The human costs of Black Friday, explained by a former Amazon warehouse manager
vox.com
vox.com
I wonder if part of the reason a military vet was hired for the floor manager's job was the expectation that they'd act like drill sergeants towards the employees, while the tracking systems acted as a real-time sword of Damocles-type apparatus.
No one active duty yells at people like a drill sergeant outside of a training environment, except marines bc rah
It's pretty amazing the levels of psychological conditioning you guys have had.
I grew up in a rural town to working-class parents who hated me spending time on computers and wanted me to get a trade. I'm now 33 and halfway to my CS degree that I should have finished 12 years ago. The Army has been good to me but it's not the life I should have lived.
Even growing up rurally was hard. I was a very intellectual child and rural areas aren't the best environment for that i.e. family that actively squashes your interest as opposed to encouraging it.
Costco is a union company that's like a walk-in version of Amazon warehouse invented before Amazon. They pay workers well, give them bonuses, and so on. Company makes around $100 billion a year.
If trying to imagine unionized Amazon, walk into a Costco noting how the workers perform and at what stress levels. Better yet, if about vote with your wallet, just buy stuff from Costco and similar companies instead of Amazon to maintain and create more great jobs.
My company is a union company, too. We outperform the competition. They try to poach us all the time, too. The contract allows management to take action against lazy or disobedient employees if they can prove it. Their continued employment is totally due to terrible, ineffective management. All they gotta do is write their name on a piece of paper they present to those workers several times to fire them. Instead, they write up good, compliant workers over technicalities but ignore bad workers that argue back more. The lazy, weak managers get stuff done on paper that way. Although very common in union shops, I virtually never see anyone talk about the management angle on bad employees hard to get rid of.
The other issue is managers backing friends/family, who they buy drugs from, sleep with, and so on. Lots of political backchanneling over the most ridiculous stuff in these big companies. The sales teams are even crazier most of the time but theyre professional bullshitters with incentives to be aggressively outgoing. So, no surprise Im always hearing crazy stories about ex-employees. ;)
https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/03/19/even-costc...
There's the rub. Buried near the bottom.
The guy thinks people should not be allowed to be too rich.
Or the fact that people get that rich points to a systemic flaw in the system. Bezos earns 4 million per hour, no matter if he's asleep or awake. It's pretty wild to assume he personally creates that much value. The only other justification is that society is distributing wealth in a skewed fashion.
The fact that capitalism is the best resource allocating framework we found, for managing society, shouldn't prevent us from discussing its flaws.
That is false. It was based on the appreciation of his Amazon stock at a cherry-picked moment in time. He's probably been losing millions per hour lately. In reality, his total compensation is less than $2M and his salary is less than $100K.
The thing that people forget is that democracy is inefficient, but it has less flaws than anything else we have tried in the past. I suspect Capitalism is similarly the least flawed system we've found so far. (don't know enough economic distribution history to be sure).
A lot of people claim socialism is much better, but I am not sure it works well at big scales, looking at say a country like India.
- Expects workers to work compensated overtime during a busy period
- Tracks worker performance
- Expects people to take only their scheduled breaks, and writes them up if they're MIA for 30+ minutes
- Requires workers to show up and work during their scheduled work hours
The humanity! And this poor guy, working a non-specialized manager position attainable with just a high school degree, was only paid a meager $80,000 a year!
More seriously though: the caterwauling over Amazon's cruel and unusual work conditions is getting a little long in the tooth. I had more sympathy when it's peeing in bottles and passing out from heat exhaustion, but if the above is extent of the complaints now...get over it?
> My salary was $80,000, which is on the higher end. They gave me more because I said I wouldn’t accept anything less, since I had a master’s.
In high school some of my favourite teachers were there mostly as a semi-retirement job. My favourite was a retired Intel architect who taught grade 10 electrical engineering.
I would have been spoiled rotten if we were able to consistently attract those kinds of teachers.
Why on earth would you not want to pay a better qualified teacher more? You must think that teaching is easy because the math is not complicated, yet most of the people who say this would loathe the idea of teaching for a living.
Teaching something to somebody requires very specalized skills. And frankly most teachers in k-12 seem to lack this -- at least when. I went to school.
Teachers apply knowledge, experience and work in a way that magically makes you smarter and informed. Their effectiveness is a measure of their skill and the students. The argument against the unions is bunk — paying a premium for a math PhD to teach high school is probably pretty dumb... experience makes you effective at teaching trigonometry, not PhD expertise in math.
Go to any catholic school and you’ll see woefully unpaid teachers doing an amazing job — because the parents and therefore the students are very motivated.
The discussions about developers are similar. You need to overpay for people in a few metros... but you can pay a lot less for skilled people all over the place. The wacky salaries in industry have more to do with control and investors than the actual work.
Maybe I'm misreading what the parent said (and got downvoted like crazy for). My interpretation of it was an indictment of the teachers unions, where someone who comes in with a background like his teacher had (serious industry experience) is going to get bottom of the barrel pay because of the lack of seniority etc.
I absolutely think someone with that kind of experience should be able to make good money as a teacher, even if they're teaching grade 10 physics. There's also some amazing teachers who came into the career through the traditional path that should be making way more than they are.
In a number of industries, having your mba and being a manager doesn't put you over $80k. Masters even in relevant subjects don't necessarily put your salary that high in industries including teaching, shipping and logistics, warehousing, factory production.
It seems we were reading different articles, then. In any case your synopsis provides a very skewed representation of what the article actually said.
You posted a completely false list of complaints after this
> And this poor guy, working a non-specialized manager position attainable with just a high school degree, was only paid a meager $80,000 a year!
This is a misleading statement focused on hiding the fact that the area manager being interviewed has an MBA. Moreover the manager never complained about his salary. He complained about how he was forced to fire hourly workers and had to be on his feet for 14 hours a day for several weeks unless he was willing to be fired.
Just because the article doesn't explicitly mention peeing in bottles or passing out from heat exhaustion doesn't mean those problems no longer exist, and I don't see any claim that the article somehow comprises "the extent of" complaints about Amazon.
That the source was tangentially involved in the military makes it even more comical. A job that requires its workers to be screamed at, put through torturous physical conditioning and possibly blown up by bombs, but I guess that's nothing compared to working a 10 hour shift in a warehouse.
If a manager job makinking 80k a year with the major complaints bring -- taking orders -- giving orders -- bening on feet for 14 hours -- and no real designated lunch time, then I am not sure how well our armed foecses are going to do in a actual war -- which is sort of what we keep them around for...
Or Vox is just a flame bait instablishment who has a nack at finding people who like to complain about stuff because -- feelings.
"I boycott Prime Day, but I do shop on Amazon during Black Friday. I feel bad about it, but at the same time, I don’t think me not shopping will get Amazon to change its practices."
Now, it will be interesting to see how soon Amazon workers unionize and how that'll play out.
> The military is known for being a bastion of sexism, but I had a worse experience at Amazon.
> . . . the managers do not get any sort of break or lunch. Most of us just never ate. Everyone is on their feet for 12 hours a day.
> Associates got a 30-minute lunch break, two 15-minute breaks, and an additional 15 minutes of “time off tasks.”
Working 12 hours per day with a total of only 1 hour of break time, split into three smaller breaks – and all tracked to the minute? And no lunch for managers?
> The associates work 10 hours a day, the managers 14 to 18. It’s mandatory overtime, the hours are not voluntary, and they are all on your feet.
Do you really think this is acceptable?
To be honest, I'm quite sick of the general attitude on HN towards Amazon. I get that it's convenient and usually cheaper than its competitors. But let's not pretend that the way they do business is morally acceptable. It isn't.
This is absurd. Instead of trying to convince yourselves that it's Not That Bad, why not vote with your dollars and support businesses that treat their employees better? From what I can tell, most people reading HN have the means to do so.
(Edited to better follow HN guidelines.)
I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth, so I will not make any flippant summaries of your post. I just want to know what Amazon would have to do to become moral: how long should the breaks be? How should they modify their performance policies? Etc.
This argument implies that workers are on equal footing with employers when negotiating for wages. You forget that not all industries are like ours.
We've created a world full of pointless cruelty. "How long should the breaks be" is the wrong question to ask. Progress, to me, would look like a lot more workers doing a lot less work, and being compensated at a level which gives them financial security. Unpleasant work takes a toll on people. 8 hours should not be the goal, it should be the maximum.
1. 8h/day max
2. double pay extra work and limit the maximum amount to +3h
3. not 'monitoring' bathroom breaks
4. not fire people on the spot, give them warnings and help them improve
5. don't use metrics as a weapon agains them, instead build programs that help improvements
6. let workers to pack seated as well (to not stay 8h on their feet)
7. hire more occasional workers for very peak days (ie: BF, CM)
8. Not fire for sick leaves nor holidays leaves
9. Not fire for taking holidays during BF
This are the first 9 thing that i can come out with.
It's interesting for me anyway how many of the things related to Unions and workers rights the are at the center of the debate in the US now, are either illegal or totally unacceptable in EU.
1. Most customers choose to buy from the seller with the lowest price.
2. Employees are free to leave their employment if they find the conditions intolerable.
Which of these rules do you want to change?
> 1. Most customers choose to buy from the seller with the lowest price.
By setting a floor for the lowest operational cost, defining such basic concepts as:
1. Maximum work schedule (12h/day mandatory is not acceptable);
2. Minimum wage.
If every seller must abide by the same rules, the market is fair. Costs won't be absurd and no worker will work under medieval conditions. I know costs won't be absurd because I live in Europe, where these rules are in place, and we can still buy gadgets and books.
Also, if you mandate higher costs for suppliers (through limited hours and minimum wages) then you will create incentives for people to buy from suppliers that aren't subject to those regulations (i.e., foreign suppliers). You can try to prevent that through tariffs and duties, but they have their own problems.
That is not a bug, it is a feature. I prefer to never have people in medieval working conditions. Pushing society to evolve past that need is a good thing.
So far, we have been able to reallocate jobs so that automation does not cause widespread unemployment. When[1] that is no longer the case, we can as a society find another stable working model.
[1] It is possible that automation is already exceeding society's "job reallocation rate". It is still difficult to tell, but something to be vigilant about.
> Also, if you mandate higher costs for suppliers (through limited hours and minimum wages) then you will create incentives for people to buy from suppliers that aren't subject to those regulations (i.e., foreign suppliers). You can try to prevent that through tariffs and duties, but they have their own problems.
You are describing one of the large flaws of globalization, which we should, as a society, have already tackled. It is not acceptable, for example, that Chinese or Indian workers get poisoned by producing chemicals without proper hazard protection in place.
That it is possible to circumvent regulation is not a justification to abolish regulation. It is a justification to close the circumvention loopholes.
Their job is going to be automated out of existence anyway, so the choice is between being paid less, or being paid more, until it is.
Is your issue with Amazon, or with the system of capitalism in general? If the latter, why are people criticizing Amazon specifically?
You get a more functional labour economy by having labour able to access better opportunities. If there's a killer sales agent that won't apply for my sales position because Amazon is dunking him with 14 hour days repeatedly, no one benefits besides Amazon.
To answer from another perspective, a society resembling something like socialism or anarchism is what I personally would prefer to live in. I have doubts about whether we can move towards that from the current situation or whether it's workable, full stop. But it sure would be nice.
Personally, I'm not too concerned about HN karma, but I'm curious about the incentive system that it creates. Does the karma system simply promote adherence to the majority/popular view, or does it improve the quality of discussion?
> I'm quite sick of the average HN commenter's attitude towards Amazon.
Which is a bit insulting, as there is no "average HN commenter." We are all individuals and deserve to be treated as such.
Nobody looks forward to working extra hours at a job that is already tiring. What they look forward to is the chance for a brief respite from the constant stress of poverty, even if it comes at great cost to everything else in their lives.
Source: worked as a welder in a shipyard after the first dotcom crash. Took all the overtime I could get, because bills don't pay themselves. I enjoyed the work in a general sense, and my coworkers, but a human body can only push itself so hard before there are long-term consequences, and that is something that most hourly workers have to deal with over their entire careers.
tl;dr- "Looking forward" to overtime is like saying that someone who is drowning is "looking forward" to breathing.
I’m very interested to learn about Amazon tech, but instead I see an article just about everyday about how Amazon is some horrible sweatshop.
From my perspective, capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system in history.
By what metric has it “failed” ? Because the bottom few percent live in shitty conditions? Before capitalism, the bottom 90% of people were illiterate subsistence farmers.
Is China capitalist or communist? That's the country that has lifted most people out of poverty.
If you really want to pick a typical capitalist country - pick India. It is a country that is clearly democratic and capitalist and represents several 17% of the worlds population. I can pick a dozen eastern bloc countries that were better off in the 80s than India is today.
If you are looking for clear A/B test examples where 2 exactly similar populations existed and one was treated with capitalism and the other with socialism, then you wont find any. The only one that comes remotely close is Latin America compared with Cuba - because both regions had similar economic and geographic status. One set of countries were treated with capitalism and Cuba was treated with communism. Cleary Cuba did much better than Latin America, but this only yields a sample size of one and it would be overreaching to generalize.
I find the whole debate around capitalism vs communism a red herring. Western Europe and USA have enjoyed great wealth because of historic reasons. Western Europe, thanks to colonization of Asia and Africa. USA - thanks to free slave labor and effective colonization of Latin America in the 20th century and geographic safety in the world wars.
Eastern Europe and Russia had limited colonial resources to plunder and had been ravaged by the 2nd World war. They did not have access to Marshall plan funds to rebuild after World war unlike Western Europe. Moreover they were a small bloc of countries that had to trade within themselves because of economic blockade by NATO. Considering the extremely tough circumstances they had mixed results. Romania did well, Poland not so much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Repub... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_People%27s_Republic#Eco... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Soviet_Socialist_Rep...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Cuba
Cuba, in particular, has heavy sanctions to this day.
While capitalist countries like Singapore (dictatorship), Malaysia and Hong Kong (colony) did well, some did not (Pakistan) and other countries in the immediate American sphere of influence did extremely badly. Haiti, Nicaragua, Chile etc.
If anything that can be concluded from this, it is
- Being independent is good for a countries economy. Colonization or pseudo-colonization via capitalistic banana republics can be devastating - India, Haiti etc.
- Trade embargoes can ruin a countries economy. Except Cuba, almost all countries are ruined by it - NK, Iraq, Iran etc.
- Socialist welfare states can work and avoid terrible poverty and exploitation of workers. Scandinavia, Cuba, Communist Romania etc.
- USA strongly prefers dictatorships as trading partners-Chile, Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Haiti, Nicaragua etc.
I can name two: Germany and Korea.
North Korea and South Korea had comparable economies until the 70s. Very few countries face the same kind of crippling sanctions that NK has. And you can always compare Cuba with your choice of a Latin American country to make a counterpoint.
We could use more public spending on safety nets in the US. That has nothing to do with whether “capitalism has failed”.
Moreover, if, for arguments sake, you pick the most powerful capitalist state for comparison - I should also be free to pick the weakest capitalist state to balance things out.
> The former Amazon employee, a US Air Force veteran, requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions.
> [...] I was at a fulfillment center in California from [redacted] to [redacted].
> I was an [redacted], inside a new facility that had about 1,000 associates.
Isn't this a lot of info given away?
/edit: in case the original article does the same
I don't find that the military information was valuable, it could've easily been left out, and the veteran question the author posed could have still been asked if it were rephrased.
There are trade offs in all of these methods, but I don't see them as being particularly wrong if you want to provide color to your story without materially affecting it, and can be confident that you aren't helping to identify your source.
If it is just a coincidence that the details of your fudging match a specific person, then they can still deny it. I don't know, but the point of all this is to protect a source, not to protect a random person who might be implicated by bad luck and punished illegally by bad actors.
Oh yeah, anonymous.
People want their packages the next day or before Christmas. Amazon is paying them overtime and more for Black Friday. I mean this is the job, like a job that requires you start at 12am. Tiring sure, but weigh the pros and cons and make a decision. Amazon has no problems finding workers, or else they'd pay $30 an hour
There isn't a market solution for every problem. Labor rights abuses are rampant in apparel manufacturing. Are those problems "not serious" enough because people continue to pursue employment there?
If Amazon is doing things legally, and we're not happy, then we need to be upset with Congress, if anyone.
Hard jobs exists, but people get compensated for the long hours, hard work, smell or whatever.
what is your solution, should Amazon shut down, pay them more or what? Kids want their packages before 12/24
I had a temp job like that once. Two twelve hour shifts starting at midnight. I feel asleep at the wheel in the middle of the day on the 2nd day. I lucked out and didn't hit anything, woke up to put my foot on the brakes and rolled to a stop in a parking lot.