Hacker News Reader

Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

It's such a complex situation. Amazon has contracts with small companies who provide trucks and humans. Amazon provides the work, the groups of packages, the routes, the app the drivers need to use to deliver.

The companies compete with each other for more 'routes' each day. They offer to take on more work, to do more. And then they hire anyone they can to fulfill those routes. The drivers themselves are on contracts with the small companies that can end at any time. Not making your rate? Up to the small company to decide if you have a contract tomorrow.

The contracts themselves presume the drivers will deliver a route in a specific number of hours for a fixed rate of pay. But newbies work at a much slower rate. And during the holiday season, they need a lot of extra labor- a lot of newbies.

Who is to blame? Amazon? The companies? The drivers? Capitalism gone mad? Take your pick.

View on HN

>Who is to blame? Amazon? The companies? The drivers? Capitalism gone mad?

All of the above? But mostly Amazon. We need to stop letting companies get away with poor practices by blaming it on a contractor. Companies should be accountable for the behaviour of their contractors.

If Amazon wants to structure their delivery business around contractors, they have a responsibility to require the contractors provide good working conditions.

While I have some sympathy for that position....

"Hello, can you have someone deliver this parcel for me. I'll pay you $5"

You're saying that if Amazon is asking that, they are responsible for the life of the person delivering it.

If I am asking Amazon that, therefore, does that make me responsible?

> You're saying that if Amazon is asking that, they are responsible for the life of the person delivering it.

> If I am asking Amazon that, therefore, does that make me responsible?

yes. definitely. not entirely, but for sure to some small degree.

One suggestion is to include the actual price of delivery instead of "free delivery" (or discounted) into the displayed price.

Swift delivery is changing our expectations. If I knew it would take a week to come I would plan ahead, instead I can buy on impulse. Of course the real costs are being externalised, on the poor drivers but also on congested roads and pollution.

One of the consequences: https://www.londonair.org.uk/london/asp/annualmaps.asp

The cutoff in my opinion is that if you know or reasonably should know about the behavior of the contractor then you are responsible. If Amazon is not aware of this behavior, then it is clearly willful ignorance.

yes, of course. you're responsible on a smaller scale than amazon is, but ultimately you are responsible for the behaviour of the companies you patronize. and the behaviour of their contractors.

and that's not limited to whether you know about their poor behaviour or not. If you see something that's too good to be true, like "free same-day delivery", it's up to you to question whether that's really something you want to support.

I agree, this is part of the "gig" economy gone bad. I think the solution is quite simple though. All contracts must also include a minimum wage (not saying this is the US minimum wage currently) per hour. This sets a floor and forces more of the cost back up the chain. It fixes the problem of someone forcing minimally bid contracts to people who are desperate for any kind of work. We have great algorithms and the computing to calculate "fair" amounts of time for delivery including traffic data and time of day that can also be extremely optimized for efficiency. Then the contract is for X hours at Y wage plus (maybe?) a bonus per delivery.

We complain about sweatshops making sneakers in abusive conditions but say cynical things like "... people don't have to take these jobs ..." when it comes to having parcels delivered right to our door so we don't even have to leave the house. I think it only fair we take a stand that these people deserve a decent living for delivering our (frequently frivolous) purchases.

Minimum wage laws are already supposed to work like that.

The problem is that companies, Amazon and their contractors in particular, have been able to mischaracterize employees as "contractors" in order to get around minimum wage laws.

It's the lax enforcement of 1099 mischaracterization that has allowed the "gig economy" shit-sandwich jobs to proliferate. A deliver driver who has to maintain a delivery schedule or meet delivery deadlines given by Amazon (and in likelihood follows a programmed route given to them by an Amazon routing system) is in no real sense an INDEPENDENT contractor in the way that definition was originally meant.

Contractors are exempt from minimum wage laws because otherwise there would be a catch-22 situation if, say, a plumber you hired mis-estimated the amount of work involved in a job. (If he gave you an estimate that a job would be $100, and it turned out to take 10 hours plus $50 in materials, he could very well end up making below minimum wage. But he can't go back and squeeze you for more money; he's the one who gave you the estimate! But it hardly makes sense to penalize him again for not paying himself enough.) But these exceptions envisioned bona fide independent contractors, mostly skilled tradespeople, and not today's largely-unskilled and entry-level "contract" jobs.

This happened in the Netherlands with PostNL (former TNT) and the lawmakers actually are working to prohibit this false contracting (since there is a direct relation between employer and employee thus no contracting but regular employment). Though they are overdoing it and taking some self employed people down with it in the process. It's called 'wet DBA' and needs some refinement in the coming years but might work in the end.

You could call it progress though. And it is an example in which both regulation is needed and can be achieved somewhat.

Right, that is what I was trying to say (and maybe did poorly). A plumber bids his own contract. These deliveries are bid and structured by someone else. It should be more like how most mechanics work (especially at a dealership). There is a book that says that job X should normally take Y hours to complete. The mechanics know their rate of payment per hour. The way you really make money is by being better than Y hours. Yes, you can still screw up and take 2Y but there is a floor that is "fair" and you don't have to be worried about people bidding Y / 2 and a race to the bottom.

Incorrect, they are not given a route by Amazon. I have had friends doing this through On-Trac, and they were either calculating routes themselves (as a driver) or via a system at the On-Trac center.

> Who is to blame? Amazon? The companies? The drivers? Capitalism gone mad? Take your pick.

And a fashion against labor laws. One of the great things about labor, safety etc laws is that they apply to everyone. Company X may not want to implement safety rule X because it will increase costs and make the competition cheaper. Perhaps all the companies X, Y, and Z want to do it but all are afraid. If the law mandates it none are disadvantaged relative to their competition.

This is an important kind of externality, really no different from the paint factory dumping effluvia into the river, but less frequently discussed.

Amazon. They switched from using respectable national couriers that employ people full time in well paid jobs, to creating a platform that rewards bottom feeders. Adsense/Adwords did it with the ad industry. Uber did it with taxis etc. The constant march of technology for efficiency without considering the ethics.

'They switched from using respectable national couriers that employ people full time in well paid jobs, to creating a platform that rewards bottom feeders.'

Speaking about the UK, so apologies if the situation was different elsewhere.

But...

From how I remember it, these 'respectable national couriers' were just not doing the job they were paid to do.

Agreed, people like DHL, FedEx and ParcelForce in the UK were not delivering packages when they said they would.

There was a 3 month phase when I didn't recieve a single next day delivery on the next day.

It is a very rare occurance now when I don't get an amazon package delivered on time through amazon logistics.

The whole parcel delivery market (in the UK at least) has really ended up going this way over the last 5-10 years.

As soon as one company switches to self employed 'gig economy' compensation for their fleet, they get a big advantage in costs which means they can push prices lower.

The only way the competitors can match it IMO is by also switching to the same model, otherwise they lose contracts to the companies that do.

I think it's especially difficult in parcel delivery as the 'customer' is the store you order from, not yourself. So you don't really ever buy parcel delivery services yourself, it's always subcontracted.

Not really sure the best way to solve this apart from govt regulation, but feel it would cause all kinds of crazy side effects if not well thought out.

These carriers were too slow and didn’t operate on weekends. I blame the legacy carriers. A company like UPS or FedEx should be able to deliver around the clock while still treating its employees fairly. But they have not kept up.

'Who is to blame? Amazon? The companies? The drivers? Capitalism gone mad? Take your pick.'

You can add 'customers' to this list since this is where it all begins.

It isn't so long ago that all people complained about was the time it took for stuff to be delivered and all those 'we called but there was no one in' cards.

So capitalism responded and now folks have something else to complain about.

Customers can only choose not demand, so this is simply a red herring to shift and diffuse blame and responsibility to consumers from the primary abuser who is actually doing this, and create an environment of helplessness.

Tomorrow if customers demand 10% of the existing prices are companies going to line up with slave labour conditions to deliver and then shift blame? Responsibility does not work like this.

'..are companies going to line up with slave labour conditions to deliver and then shift blame?'

No because we don't drag people off the street and force them to be delivery drivers. There is a level at which people feel incentivised to do this kind of work and there is a level at which they look for something else.

Of all involved parties, drivers and customers are the ones with least power to influence this decisions. By far.

That's why unions and governments pushed hard to regulate employment to protect workers during the last 150 years.

Yes and then (in the UK) the labour movement split into working class people and middle class people with a socialist ideology.

As it turned out, the two are not mutually compatible.

I don't see why this was downvoted. If Amazon would treat their drivers better, prices and/or delivery times would go up. And that would make a lot of customers go to competitors who might treat their drivers worse but offer a better deal.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, this was perfectly acceptable:

"Please allow 28 days for delivery"

Amazon is to blame. They are probably offering rates that can only be met with sweatshop conditions. I see that at my company. Contractors are used to wash the the company free from any responsibility but they know exactly what's going on.

Whoever determines the service levels required by the contract between Amazon and the delivery company/ies. So, bizdev, vendor sales, etc. This wouldn't be the first time a company sold a feature it couldn't provide, or that requires superhuman committment by the people whose feet are on the ground (or keyboard, as the case may be).

Primarily Amazon, for not caring about the contractors life, as long packages get delivered and its cheap.

A company has a moral responsability to ensure its suppliers do meet certain standards.

It's wishful thinking to believe that any company has a moral responsibility. Companies only have legal/fiscal responsibilities. If you expect companies to act morally in the long-term you don't understand capitalism.

I sure do understand it, hence why don't agree with it and am a big supporter of unions.

Pretty much this. Capital abhors restrictions - whether moral or legal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com