. What is the difference, when you said you destroyed the packages in each case?
      - nooneknows 5y ago
        The difference is the intention.

Frost1x 5y ago

A lot of corporate gains have been at a cost of squeezing on labor resources in some form or another, either time, lower comp, higher productivity, etc. or some combination of these elements. There has been some innovation in general technology making improvements for labor but a lot is really just doing more, for less, and someone else pocketing the gains. You need look no further than AWS treatment of SEs in their PIP culture to see this. You can only squeeze people so far until they finally step away. The only reason it's being sustained is that people don't have alternative options in many cases and are esentially forced to do it. At some point people will find other options and leave you on your feet but as long as there's a steady stream of desperate people ready to be subjugated to ridiculous working conditions, this will continue.

mattgreenrocks 5y ago
> You need look no further than AWS treatment of SEs in their PIP culture to see this. Curious if you or someone else can expound further on this?
- azar1 5y ago
  https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/internal-amazon-documents-shed-light-on-how-company-pressures-out-6-of-office-workers/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/internal-amazon... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581797
- IncRnd 5y ago
  I've never worked at Amazon, but I read that as Software Engineers are subjected to progress improvement plans as a way to legally threaten firings in order to make people work extensive hours.
jmeister 5y ago
> corporate gains What about customers? They seem to be happy to ignore how the sausage is made, to have stuff delivered to their doorsteps cheap and fast.

whatok 5y ago

Comparing packages to deliveries is apples to oranges. I don't disagree that these jobs are rough but 120 deliveries with an average of 3-4 packages per delivery paints a similar picture.

nrmitchi 5y ago
> an average of 3-4 packages per delivery Do you have any source for this? It seems like a really weird assumption to make, especially given that Amazon will already bundle multiple orders into the same package.
- lostapathy 5y ago
  Conversely, any UPS driver is about guaranteed a handful of business stops that have a dozen to several dozen packages at the stop.
- burnished 5y ago
  I think their point is that you probably can't compare these two numbers very well because they measure different things, and in the case of Amazon if on average they have 3-4 packages per delivery then the two companies would have very similar numbers. Sidenote, I hate "cant compare apples to oranges" because you eminently can. I'd argue it is much easier to compare things that are very similar! Apples and oranges both have sugars and acids, skins, are recognized as fruits, and are frequently interchangeable. Comparing apples to cranes is much more difficult. "comparing apples to oranges" should mean the comparison is relatively easy to make on a variety of axes!
- whatok 5y ago
  I should clarify that comment with if you made a naïve assumption of 3-4 packages per delivery then it's a similar workload. I don't doubt that Amazon workers are treated worse than UPS workers but comparing packages to deliveries without normalizing somehow is not productive. The 400 package number from the article is also specifically cited from this company and we have no idea whether that is a nationwide figure while the UPS comment implies that it is.

bradleyankrom 5y ago

I wonder how prevalent those storage lockers are on a typical route … the last few places that I’ve lived have had Amazon or Luxer lockers, ranging from a couple dozen to maybe 100+ individual spaces. The 400/day seems a little more feasible if a quarter or half can be dropped in the same location, but I really have no idea how ubiquitous those lockers are.

specialp 5y ago

Yes and hence like warehouse workers not taking bathroom breaks for fear of being "off-task" Amazon drivers cut corners too. I have seen them blowing through stop signs, and one of them after blowing through a stop sign, ripped a three point turn and came within one foot of my car before my beeping stopped them. I called Amazon and they of course speak of them like they are some completely separate affiliate that has nothing to do with them. This is despite the fact they say Amazon and deliver only Amazon packages.

MattGaiser 5y ago
They are basically delivery franchises in my understanding.
at-fates-hands 5y ago
>> I called Amazon and they of course speak of them like they are some completely separate affiliate that has nothing to do with them. This by design: Amazon has repeatedly said in court that it is not responsible for the actions of its contractors, citing agreements that require them, as one puts it, to “defend, indemnify and hold harmless Amazon.” Just last week, an operations manager for Amazon testified in Chicago that it signs such agreements with all its “delivery service partners,” who assume the liability and the responsibility for legal costs. The agreements cover “all loss or damage to personal property or bodily harm including death.” Amazon vigilantly enforces the terms of those agreements. In New Jersey, when a contractor’s insurer failed to pay Amazon’s legal bills in a suit brought by a physician injured in a crash, Amazon sued to force the insurer to pick up the tab. In California, the company sued contractors, telling courts that any damages arising from crashes there should be billed to the delivery companies. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/us/amazon-delivery-drivers-accidents.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/us/amazon-delivery-driver... The whole article was pretty shocking to read. I rarely, if ever buy stuff on Amazon now that I know how they've attempted to wall themselves off from responsibility of what happens with these companies.
- mattmcknight 5y ago
  If you or I hire a company to ship a package, we are not generally responsible if the driver the shipper hires runs someone over. This same construct should apply at scale.

crazygringo 5y ago

> 400 seems crazy, I wondered about UPS. In cities, an Amazon delivery driver might be delivering 5, 10, or 20 packages to the same building. And in those areas where Amazon is using its own delivery network, UPS packages (non-Amazon) will be far fewer -- often just 1 or a couple or none per day. So it's not crazy. The Amazon driver might be elivering far more packages but making fewer stops. Also, a lot of those packages are the little white-and-blue padded envelopes, almost more like large letters than packages.

GoodJokes 5y ago
Found the Amazon astroturfer. Good try though! Cheers!
KillahBhyte 5y ago
There may be some sampling bias as you point out, but it is still crazy from my perspective. I would suspect that UPS and the other major carriers have optimized this task to death. With the right bundling and route optimization for a specific city or set of parcels I could see some level of improvement due to the things you mention. But 200-300% efficiency gains over businesses that have been profitably providing this service for years? Its exceptional enough to warrant being called crazy at first glance. From the article, "The two Portland delivery companies are demanding a cap at 250 packages and 150 stops per 8.5 hour route" Which seems to indicate that they realize that some bundling will occur and accept it as long as there is an upper bounds on both metrics.
- crazygringo 5y ago
  > I would suspect that UPS and the other major carriers have optimized this task to death. In the end a great deal of it comes down to volume per delivery location. If UPS is delivering 1 package per day per location, there's nothing they can do to optimize (except skip locations certain days, which nobody wants). It sucks for them. Then Amazon comes along with 5 packages per day per location, and it changes the economics completely. By 200-300% is not unreasonable at all. There's a fact that blew my mind when I first learned it -- that apparently UPS actually loses money delivering packages for Amazon, but makes more profit in the end because the added scale makes it even cheaper to deliver packages for other people. E.g., if it's already dropping off an Amazon package at a location, then it's suddenly much cheaper to drop off the non-Amazon package at the same time.

kevindong 5y ago

I don't think you should be directly comparing UPS and Amazon drivers in this instance. Amazon can pick and choose where they have contractors make deliveries (e.g. non rural areas with higher population densities). UPS serves almost everywhere. Additionally, we don't know what hours UPS drivers work in comparison to Amazon drivers.

zamfi 5y ago

Not justifying Amazon’s labor practices by any means, but Amazon delivery != UPS. It’s quite possible that Amazon only runs its own delivery in areas with a high enough order density that 400 packages/day is possible, and UPS doesn’t restrict itself in this way.