8 ms·

I wish Amazon employs 50% more workforce and then force cut working hours for workers to 8 hours / day. Aka, you can't do overtime even if you want to. But may

I wish Amazon employs 50% more workforce and then force cut working hours for workers to 8 hours / day. Aka, you can't do overtime even if you want to. But may be they did it. Or the workers don't want it. Or something else. It's not like Amazon didn't think of it themselves.

_3u10 5y ago
Have you ever worked in a warehouse? The last thing I wanted at 18 was not being able to earn 50 to 100% more an hour. Also what your proposing is what the company did to everyone who didn’t work overtime but instead focused on working more than part time hours, so they would qualify for full time hours and thus benefits. Work 2 months at 40 hrs per week? Great, have a month with no hours. Voila, now after 3 months your average hours per week is part time. Yeah this was a union shop too, so don’t want to hear any nonsense from anyone about how great things would be if a union was skimming an additional 10% off the workers pay. I wish people who weren’t doing the work would fuck right off with interfering with other peoples working relationships. Unions, mgmt, govt, workers comp, it’s all fucked and skims massively off people doing the work and towards the lifers. Sorry if this comes off as a personal attack, but it brings me back to that life and the struggles everyone is going through. You feel fucked from every direction at a warehouse.
- KptMarchewa 5y ago
  >they would qualify for full time hours and thus benefits. This is not how stuff works in Poland. There's no difference between full-time and part-time benefits, instead, there's a difference between employment contract (UoP) contracting (UZ, UoD) and self-employment.
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    There are also legal limits on working time, although it's not clear to me which would apply to a warehouse worker. https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/observatories/emcc/erm/legislation/poland-working-time-flexibility https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/observatories/emcc/erm/legis...
    - KptMarchewa 5y ago
      Take a look at "Work involving continuity of operation" part. Amazon warehouses have 4x10h system AFAIK.
    - gambiting 5y ago
      You can legally opt out of the working time limits in most professions, except for limited few like truck drivers. I'm yet to see an employment contract that doesn't have a clause for the opt out. I work as a programmer contracted for 37.5h/week but of course there's a clause in my contract to say I agree to work more "if needed"(never had to in my 7 years of work here, but still).
      - KptMarchewa 5y ago
        Overtime on UoP is permitted, but regulated. You can't do over some limit (like 400 hours yearly); except if you're a doctor.
  - _3u10 5y ago
    Interesting. Here it's company to company, you can have benefits part time, but most don't offer it as most part time jobs are low wage. (Less likely to have bennies)
    - KptMarchewa 5y ago
      Also, "benefits" mean very little at that level in Poland, since healthcare is state run - and shit, but equally shit. Private healthcare is usually diagnostics only (also, dentistry and some "luxury" operations like LASIK).
- pfr1054 5y ago
  Check your privilege. You got 50 to 100% more an hour for working overtime BECAUSE it was a union shop. Yes the union that you resent for 'skimming' was getting you a way more than 10% bump in every paycheck. If it wasn't a union shop, then you would have been working overtime at the same hourly rate as regular hours. This is what GP objected to - if there's no incentive for management not to demand excessive overtime, they do it all the time and burn people out. If there are overtime limits or statutory pay increases for overtime, they manage their resources properly.
  - hirako2000 5y ago
    Well that's what the union would say. We did this. You are welcome. His point is that they are interfering with employer/employees relationship, and skim a percentage. One could argue the unions aren't getting the best deals in the long run, and skim a percentage on top. The amount of corruption those involved get tempted to participate in is significant, hard to know what we don't know. What I observe is that more prestigious jobs get away without unions getting in the way. In tech, there is generally a distrust in political factions forming to supposedly fight for employees benefits. Perhaps well paid workers figured there is no need for fighting against well paying employers, for discrete reasons. Amazon warehouse employees? If it's so bad, leave. It's just feeding the beast to accept the now well known conditions there.
    - simiones 5y ago
      > Amazon warehouse employees? If it's so bad, leave. It's just feeding the beast to accept the now well known conditions there. Unfortunately, the current economic system comes with an air-tight protection from such dangerous ideas: if you don't work, you can't live. So, unless there is some place that deigns to offer better conditions than Amazon warehouses, your choices are to work in these conditions or just die. > What I observe is that more prestigious jobs get away without unions getting in the way. In tech, there is generally a distrust in political factions forming to supposedly fight for employees benefits. This happens more in newer industries, where unions are more actively discouraged from the get go. Older prestigious professions do tend to have unions, at least in my country. Dctors have unions. Actors and screen writers have unions. Magistrates (at least those working for the state - prosecutors, judges, public defenders) have unions. I think civil engineering is not unionized, but that is more of an exception. Even more, some areas in tech are some of the most disfunctional working environments around, and unionization is becoming a hot topic. Look at the recent Activision Blizzard or Ubisoft or Riot Games scandals.
- Shacklz 5y ago
  Unions are for sure not the silver bullet that will solve all problems, but just look at the different working conditions across countries and you will see that generally speaking, unions do lead to better working conditions and overall well-being of the employees. After all, that's literally their purpose and why they exist in the first place. > I wish people who weren’t doing the work would fuck right off with interfering with other peoples working relationships. [..] You feel fucked from every direction at a warehouse. It's precisely the POINT to interfere, because they cannot fend for themselves. It is literally the reason why unions were invented and why governments of pretty much all advanced nations choose to regulate work: There will always be those who have no choice but to accept the work that is given to them, and unless someone fends for them, they will be exploited. Try to keep your own emotions out of it, and look at the raw numbers & statistics across countries. The patterns are evidently clear.
TrackerFF 5y ago
I worked a string of temp jobs throughout college - usually via temp agencies. I too, did some similar gigs to Amazon warehouse. Usually, both employee and employer want the overtime - more so for the employee, if the OT pay is attractive. When I worked night shifts in a mail sorting facility (11PM to 11AM), the OT pay was almost 100% Employees want it because they can make more money without having to balance multiple gigs/jobs, employers because less employees = less paperwork and less people to manage.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  And this is why regulation is needed. As long as employees want OT pay because otherwise they can't make a living, they will work (sometimes ridiculous) amounts of OT and companies will exploit that need of the workers. People having to work two full-time jobs or balancing "gig economy" modern slavery just to make rent? That only shows how broken the system is, especially when it comes to rents. Fair wages and OT bans by law are the only way out - like in Germany, where you are not allowed to work more than 10 hours a day across all your jobs combined.
  - cto_of_antifa 5y ago
    [dead]
  - littlecranky67 5y ago
    Yes, and to add to your comment, in Germany the Employer is responsible for monitoring those 10h limits of its employees. If for example and employee would die in an accident due to falling asleep while driving after more than 10h of work, the employer can be held accountable.
  - mantas 5y ago
    The problem is how do you define „make a living“ and what do you do if someone just wants extra €€€ beyond that? I make fair money yet I still moonlighted a lot. Should I be allowed to work extra to have money for a sweet bicycle or travelling?
benreesman 5y ago
Sadly, the titans of industry have become very focused on short time horizons. Giving employees reasonable working hours, reasonable working conditions, and reasonable pay for the cost of living is trivially the right move if your ambition is to build a lasting monument of human accomplishment and a lasting legacy of human kinship and solidarity.
- rob74 5y ago
  Hey, do you want to become the next In-N-Out Burger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-N-Out_Burger#Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-N-Out_Burger#Culture) or the next McDonald's? If you want to really reach for the stars (like Bezos is currently trying with Bue Origin), you can't let such trivialities like humane working conditions get in the way... </sarcasm>
- simiones 5y ago
  Well, at one time something like 20% of the deaths in Pittsburgh were happening in Carnegie's steel mills according to the Economist [0]. So it's nothing new, unfortunately. It seems to almost be a pre-condition for getting really really rich. [0] https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2003/01/30/pittsburgh-pirate https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2003/01/30/pittsbur...
pietrovismara 5y ago
I wish Amazon would disappear overnight.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  Just like with ousting dictators, that would leave a power vacuum which will be filled ASAP by an equally evil corporation, since Amazon proved what one can get away with. The solution is to legislate companies with despicable practices out of business, but that ship has sailed some time in the '70s -'80s when globalization and unscrupulous capitalism kicked into fifth gear.
  - pietrovismara 5y ago
    Of course, and "obliterating" Amazon would still leave all the other corporations who behave similarly and the broken system they lay their foundation upon intact. Still, it is fine to me to express frustration using a childish dream for revenge every once in a while.
varispeed 5y ago
I think big corporations like Amazon should be more tightly regulated. They could easily afford cutting hours by 50% and quadrupling the pay at the same time, so workers wouldn't have to do overtime, but this is a exploitative and greed driven business. They also don't pay right amount of tax and because of that all workers are taxed more to make up for it.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > They could easily afford cutting hours by 50% and quadrupling the pay at the same time Source? Retail business profit margins are 2% to 3%, with labor being the biggest cost. Without a law requiring all retail businesses to do the same, Amazon retail prices would become wildly uncompetitive to other large retailers.
- mrep 5y ago
  Quick estimate: amazon retail had about about 8 billion in operating income for the six months ending in just [0] so estimate 16 billion a year. They also had 1,335,000 employees [0]. At least for the US, their starting pay is $18 an hour [1]. 18 * 40 * 48 is $34,560. If we assume 1 million of those are front line workers, just doubling their pay would increase their costs by 34 billion dollars putting them in the red by 18 billion dollars a year. Obviously pay varies by location so not a perfect estimate. [0]: https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-release/news-release-details/2021/Amazon.com-Announces-Second-Quarter-Results-2dcdc6a32/default.aspx https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-release/news-release-details... [1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/exclusive-amazon-hikes-starting-pay-18-an-hour-it-hires-125000-more-logistics-2021-09-14/#:~:text=Amazon%20hikes%20average%20U.S.%20starting%20pay%20to%20%2418%2C%20hires%20for%20125%2C000%20jobs,-By%20Jeffrey%20Dastin&text=Sept%2014%20(Reuters)%20%2D%20Amazon,workers%2C%20an%20executive%20told%20Reuters https://www.reuters.com/business/exclusive-amazon-hikes-star.... > threads
  - varispeed 5y ago
    > in operating income > so estimate 16 billion a year. Amazon is in control of that number. They could easily quadruple that if they pulled money out of avoidance schemes and cut fake costs.

_3u10 5y ago

Have you ever worked in a warehouse? The last thing I wanted at 18 was not being able to earn 50 to 100% more an hour. Also what your proposing is what the company did to everyone who didn’t work overtime but instead focused on working more than part time hours, so they would qualify for full time hours and thus benefits. Work 2 months at 40 hrs per week? Great, have a month with no hours. Voila, now after 3 months your average hours per week is part time. Yeah this was a union shop too, so don’t want to hear any nonsense from anyone about how great things would be if a union was skimming an additional 10% off the workers pay. I wish people who weren’t doing the work would fuck right off with interfering with other peoples working relationships. Unions, mgmt, govt, workers comp, it’s all fucked and skims massively off people doing the work and towards the lifers. Sorry if this comes off as a personal attack, but it brings me back to that life and the struggles everyone is going through. You feel fucked from every direction at a warehouse.

KptMarchewa 5y ago
>they would qualify for full time hours and thus benefits. This is not how stuff works in Poland. There's no difference between full-time and part-time benefits, instead, there's a difference between employment contract (UoP) contracting (UZ, UoD) and self-employment.
- Symbiote 5y ago
  There are also legal limits on working time, although it's not clear to me which would apply to a warehouse worker. https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/observatories/emcc/erm/legislation/poland-working-time-flexibility https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/observatories/emcc/erm/legis...
  - KptMarchewa 5y ago
    Take a look at "Work involving continuity of operation" part. Amazon warehouses have 4x10h system AFAIK.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    You can legally opt out of the working time limits in most professions, except for limited few like truck drivers. I'm yet to see an employment contract that doesn't have a clause for the opt out. I work as a programmer contracted for 37.5h/week but of course there's a clause in my contract to say I agree to work more "if needed"(never had to in my 7 years of work here, but still).
    - KptMarchewa 5y ago
      Overtime on UoP is permitted, but regulated. You can't do over some limit (like 400 hours yearly); except if you're a doctor.
- _3u10 5y ago
  Interesting. Here it's company to company, you can have benefits part time, but most don't offer it as most part time jobs are low wage. (Less likely to have bennies)
  - KptMarchewa 5y ago
    Also, "benefits" mean very little at that level in Poland, since healthcare is state run - and shit, but equally shit. Private healthcare is usually diagnostics only (also, dentistry and some "luxury" operations like LASIK).
pfr1054 5y ago
Check your privilege. You got 50 to 100% more an hour for working overtime BECAUSE it was a union shop. Yes the union that you resent for 'skimming' was getting you a way more than 10% bump in every paycheck. If it wasn't a union shop, then you would have been working overtime at the same hourly rate as regular hours. This is what GP objected to - if there's no incentive for management not to demand excessive overtime, they do it all the time and burn people out. If there are overtime limits or statutory pay increases for overtime, they manage their resources properly.
- hirako2000 5y ago
  Well that's what the union would say. We did this. You are welcome. His point is that they are interfering with employer/employees relationship, and skim a percentage. One could argue the unions aren't getting the best deals in the long run, and skim a percentage on top. The amount of corruption those involved get tempted to participate in is significant, hard to know what we don't know. What I observe is that more prestigious jobs get away without unions getting in the way. In tech, there is generally a distrust in political factions forming to supposedly fight for employees benefits. Perhaps well paid workers figured there is no need for fighting against well paying employers, for discrete reasons. Amazon warehouse employees? If it's so bad, leave. It's just feeding the beast to accept the now well known conditions there.
  - simiones 5y ago
    > Amazon warehouse employees? If it's so bad, leave. It's just feeding the beast to accept the now well known conditions there. Unfortunately, the current economic system comes with an air-tight protection from such dangerous ideas: if you don't work, you can't live. So, unless there is some place that deigns to offer better conditions than Amazon warehouses, your choices are to work in these conditions or just die. > What I observe is that more prestigious jobs get away without unions getting in the way. In tech, there is generally a distrust in political factions forming to supposedly fight for employees benefits. This happens more in newer industries, where unions are more actively discouraged from the get go. Older prestigious professions do tend to have unions, at least in my country. Dctors have unions. Actors and screen writers have unions. Magistrates (at least those working for the state - prosecutors, judges, public defenders) have unions. I think civil engineering is not unionized, but that is more of an exception. Even more, some areas in tech are some of the most disfunctional working environments around, and unionization is becoming a hot topic. Look at the recent Activision Blizzard or Ubisoft or Riot Games scandals.
Shacklz 5y ago
Unions are for sure not the silver bullet that will solve all problems, but just look at the different working conditions across countries and you will see that generally speaking, unions do lead to better working conditions and overall well-being of the employees. After all, that's literally their purpose and why they exist in the first place. > I wish people who weren’t doing the work would fuck right off with interfering with other peoples working relationships. [..] You feel fucked from every direction at a warehouse. It's precisely the POINT to interfere, because they cannot fend for themselves. It is literally the reason why unions were invented and why governments of pretty much all advanced nations choose to regulate work: There will always be those who have no choice but to accept the work that is given to them, and unless someone fends for them, they will be exploited. Try to keep your own emotions out of it, and look at the raw numbers & statistics across countries. The patterns are evidently clear.

TrackerFF 5y ago

I worked a string of temp jobs throughout college - usually via temp agencies. I too, did some similar gigs to Amazon warehouse. Usually, both employee and employer want the overtime - more so for the employee, if the OT pay is attractive. When I worked night shifts in a mail sorting facility (11PM to 11AM), the OT pay was almost 100% Employees want it because they can make more money without having to balance multiple gigs/jobs, employers because less employees = less paperwork and less people to manage.

mschuster91 5y ago
And this is why regulation is needed. As long as employees want OT pay because otherwise they can't make a living, they will work (sometimes ridiculous) amounts of OT and companies will exploit that need of the workers. People having to work two full-time jobs or balancing "gig economy" modern slavery just to make rent? That only shows how broken the system is, especially when it comes to rents. Fair wages and OT bans by law are the only way out - like in Germany, where you are not allowed to work more than 10 hours a day across all your jobs combined.
- cto_of_antifa 5y ago
  [dead]
- littlecranky67 5y ago
  Yes, and to add to your comment, in Germany the Employer is responsible for monitoring those 10h limits of its employees. If for example and employee would die in an accident due to falling asleep while driving after more than 10h of work, the employer can be held accountable.
- mantas 5y ago
  The problem is how do you define „make a living“ and what do you do if someone just wants extra €€€ beyond that? I make fair money yet I still moonlighted a lot. Should I be allowed to work extra to have money for a sweet bicycle or travelling?

benreesman 5y ago

Sadly, the titans of industry have become very focused on short time horizons. Giving employees reasonable working hours, reasonable working conditions, and reasonable pay for the cost of living is trivially the right move if your ambition is to build a lasting monument of human accomplishment and a lasting legacy of human kinship and solidarity.

rob74 5y ago
Hey, do you want to become the next In-N-Out Burger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-N-Out_Burger#Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-N-Out_Burger#Culture) or the next McDonald's? If you want to really reach for the stars (like Bezos is currently trying with Bue Origin), you can't let such trivialities like humane working conditions get in the way... </sarcasm>
simiones 5y ago
Well, at one time something like 20% of the deaths in Pittsburgh were happening in Carnegie's steel mills according to the Economist [0]. So it's nothing new, unfortunately. It seems to almost be a pre-condition for getting really really rich. [0] https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2003/01/30/pittsburgh-pirate https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2003/01/30/pittsbur...

pietrovismara 5y ago

I wish Amazon would disappear overnight.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
Just like with ousting dictators, that would leave a power vacuum which will be filled ASAP by an equally evil corporation, since Amazon proved what one can get away with. The solution is to legislate companies with despicable practices out of business, but that ship has sailed some time in the '70s -'80s when globalization and unscrupulous capitalism kicked into fifth gear.
- pietrovismara 5y ago
  Of course, and "obliterating" Amazon would still leave all the other corporations who behave similarly and the broken system they lay their foundation upon intact. Still, it is fine to me to express frustration using a childish dream for revenge every once in a while.

varispeed 5y ago

I think big corporations like Amazon should be more tightly regulated. They could easily afford cutting hours by 50% and quadrupling the pay at the same time, so workers wouldn't have to do overtime, but this is a exploitative and greed driven business. They also don't pay right amount of tax and because of that all workers are taxed more to make up for it.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
> They could easily afford cutting hours by 50% and quadrupling the pay at the same time Source? Retail business profit margins are 2% to 3%, with labor being the biggest cost. Without a law requiring all retail businesses to do the same, Amazon retail prices would become wildly uncompetitive to other large retailers.
mrep 5y ago
Quick estimate: amazon retail had about about 8 billion in operating income for the six months ending in just [0] so estimate 16 billion a year. They also had 1,335,000 employees [0]. At least for the US, their starting pay is $18 an hour [1]. 18 * 40 * 48 is $34,560. If we assume 1 million of those are front line workers, just doubling their pay would increase their costs by 34 billion dollars putting them in the red by 18 billion dollars a year. Obviously pay varies by location so not a perfect estimate. [0]: https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-release/news-release-details/2021/Amazon.com-Announces-Second-Quarter-Results-2dcdc6a32/default.aspx https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-release/news-release-details... [1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/exclusive-amazon-hikes-starting-pay-18-an-hour-it-hires-125000-more-logistics-2021-09-14/#:~:text=Amazon%20hikes%20average%20U.S.%20starting%20pay%20to%20%2418%2C%20hires%20for%20125%2C000%20jobs,-By%20Jeffrey%20Dastin&text=Sept%2014%20(Reuters)%20%2D%20Amazon,workers%2C%20an%20executive%20told%20Reuters https://www.reuters.com/business/exclusive-amazon-hikes-star.... > threads
- varispeed 5y ago
  > in operating income > so estimate 16 billion a year. Amazon is in control of that number. They could easily quadruple that if they pulled money out of avoidance schemes and cut fake costs.