Amazon workers sleeping in tents
thecourier.co.uk
thecourier.co.uk
I'm not going to try to defend Amazon - it certainly has many employment issues both in the FCs and at HQ. But this story specifically is virtually content-free. Most of it's content is to be found in the first sentence: "At least three tents have been spotted in woodland beside the online retail giant’s base just off the M90 in Dunfermline in recent days" and then later it emerges that they managed to find one occupied tent whose occupant was using the tent to avoid commuting from his home. The rest of the article strings together innuendo and rehashes talking points to try to build the desired narrative and mental picture of a tent city full of freezing, starving Amazon FC workers.
A truthful headline would have been "An Amazon worker sleeps in a tent near Dunfermline site to avoid long commute", but then that would neither have sparked the same moral outrage nor garnered the same number of clicks.
Perth and the Dunfermline site are roughly 30 miles apart, on public transport the trip would take roughly 2 hours.
Sounds like a great idea castigate an employer in a semi-rural area with piss poor public transportation.
Some potential future network of public transportation provided via self-driving cars excepted.
To be sure, there's a lot of people who have said that Amazon is a shitty place to work: not just in entry level jobs, but even as a well-educated 6 figure software engineer. I would not choose to work for Amazon unless I was desperate, period. It seems too corporate and too micromanaged a place to work and the few good things about working there that I've heard like small teams don't outweigh all of the negatives.
That being said, Amazon isn't a government entity that is responsible for your housing and they have no right to tell you where to sleep at night.
Look at this section of the article in particular.
> One worker, who did not wish to be named, was reluctant to speak to The Courier but did describe the firm as a “poor employer” and criticised working practices at the Fife site. He added that he had opted to stay in a tent as it was easier and cheaper than commuting from his home in Perth, although his camping equipment had disappeared by Friday afternoon.
This is a guy took the best job that was available to him (even though it's far away from his house) who is doing this by choice for a period of time as he believes that this decision benefits him the most. I don't see anything wrong with this. I feel bad for him if his stuff got stolen because of the extra media attention there: the reporter was probably intending to do something nice for them and it might end up backfiring.
But really, what can Amazon do about this? For that one example, that's a guy that already has a home but chooses not use it out of convenience. If they offered seasonal workers some extra resources and facilities (say use of the parking lot to sleep in safer at night) to make their lives easier, they'd instantly be accused of exploiting workers and there would be images of tent cities on the news every night trying to make them look bad.
They could pay their workers a living wage and not treat them like dogs.
Here's the deal: How about you and me go into a big pit, with knives. And if I win, I get all your stuff.
Oh, I see, suddenly you'd rather get the State involved.
If Amazon took the advice and paid higher, the products would cost more and the web-potificators would congratulate them profusely for their magnanimity while putting them straight out of business with their buying habits.
Amazon is huge so it distorts the picture and seems to muddle the thinking a bit but even the largest of ships are beached by a receding tide.
I'm not saying that this is the desired order of things, just things work at the moment.
Amazon needs the work done, people are willing to do that work for that wage under such conditions - supply and demand. At least people have that option; impose restrictions, and many go from having that option to not having it (while the employer finds cheaper options).
so it would be fair if somebody who did a poor job in his school days (probably, I never heard that anybody work at Amazon with higher education and even than in germany amazon pays way more than other employers Zalando for example) and already have a home to get as much money to have two homes because one of the fact that his job is too far away from his regular house? Btw. I'm dropped out of "College" (in germany it's called different) but I tried hard to get a decent job and search a place to live (which is extremly hard here in Freiburg) but I got a cheap one that I can afford, besides the fact that it's not big, but it's fine. And I never complained since It was my own fault that I don't live like the rich boys now and "only" drive a "small" car, but some people are just ridicoulus.
I know there are a lot of problems in the world but actually Europe and USA are actually still not the one's with "really really" big problems, actually we discuss about problems that some people did not get enough money blabla, while in other countries they barly get any money, food and water, it's just ridicoulus that we live in the cockaigne and call out some big companies because they don't pay their workers more. What all people forgot, they have a job, without one they would get way way less.
Would the wage you propose all workers make allow this individual to live closer to his work site? Does the wage he makes now specifically disallow him from living close to his work site? Would his employer treating him better mean he doesn't sleep in a tent?
This article doesn't give us enough information to know.
This is sad but is not Amazons fault. The people of the western world need to demand Universal Basic Income. Maybe if the government provided such a safety net, Amazon would have to pay people more to get them to work.
In the US, at least, we seem to have elected a President with a mandate of dismantling what little regulatory and progressive protections already exist, adding more would be culturally and politically unthinkable.
We'll see the repeal of the minimum wage and the establishment of China-style "free trade zones" long before we see UBI.
There is your intellectual appeal.
There are many legitimate criticisms of Amazon work culture. It is aggressive. A lot is expected from you. The perks are nowhere near a Google's or many SV shops.
But corporate and micromanaged are the furthest thing from the truth. There are VERY few "top-down" directives. (we call them S-team goals for the SVP team). And each and every team is given a TON of autonomy, independence and ownership.
This of course has its own problems, and why sometimes some teams breed awful internal cultures that lead to NY times articles. It's why the AWS console is built with 23 different web technologies and each one is slightly inconsistent from the other. It's why most of the company's internal services are still not on native AWS (though we are essentially 100‰ on EC2).
But this ownership and independence is 90% Fabulous and genuinely freeing. You are given a tremendous amount of autonomy over your technical decisions. You get a chance to decide on the working culture and attitude towards software development that makes sense for the people on your team, depending on your strengths, preferences, projects, and customers.
Amazon is not for everybody. But it is far closer to a group of a few thousand startups than a corporate behemoth.
Also, the SDEs here put a stop to all that Proctor-driven interviewing, though sadly Amazon PR doesn't want to make a public declaration as such. Oh well.
You're saying that internal pressure has caused HR to drop ProctorU across the SDE/intern pipeline? What's the replacement, traditional phone screens + onsites?
It is rare to have a workplace like Apple, where the CEO was rumoured to involve himself in every aspect of the company.
Most workplaces' simply suffer from bad team leads, bad middle managers, bad shift managers, bad scrummasters, and the like.
In fact, it may be that extreme team autonomy allows micromanagement to flourish since the top leaders don't know what's going within the teams, and do not try to stop poor team dynamics from occurring unless it affects performance in a visible way.
I applied to be an Amazon Fulfillment Specialist (or whatever they're called) back when I was without a job in Silicon Valley a few months ago.
I applied online and got the job offer without any interview at all whatsoever. They asked me to attend a 'training session' in a conference room at a nearby hotel. When the doors opened, there were tables lined up on the perimeter of the conference room with a small projector in the middle that illuminated the Amazon logo on the screen. In one corner, people started lining up to get their photo taken and were also given a piece of paper with their name and other information like a candidate number. After you had your photo taken, you had to take a seat at one of the tables which had a swab stick for a drug test as well as some other paperwork for the drug test (like a consent form). The presenter was a real prick because when people asked him questions he would be very assertive and act as if people were wasting his time trying to get through the slideshow, which described their work ethics and talked more about the job. At some point we got to the drug test part which involved the presenter slowly going step by step through the process and checking to make sure we were all in sync. Once we were done, we put the drug test into some kind of bag and were free to go.
Overall, the process was horrendous and really showed that Amazon just wants anyone and everyone to become part of their fulfillment center. It doesn't surprise me that people would sleep outside of the fulfillment center given how smooth sailing the hiring process is, if it's anything like what I went through. It's meant to be open and 'friendly' to anyone without any recent drug usage.
Is it really that this job is too easy to get?
It sounds like you're saying this is a bad thing. Here we are with a hiring process that really lives up to the ideals we've been preaching for the past 50 years. Equality. Actual, real equality. Women, Blacks, Ethnic Undesirables, Special Needs... It doesn't matter who you are, you can get the job.
And it's "horrendous."
For what it's worth, I actually agree with you, but it does seem telling that this process that clearly lives up to the requirements all the underprivileged of our society demanded, we call it horrendous.
Are you suggesting that a meritocracy is better?
They will more or less hire anyone, but that's because they're essentially hiring meat robots to perform repetitive tasks for ten hours a day, six days a week at peak, until actual robots become economical. There is no reason for Amazon to care about the interview process when they hire and fire constantly, and any particular task is so compartmentalized that you can learn it in an hour. It's tedious and brutal, but in my experience, no one ever told me it would be otherwise.
Shouldn't the workers of Scotland, if they have the ear of their fellow countrymen, move to change the legal and social structure in which Amazon is only one of many members? What about the company that behaves cruely but isn't big enough to reach the news like Amazon does?
This is why I don't have faith in moral narratives.
Scotland is quite a bit more liberal than the rest of the UK; it does indeed see more of its future in the social democracies of northern Europe.
When it comes to regulation of the labour market, Scotland is decidedly less liberal than England.
My point was simply that this is an illiberal position. Liberal only means "economically statist" in America. Everywhere else in the world it still means classically liberal - i.e. in favour of free markets.
Again, I don't think I'm making this discussion any better by pointing this out, so I'm going to leave it there.
As an example, a Scot would never say "The government increased the minimum wage today, that was very liberal of them."
It's my hope that people in the USA will eventually go back to using the word "liberal" in the classic sense. But then, I keep hoping people in the USA will adopt the metric system, and I am always disappointed.
And whether Scotland becomes independent, my point remains -- you can ask why Amazon pays minimum wage, or you can ask why minimum wage is so low.
Depending on Amazon to be moral is as inadequate a solution as hoping for noblesse oblige. It's more interesting to discuss the <mechanics> of why Amazon class entities will pay higher wages.
Or people can morally shame <one> Amazon event, just like people who disagreed with Peter Thiel's influence in the sex tape case instinctually shame <one> Peter Thiel event. Whether you're asking for Amazon or Peter Thiel to "do the right thing", you're asking for noblesse oblige.
This kind of moral shaming does not scale, it depends on flash outrage, and companies that play the long game in media will beat this kind of ad-hoc moral shaming.
I also wanted to discuss not merely government structure, but also social structure, to imply that multiple parties need to fail for classes of workers to be exploited. The net of your society is the reason why Amazon is permitted to exploit an individual, and that includes churches, advocacy organizations, unions, etc.
I thought that discussion of both hard and soft structures is the better way to go, or we can hope that outrage continues to shows up at the right time and the right place.
Should we discuss whether you have the moral right to water, or should we discuss the formal plans to erect an infrastructure of water?
The latter doesn't require you to do any serious moral labor (deliberation and consensus work). You need only want. Do we both want something? Then we already have a basis for discussion. The question of whether you want workers to be paid more is far easier to answer than the question of whether moral consensus on workers wages can be achieved in your lifespan.
Also, how many moral frameworks for achieving moral consensus are you aware of? There are certainly frameworks for achieving empirical consensus on policy effectiveness.
The person has a house and could already commute from far out, they chose not to.
The other stuff still sounds shady though, when I got the ups job I knew what I was getting into.
You probably see this most often when traveling: Normal checked suitcases must be at most 50lbs. (Typically up to 70lbs is allowed if you pay an extra fee, but the bag then needs a "HEAVY" sticker, which alerts ground crew to handle it carefully to avoid injuries.)
I wonder if there is an opportunity for western companies to build factories on a smaller scale to Foxconn where employees live on campus. Wages could be low, but with basic services provided it could be a chance for low wage earners to save up some money. The costs might be too high for it to work on that scale though.
I was recently in South Korea and was surprised to see that there were a lot of large apartment buildings around Seoul which appeared to be employee dormitories from previous decades (1980s I believe). Some even still said Samsung and LG on the side.
However, I don't think this concept would work in Western society. The cultures between Asia and the West are very different. It's common for several generations to live in the same house in China/Japan/Korea, but this isn't the case in the West.
I agree it would make sense to build dormitories, from a transportation and economic perspective it makes perfect sense. Economies of scale.
But people in the West don't want to move to live near the factory/warehouse. They want to have a social life, and dorm life really doesn't facilitate having a social life.
Ancedotal, but my intuition is that dorm life is much easier, though that may be inherent to college. It's extremely frustrating to know that few will give you any of their time to form friendships, no matter the effort you try.
Also, I thought warehouses were the trendy places to live now.
I'm sure dorms are great if all you want to do is party all the time. However given that people working at Foxconn/Amazon are probably working 8-16 hours every day, I'm doubtful that they'd really be in a partying mood after working that long.
Hence, when everyone is finished working their shift and just wants to sleep, and you don't, it's a bit hard to be social without pissing off people around you.
> Also, I thought warehouses were the trendy places to live now.
You're talking about old warehouses which have been converted into trendy apartments. This is gentrification. No one actually wants to live in a functional warehouse.
I guess at-will employment is very at-will.
How quickly we forget history.
I mean with some strong regulation things might be different, but with the political landscape as it is I don't think it would work out.
Facilities included schools, sports accomodation etc. PSV, a dutch premier league football team is a project of Phillips the former electronics giant. PSV -> Phillips Sport Vereniging.
And Phillips built neighbourhoods, schools and public swimming pools too.
Ah well ... sigh ( I was not raised in a Phillips neighbourhood btw ).
Company scrip served to make it so you could never save up money to leave, which was the biggest problem.
In the transaction though its the 'job' that is the good thing and employers (in spite of their whining about worker shortages) are able to get people to work at those insufficient wages, and so they continue to pay them.
Unionization broke that cycle once, I'm curious to see if a technology worker union emerges from this growing level of pain.
In a sense, you can be pushed to accept a job at an infeasibly low wage because the alternative is having no income at all.
But more often it goes wrong, like Fordlandia.
And nets!
As an aside, I worked with an ex-Foxconn engineer who lived in the dorms to save money. They wired up his office phone to also ring in his room. When foolish US engineers would call him, not aware of the time difference, it would wake him up in the middle of the night. He took his phone off the hook to get some sleep but got in trouble for it.
Inside the buildings were apartments that housed up to three people, everyone had their own private bedroom and bathroom. The quality of the buildings was fairly good, not luxury but not cheap.
You could also opt to receive a stipend if you wanted to find your own accommodation, but it was a bit low to get something of the same quality.
Every few months we see articles about programmers working at $SILICON_VALLEY_BIG_CORP that lives in a van outside the office or sleeps under his desk at night. The worker is usually a combination of frugal and nutty. What's the difference between that and this?
> He added that he had opted to stay in a tent as it was easier and cheaper than commuting from his home in Perth, although his camping equipment had disappeared by Friday afternoon.
Of course, the big difference with the programmer under the desk is the programmer is unlikely to be earning minimum wage. Anyone 25 and over, working 60 hours a week at minimum wage, is earning £432/week. If we assume they're working those hours or on vacation all year, their take home pay is £355/week. If we assume fuel costs of ~£4.50 each way, then if they're working five days a week that's ~13% of their income, or if six days ~15%.
If the circumstances are so dire that the worker has no other choices for employment, the alternative is no employment at all. That's the baseline comparison point for whatever job Amazon is providing and the worker always has that option as well.
Amazon is not a charity, it's a for-profit company, and arguably by building the warehouse and providing jobs it's doing more long term good than a charity would by handing out sandwiches.
Comments like yours bring to mind the phrase "No good deed goes unpunished". Would they be better off with no jobs at all?
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19...
(This is getting close to politics, a really tiresome subject which happily is banned right now on HN.)
Nope that ban is gone[1].
You can be "empathetic" by pushing for higher minimum wages, but your empathy will more likely hurt the very people you want to help - the unskilled workers.
As is often the case with "feel good" legislation it typical does more harm than good - in the long run.
But that's my point - I'm specifically not advocating any particular policy solution. I'm just advocating that we, who were lucky enough to be born in a highly developed country and are lucky enough to be highly compensated for our work, can at least acknowledge that someone else's position sucks and is unfair, instead of basically thinking "he's lucky he even has a job, he should be grateful."
I'd also argue that it's one thing to say what is possible in the current system, but I think it should be possible to acknowledge that something about the system feels wrong. I mean, some of these exact same arguments are made by the aristocrats in Downton Abbey ("These servants sure are lucky that we exist to give them jobs.")
> I'd also argue that it's one thing to say what is possible in the current system, but I think it should be possible to acknowledge that something about the system feels wrong. I mean, some of these exact same arguments are made by the aristocrats in Downton Abbey ("These servants sure are lucky that we exist to give them jobs.")
Not using every critique on a topic as a chance to express empathy does not mean one does not have any. IMNSHO, I think I have a ton of empathy. But I have a hell of a lot more rationality and I'd much rather express the latter.
If you're cold, empathy might get you a hug but rationality will get you a coat.
Should companies only ever offer work to rich people? That sounds a lot like class-based genocide.
Maybe you should try harder to see if maybe there's an underlying assumption you're making that's incorrect? Have you heard of the Double Crux? Read up on it on Less Wrong.
Why do they call their workers that? I also can't imagine how much I'd hate working for minimum wage in a warehouse for an alleged 60 hours a week with a DJ playing. It doesn't sound all that fun.
People who can code and run huge network operations are relatively rare, so they're paid a lot; it's competition for scarce employees. It has nothing to do with responsibility. If Google could pay minimum wage it would.
Not defending Amazon, just pointing out that they're paying the least they have to, just like Google is paying the least they have to.
Wages are about supply and demand. There is enough supply of the caliber of workers that amazon needs willing to work at minimum wage to fill their demand for workers.
If we think that amazon is making too much profit, and should distribute it more, then we should tax them more; that way, the benefit can spread to more people and not just the lucky ones who happen to work at amazon.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Of course, if you have any evidence that Amazon is colluding with other employers of low-wage workers to keep their wages down, that would be germane and very interesting indeed.
They can't. The level of the minimum wage is reserved to Westminster.
Whatever the wages are, the prices of everything (starting with accommodation and food) will adjust to burn most of it.
That is very effective in major cities and that's why they are so hard on everyone.
http://www.geekwire.com/2015/this-google-employee-lives-in-a...
I'd take a guess and say that the people doing this are seasonal workers who live further away. It's not worth relocating for a few months, and commuting for 2 hours per day isn't nice (from Edinburgh during rush hour it could easily take over an hour to get to Amazon's warehouse), so this is their choice.
[0] http://www.zoopla.co.uk/to-rent/property/dunfermline/?price_...
Not necessarily. Depends on the location and the experience.
There are places where the pay would be in this range and the rent would be half of that.
1/10th costs of living of the valley is nothing extraordinary.
Short of that, I recommend that we stop pointing the finger at these large multinational corporations. They are incentivized at every level to skirt the law as close as possible to maximize profits. Historically the only thing that ever changed that was pressure from the demand side (unions, consumer protection programs, lawsuits, legislation, etc etc).
Off the top of my head, a fairly straightforward way to effect change might be to get every worker signed up in a time-wage union. Pick a target wage for every employee and have them go home at the end of the day a few hours early by however much their wage is short. Women earning 75% of men would leave at 3:00 instead of 5:00. For every firing, send one or more employees who have a lot of savings or are thinking of changing jobs home with them as leverage.
The core of the issue is that currently labor is undervalued against capital which is self-evidently incorrect since time is priceless but we can always print more money. I would even argue that as we approach full automation, labor has been devalued to such a degree that it no longer makes sense to measure it against the inherent worth of a person's life. The inevitable conclusion is that at some point labor will not have enough value to support a minimum quality of life and we’ll move to a non-labor form of compensation. We already do it in various forms for the bottom half of earners and it’s only a matter of time before that fraction becomes the majority.
Amazon annual revenue: $107 bil
R&D annual expense (where engineering compensation is typically stuffed): $12.5 bil
General expense (everybody else's compensation): $20 bil
There are people working for Google living in their cars/campers/motorhomes. There are posts about how people intentionally choose to live in tents and enjoy it.
http://mashable.com/2013/06/11/homeless-entrepreneur-thomas-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1a8sjz/hi_i_am_a_guy_...
There's no suggestion that they are paying below the minimum wage, so I think singling out Amazon is quite disingenuous, regardless of how in vogue it is to bash the quality of their work environment.
If there is a story here, it is that there aren't enough homeless shelters in Fife right now, or that the minimum wage is too low; this has nothing to do with Amazon.
(sorry)
Edit: to clarify, I am not advocating that Amazon is a stellar employer. My opinion of how they treat their workers and handle the interviewing process is actually very poor. I however do not see the decisions this particular worker is making is Amazon's fault.
Amazon should be made accountable.
If a full-time employee needs government subsidies then the company is not paying enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
Is the Amazon PR unit active here? ;)
1. They treat their engineers terribly.
2. They treat their fulfillment center employees terribly.
Either Bezos is tone deaf, or just doesn't care. Either way, voting with my wallet.
It's not perfect, but if principles were easy everyone would do it.
Supposedly, as part of the ranking algorithm at HN, there's a "flame war" detection feature that drops controversial items off of the front page quickly unless they're explicitly allowed to exist there.
Having this feature in place is great for the admins as it gives them plausible deniability in terms of bias when items get ranked lower quickly, but not so good for users if it's inconsistently applied and the topics they see are for all intents and purposes controlled and guided towards certain viewpoints.
You can see my previous post in this thread: I'm not even a fan of this article! I'm even saying this as somebody who (I think fairly reasonably) defended and criticized Amazon in my response. I don't fear anything from this article however and things can be gained by talking about this issue.
Another way of putting this is that plausible deniability isn't valuable to us. We're clear on what this site is for, and we're open about how moderation practices are intended to support that. Though we can't be perfect, we do actively strive to avoid bias that would take us away from the goals of the site and of the community.