I Delivered Packages for Amazon and It Was a Nightmare
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
But they're missing the larger critical points which are very newsworthy:
- The author almost injured themselves with an overly heavy box because Amazon didn't provide them with a dolly, warn them they needed one, and if they did injure themselves the medical bills are their own
- Amazon is asking them to deliver packages where parking without getting a ticket is a logistical impossibility and risk making negative $ for the day due to tickets
- These kinds of safety and minimum wage regulations which have been hard-won over the past decades are being completely avoided by Amazon by (possibly wrongly/illegally) classifying them as independent contractors, which seems to be a scandal that laws/regulations ought to fix, but compulsory arbitration may be preventing class-action lawsuits which would otherwise correct the situation
Why is it someone else's fault if you lift something too heavy for you? What is "too heavy" is a fairly personal thing. It's trivial to tell if something is too heavy for you. Do I need to explain how?
As for not injuring yourself from lifting, that's a skill everyone should learn by themselves, like how to not fall down the stairs. It's not someone else's fault.
If a dolly will help, you can pick one up for 40 bucks or so (ironically, from Amazon!). I keep one around, because I find it useful. Many occupations require you to furnish your own tools (and if you're an auto mechanic, that can run into thousands). I've bought and used personal equipment at every job I've ever had.
I'm genuinely not sure if you're completely unaware of the real world financial problems low paid folks have, or are just trolling now.
I was being paid GBP 76.00 per week which has to cover heat & light, food, telephone, internet, gas for the car, car insurance, car tax, etc....it goes on. There is nothing left. I was also being paid "housing benefit" which doesn't pay anywhere near the actual cost of rent.
You should try this some time before making such poorly informed and sweeping statements.
If you can reasonably do that without damaging your back, and you choose to make an ill advised lift, maybe that's on you.
Where it's debatable is how well Amazon set you up for solving the 30kg problem in a safe way. It's quite possible they failed in providing reasonable instruction and equipment to this guy.
The weight given in the article was "over 30 pounds", which is 14kg. That should not trouble a healthy adult and could easily be expected when you sign up for a job delivering package. For comparison, airlines use the "heavy baggage" tag above 23kg, and depending on the airline accept bags up to 50kg or so.
Without looking it up, what's the recommended technique to lift a 30 kg box from the back of a van?
Anecdotally, I flew Norwegian recently and I was the only one that handled the luggage. I had to figure out how to attach the label, which was mildly intimidating.
To put it another way: I also order using Flex and I've never considered working a gig. Am I somehow supposed to feel bad because of this simply due to the author's hardships or feel bad about myself because I don't need to work a gig job?
Please help me understand the zeitgeist here because the downvotes surely aren't.
Do you just want to deny these are issues? If so why?
If you think you'll never have to consider doing this type of work, I don't think you should feel bad about using Flex, but I hope you will acknowledge that you are enjoying a level of prosperity that doesn't seem to be available to everyone.
Also, awareness of how business is able to turn things that used to be costs into externalities may be an early step in the process of making them take responsibility for costs that seem (to me) to be rightfully their own responsibility.
While some markets need to be torn open it's always done with a total disregard for the average Joe's who are caught in the crossfire and are paying the price for it.
I get where you're coming from about the exasperatingly impossible web of moral obligations, but you can't give up.
That's just appeal to empathy - any human has it, until he's a sociopath, but like any other basic instinct, it's human nature to reign over it and not let it run your life.
> Because he has a family. Because that's my friend and uncle and neighbor.
Most likely he's not - there are very few people who I (or you) would actually call family and care about in the way you care about family. This Joe is most likely just an anonymous person that you don't know or care about.
> I get where you're coming from about the exasperatingly impossible web of moral obligations, but you can't give up.
I can't give up something that I didn't put on myself first.
Because the next wave of innovation might send them and their market out to sea.
We've just seen the first phase of the Industrial Revolution with the automating of physical labor, and the automation of mental labor is still in its infancy, but the obsolescence of the "knowledge worker" is coming.
I mean should my window cleaning really be 5 bucks cheaper if that means the guy/gal doing it is not insured if he/she falls of the ladder and can never work again? If you let people choose to take those kinds of risk there will always be some people doing it. Undercutting the people who don't want to take these risk but get forced because they need to be competitive.
That's why we had those kind of labour laws in the first place. Because we thought while being allowed to compete everyone should have certain basic rights which should never be compromised.
This is a very high level of abstraction. Making the world a better place is sometimes interesting and to me, and sometimes it's something that I (or you) would be completely indifferent to. Unless you're from a Coke commercial or a hippy commune, "making the world a better place" is not really what you're after.
Now, how are all these things that you mentioned actually relevant to your or me?
Well that depends on the kind of person you are. To stay with my earlier example; I personally like the person who cleans my windows to not have to go live under a bridge if that person falls off the ladder and never being able to work again. All because my window cleaning had to be a bit cheaper.
So if its relevant for you is a matter of personal taste.
Compared to the UK:
Pensions suck
Tax treatment of options suck
You Don't have "any" statutory leave and much less AL period.
Sick pay is non existent a good professional employer will offer > 6 months on full payAre there drawbacks? Of course and these are things I rarely see mentioned because the "techies have it so well" is just too good of a narrative. Some examples: no pensions (haha, but the article mentioned it, so why not?), no unions, no overtime, some get stuck with 24/7 on-call rotations, constant need to self-improve or get laid by the wayside, average job security. I can go on.
Personally I would call government employees privileged. High job security and if you just "do your time", you get set with a sweet pension!
https://www.theatlantic.com/author/alana-semuels/
Of these eleven articles, ten of them run against Amazon, its business model, or its affects on society either directly in the headline or in the tagline listed on her author page...the only one I could find that didn't was "Free Shipping Isn't Hurting Amazon" piece.
So, as a person who had written a bunch of articles in the last 7 months criticizing Amazon, did that color her expectations of her Amazon Flex experience? It seems pretty clear she took the job so that she could write the piece, even basically admitting at one point that she was carrying around her reporter's notebook while on at least one of her Flex runs.
I doubt she made any false statements, but along with the objective statements, she included quite a number of subjective ones which clearly supported a thesis of "Amazon ruthlessly exploits the gig economy". And a significant portion of the article was dedicated to her own "tech support" issues...none of which seemed to be supported by quoted observations from the people she interviewed.
I don't doubt that there are valid problems and criticisms of Amazon Flex. I just don't know how much I can trust this article to objectively communicate them.
I trust her article because she focused on the facts:
* delivery address information wrong
* heavy boxes
* No ability to contact recipient for delivery
* unreliable app for scanning packages
* etc.
"Balance" is bs if balance comes at the cost of accuracy.
The current "gig economy" trend removes these benefits from employment, and with a government currently opposed to public benefits, the US could be headed towards a problem within a single generation.
This race to the bottom (disruption) seems counter productive for anything but short term investment.
>This race to the bottom (disruption) seems counter productive for anything but short term investment.
And you know who most benefits from this type of investment (basically the ones with the big money to invest with little to no real risk to their way of life). So I don't see it ending any time soon...
Edit: And in turn purposefully growing an existing problem.
401(k)'s history is almost wacky. It was an obscure provision in 1978 tax law and a benefits consultant figured out a way to turn it into something that companies could easily offer to employees as a tax-advantaged benefit.
Of course, once a benefit becomes the norm, it's almost impossible for individual firms to not offer it.
It was illegal for them to offer more money - Roosevelt instituted wage fixing. Offering benefits was a way around the law.
> Of course, once a benefit becomes the norm, it's almost impossible for individual firms to not offer it.
The real reason is that health insurance paid from pre-tax money by the employer makes it cheaper than being post-tax money by the employee. It's the tax system that binds workers to jobs via health care benefits.
Another reason people want wage increases in the form of employer-paid benefits is then they get to lie about the terrible pay they get, because they never ever account for the value of the benefits.
For example, whenever the teachers complain about their salaries, never mentioned are the generous benefits package they get.
Still, teachers are not paid enough.
Now, sure, supposedly salaries would go up if the company no longer offered health insurance but there are lots of moving parts and people and any such transition would be difficult.
You do additionally have a personal option, IRAs, that you can establish at the broker of your choice that give you a lot more flexibility. You can probably setup payroll auto-deduction in many cases.
I am surprised that post enron that US pensions where not reformed.
Defined benefit pensions are different and are much less common than they used to be. So mostly they have been reformed by ceasing to exist in the US. There are various protections for pensions but they're still an issue--especially in municipalities with financial issues.
ADDED: And there's actually a lot of sensitivity these days to 401(k) options that are perceived as risky. Such as a company's own stock.
Someone always needs to bear the risk that the planned payout will be less than forecast. Whether it's the employee or the company. And, at some point, if the money's not there it won't be paid out.
Definitely not easier in the sense that a sizeable plurality of the country, currently in control of both houses of Congress, the Presidency, the Supreme Court, and the majority of state legislative and executive branches, think this is a terrible idea that they equate with creeping Communism.
The German style system is as probably the system you could have got if people weren't so obsessed with Obamas skin color.
But you know what's more of a nightmare? Driving around to every retail outlet in a 30 mile radius, trying to convince them that you can be the most submissive and obedient out of the 200 applicants. It's hard to begrudge the gig economy for providing an alternative to that.
Right, and this can easily be underappreciated by those of us working in environments where it's hardly ever a problem if you need to take a few hours to deal with personal issues.
What was again the name of that psychological test they all use to measure the degree of slavish conformance?
The work environment matters a lot. The other people you work with matter. How you are managed matters. I think if gig software designers thought a lot about this, they would see a lot of improvement in worker retention and satisfaction.
Note that while this would make job a lot more enjoyable for workers, I still think everyone should enjoy the same basic benefits, no matter what kind of employment relationship they are in. But that could also be solved in other ways (basic income for example).
When labor is scarce, there are two consequences of that scarcity that make our current societal structure work: first, anyone capable of working possesses an inalienable resource (their own labor) that they can exchange for other goods and services in order to survive, and second, basing your economy on this kind of exchange (as opposed to, for example, slave labor) encourages people to work and be productive.
But when labor is no longer scarce, all of this changes in radical ways. Humans in general no longer have access to an inalienable source of wealth, and wealth becomes rooted exclusively in ownership rather than production. We essentially revert back to a slave-like economy, with machines playing the role of chattel slaves. But for non-owners, for people without capital, there is no longer any recourse. Sooner or later, something is going to have to give.
There are only a very few things that humans can still do with more economic effectiveness than machines: drive vehicles, pick fruit, clean houses, and fold shirts. Really, that's about it. And technology is busily chipping away at the first one. Sooner or later, we are going to have to make a fundamental change in how our society is structured, or things will get very unpleasant for a lot of folks.
The roads are clogged every day with people driving to work. Very few of them are driving to a job folding shirts and cleaning houses.
I think you'd be surprised how many of those people are doing just that. And you left out the third category of work: driving itself.
But I did leave out one important category: work requiring interpersonal interactions, like sales, particularly retail sales. But that is starting to go away too.
Of course now we're finding ourselves completely surprised at the same point - only that a lot of erosion has already been done to undercut unions.
Why did half the world go through communist revolutions, is that because workers were too wealthy?
Before the industrial revolution, yes.
> Was work ever an inalienable form of wealth?
In a society that does not allow slavery, yes.
Yes after 1/3 to 1/2 of Europe died from the bubonic plague. Workers were scarce so they were able to demand better pay and working conditions. Which is why those who run our economy would prefer to keep labor plentiful.
That doesn't follow, unless you're going to claim that price discovery also doesn't function for food, housing, clothing, and cell phones.
Food, I can choose not to participate in any given variety of food markets, I can buy groceries, or I can go to restaurants, or I can buy from family farms and hunters. Or I can make it myself.
Clothing is similar to food. And cell phones are trivially easy to refuse to participate.
We still have an inalienable right - to work for ourselves directly, for our family and community. We can be self reliant with the help of human work + judicious use of advanced tech. We revert back to the self reliant farm or village, not to a new age of capital. Self reliant tech such as solar panels, water filtration, computing, AI, 3d-printers, robots and drones would help us achieve that, as long as they are open sourced and a maker culture exists around them. Do you think billions of able, jobless people would prefer to sit around do nothing and collect UBI rather than working to make more out of what they have? What would they do with their free time when they have little resources than to work for themselves and become more self reliant?
Really? How? What exactly is someone with no capital assets supposed to do in today's world?
There will always be jobs that machines can't do. The question is will they be enough for all of humanity?
"their needs would be ignored by the corporations because there is no profit." But then how would you pay the teacher? Apparently there was some value in skills and you had money to pay the teacher. Unless you're implying that we'd go back to manually farming the villages, like the amish.
if by clean house you also mean hvac, plumber, and handyman I'm still waiting for robots to do that because they charge an arm and a leg in large cities
[EDIT] On second thought, I've decided that I will not concede construction. My list was supposed to be a post-AI list (though I concede I did not make this sufficiently clear). I think in 20-30 years it's very likely that we'll have robots that can do most construction and repair jobs, if for no other reason that by then most products will be designed to be either robotically repaired or disposable.
Out of curiosity, have you ever read Vonnegut's Player Piano? It touches on many of these topics, but in particular what you describe is also a key theme. There are few remaining jobs that people can do that machines can't (in the book, tend bar and give a haircut). Human labor is in such a high surplus that the state essentially hires all working age (18-45) males who don't demonstrate the potential to become an engineer or a manager (hews closer to understanding policy, statistics, and systems than actual people management). Then they receive a pension (as in the military today) for the rest of their lives. Societal change becomes necessary, but of course it's Vonnegut so even that doesn't go the way the people intend.
This is the exact opposite of historical fact.
Before the industrial revolution, labor was next to worthless. Laborers were paid next to nothing by current standards, and lived in poverty below current day third world levels.
The industrial revolution made labor more scarce. Many industrial jobs were created and wages rose as competition for workers intensified. This has been going on uninterrupted for 250+ years now.
This could change in the future, but note that the impending replacement of human labor by machines have also been predicted for 250+ years. I'll believe it when i see it.
That's true. But...
> labor was next to worthless.
That does not follow. Before the industrial revolution, nearly everyone, even royalty, lived in what would today be considered poverty. Labor as a percentage of total economic output was much higher before the IR than after. It's just that overall productivity vastly increased.
> Many industrial jobs were created and wages rose as competition for workers intensified.
That's true, but...
> The industrial revolution made labor more scarce.
No, that's not true. Yes, many jobs were created, but many previously existing jobs were destroyed. Unemployment as it exists today was unknown before the IR.
Please note that I am not saying that these changes are bad. Before the IR, an unemployed person would have been a dead person because there wasn't enough economic margin to support an unproductive population. Unemployment was a luxury that pre-IR society simply could not afford. Society as a whole is vastly better off because of technology. All I'm saying is that the rules we have for how wealth is distributed is based on assumptions that are becoming less and less true as time goes by, and that we need to address this or it will cause more and more serious problems.
What? That's a weirdly specific and tiny list. How about:
- Nearly any sort of creative work: programming, graphic design, product design, landscaping, architecture, writing marketing copy, technical writing, music.
- Diagnosing any complex system. Machines are terrible at diagnosing themselves. Ever pulled an OBD-II code from a car and then wondered which of a hundred actual problems might be the cause of it? How about finding out which exact part is causing your dishwasher to back up and flood?
- Actually repairing any problems that have been diagnosed. Repairing a car is vastly more complicated than building one from scratch using a neatly laid out set of parts in a predetermined series of steps. Hell, making a robot that can reliably change lightbulbs in homes would be a milestone achievement.
- Construction, or any job that requires using tools to performs a task that isn't defined with absolute precision and sequencing. Similar to repair work.
- Human interaction. Medical care, guided tours, live entertainment (not just the performers, but they people they interact with backstage), police work, HR, public relations, management, child care.
- Any mission-oriented or long-term goal-oriented work, i.e., military strategy, city planning, legislation, social policy, organizational direction.
Indeed. I didn't make it sufficiently clear, but I intended this sentence to be the operative one:
"AI and automation will soon drive the last nail in the labor-scarcity coffin"
So that list was supposed to be a post-AI list, not a contemporary one.
That said, Amazon should be doing a better job to educate people on how to be successful in these jobs and should adapt the jobs depending on city. It makes no sense to have people driving around in their own cars in SF delivering packages. They could go a long way by hiring bike couriers and doing a better job at distribution. It sure doesn’t sound like last mile delivery when they are forcing people to drive down to south SF to get the stuff.
If I was an engineer at Amazon working on this flex program I’d be embarrassed. If you filter out the entitled and emotional undertone of the author there are many matter of fact things that are just poorly designed and executed on the designers of this system. Sitting at home and refreshing an app? Really? That hour you keep people occupied with a pointless task because of your poor design is an hour you’ve burned of their time that could have been spent doing something productive for either themselves or Amazon.
Not doing address validation, poor distribution logistics, poor use of labor. I guess there is no external pressure to fix anything until they have burned through the labor pool in SF and no one wants to work with the dysfunction? Wonder when that will be...
Density populated areas, airports, sporting events, etc all have had to make changes to deal with Uber and Lyft traffic so the city handing out parking tickets doesn't solve much. Seems like heavily populated city addresses & building owners need to solve the last 10 yards because it's not going to slow down.
I wonder why that is. Do they think it's so obvious that it's not worth mentioning, or they really don't care?
The losses on the gig worker (benefits, holiday entitlement, etc.) need to be borne by someone - and it doesn't make sense, in my view, to make either the gig work or the government (the wider public) pay for it.
I would suggest that all companies using gig workers (anyone doing work for a corporation without a proper employment contract) need to pay in to a mandatory fund to cover the lost benefits. To me its obvious that the cost should be borne by whoever is extracting the greatest benefit.
Wow. Do other gig economy jobs do this? Uber and Lyft? I may just start carrying cash to leave tips now.
This happened just off Sand Hill Rd., as it happens.
[0] https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/kzyw4y/amazon-is-imitati...
I stopped there.
This is cheap click-bait journalism trying to get on the wave of writing something about Amazon labor conditions.
Modern American journalism is a joke. Many things in this country are wrong and people can and should rightfully complain/voice their concerns about those things, but this type of journalism is just the equivalent of setting a house on fire just to have the exclusive that you were the one who covered it first. How can we trust any news outlet right or left, if their motivation is only just clicks and impressions?
If there was some giant corporation that was dominating house cleaning nationally and touting the great pay of cleaning toilets for them as a freelancer, that would certainly warrant some inspection, too.
Around here the local retail businesses Amazon is crushing are owned by large corporations, who previously put the small, independent retailers out of business decades ago.
The same way Netflix put Blockbuster out of business, who put the small, independent video renters out of business long before.