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How can anyone blame Amazon here? They saw the massive success of labor exploitation that Uber and the gig economy was enjoying and had to jump in, too. Any goo
by vgeek 5y ago
How can anyone blame Amazon here? They saw the massive success of labor exploitation that Uber and the gig economy was enjoying and had to jump in, too. Any good monopolist should feel obligated to step on others to help themselves. How these modern day robber barrons have such amazing PR is beyond my comprehension abilities. This seems the case within tech circles (even when it is well known that they are hostile towards their own white collar employees) and across the general public.
The $0.10/fee per delivery, with ~150 deliveries per route and up to $0.15 /unit bonus (that number is probably astronomically hard to achieve) seems like peanuts? Does a route only take an hour to complete? If that is the case, then Amazon probably just wants so much excess capacity so as to be detrimental to the contractors. Google's Leapforce/Lionsbridge followed this same model for search quality raters-- hiring more and more raters, leading to an excess of raters, causing many to abandon the platform due to insufficient work volume (paid per piece) and subsequently lowering per rate fees for the remaining raters. It just seems like our gradual slide back into serfdom.
- t0mas88 5y agoI also don't understand why they're complaining that Amazon doesn't pay for damage to the vehicles. I mean... If I hire a small business to do something for me, I wouldn't pay for their car damage or insurance either, that's part of their business risk. These guys agreed to deliver a service for a certain price, that price wasn't profitable enough so they should dump Amazon and look for other customers.
- xkcd-sucks 5y agoYeah, but it also seems like Amazon owns the van leases, owns the repair/maintenance contract, and specifies most of the policies/operations, so there are very few parameters for cost management. It's not like they're contracting with a truly independent courier/delivery company. So Amazon offloads the risks (or even profits by them in the case of vehicle repairs) and leaves a sucker holding the bag. Obviously "business owners" should figure this out before committing to anything but the whole thing seems remarkably scummy in the "you shouldn't have taken a job in the coal mine since you knew company-store food prices exceed wages" sense