Documents show Amazon is aware drivers pee in bottles and even defecate enroute
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
Why? Because the driver will have a set of deliveries. Once they’re finished those they’re done for the day.
In NYC at least finding a restroom and finding parking (even double parking) beat it takes valuable time. It saves time to pee in a bottle.
This just isn’t unique to Amazon is all I’m saying.
But my employer (and the law here) doesn't expect me to do this, even if the nearest toilet is several minutes walk away.
Why not? Every Amazon Locker could have an Amazon Pooper.
These stories are always framed this way as if only someone truly desperate would stoop to peeing in bottles. But to many people, peeing in a bottle is actually not a big deal and is, in fact, preferable to getting home fifteen minutes later.
Funny you should mention that.
Now if they still paid people for their urine (referring to the origin of the phrase 'doesnt have a pot to piss in')... Easy money.
If the nature of your job permits converting going-to-the-restroom time into time at home and you have adequate privacy it's a very sensible thing to do.
I can see there being a need for legislation here as this example with Amazon shows that companies will ignore basic human needs if given the chance.
In addition, the problem is possible to solve provided the delivery drivers are given adequate time to do so. Technology can definitely assist the decision-making process: finding public restrooms with available parking along the path of a delivery route and maybe altering the route as required. However, I definitely see there being a need to build additional public restroom facilities and hire staff to maintain them.
Another argument that could be made is that these delivery companies are shifting/not bearing the full burden of hiring employees. An office worker will usually have access to a restroom that is paid for by employer paying rent for their place of business.
Need to urinate? Pull over, get out, and water the grass. This is older than time, and a non-issue. Really. It isn't an issue to me.
Defecation is obviously in another category.
Peeing in a bottle is also a non-issue. As far as I am concerned, if a woman can breast-feed in public, why can people not urinate into a container inside a car?
(Both are body parts with sexual, and non-sexual purposes)
And women can do so too, with the aid of such things as this;
https://www.amazon.com/Standing-Resistant-Urination-Portable...
To take a step back, are astronauts the next "put out" class? Tank drivers on patrol? Park rangers? Long haul truckers? Virtually all outdoor, in the country type jobs?
And more oddly, at first all I heard about was urination in bottles. Then massive outrage did not appear. Now defecation seems to be added?
Note: Amazon sucks donkey balls, but let's address the true suckage, not what I see as a non-issue.
Yet even many rural places have laws against it (usually at the state level). It's just enforced less strictly outside of the towns and cities.
(eg, are you just going to do it in your pants, over the car's seat??)
I'd even call it a human rights issue, when no alternative exists.
Here, the key is to leave the passenger door open, and do it concealed. Then, silly usages of public exposure law attempts cannot be deployed.
Other method are to hike into the bushes, but with ticks and mosquitoes, many refuse to.
Ticks and mosquitoes are basically a non-issue here, but finding a bush isn't always the easiest.
I know a guy who took a leak in an alley on his walk home from the bar at 1am. He's now a registered sex offender because that alley was across from a playground, even though no children were present and it was dark out.
The only thing my experiences have taught me is that the 'justice' system will do everything it can to win, even when it makes no sense. Eventually they will screw over enough people that nobody will be left to support it.
I always wondered if firings due to those types of situations should be legal. The failure is obviously on the bean counters who demand a certain amount of work done with inadequate labor, but blame often falls on those performing the labor.
A few years ago, I called an Uber and a lady showed up visually uncomfortable. We drove in silence for 2 minutes before I asked her if she would like to stop at a gas station. I knew to ask that because my previous driver have had the exact same problem and told me he had to stop. He told me that sometimes he has no choice but to use a bottle. Is Uber intentionally making drivers pee in bottles? No. But it happens by design. When a driver is matched with another rider before the current ride is over, she doesn't get a break. She can decline the next ride, but from what I learned you get penalized if you reject enough riders. Is the solution wearing a concealed pouch where the driver can relieve himself discreetly? Um, no. I think a simple button on the UI that say 10 minutes break solves it.
Riders pay the price by making the ride slightly late, but that's a damn good compromise.
So why do Amazon drivers relieve themselves in a bottle? Because sometimes they have 240 packages to deliver in one shift. And when they don't do a perfect job, customers complain and they get penalized. Unlike with Uber, a simple UI update doesn't fix the problem. The customer expects same day delivery. Is it Amazon's fault? Yes, they promised impossibly convenient delivery times. Fixing the issue means longer delivery. Are we willing to compromise?
Chances are if you’ve bought products that are shipped somewhere in the US you’ve been paying for pee labor.
I also don’t think mandatory delivery targets are the sole reason. Even if you go right now onto the Amazon flex subreddit you can find people asking questions about peeing. Those drivers accept in blocks of a few minutes to hours, they could wait, find a bathroom, then take another delivery but it’s less money.
This is a societal problem, it’s just Amazon that is having it exposed for them.
Amazon doesn't compromise where profit is on the line. If Amazon hired more drivers, they would still require that rates and quotas remain the same. It would just make firing drivers caught urinating and defecating on the job easier for them.
Work out a deal with UPS/FedEx/Amazon but also Uber, Lyft, Postmates etc where they pay a membership and all of their drivers can use the space.
I don't know about urban core businesses, but in most places, it's already the case that no one working at McDonald's/etc cares if you walk in, use the bathroom and leave.
It's a very "American left" pitfall: make the victims of your "compassion" worse off as long as you avoid the appearance of inequity. See also: payday loans, boxing gloves, etc
> The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do, and have great wages and health care from day one.
Amazon's PR (one of the best in the industry) at its finest.
Minimize/deny/ignore the issue raised, and quickly bridge to something else entirely.
Disclaimer: worked at AWS 2008-2014. Opinions my own.
> Two economists are walking down the street, when they pass buy a luxury car dealership. One economist says, "I really want that Ferrari!" The other economist replies, "Clearly you don't!"
And the other one that isn't as relevant but is funny:
> Two economists are walking down the street, when one of them sees something on the ground. She says, "hey, is that a $20 bill on the ground?" The other economist replies, "obviously not, otherwise someone would have picked it up already!"
In this case, even a well-paid tenured economist probably could not afford the Ferrari without making some significant sacrifices elsewhere. So it's not that they are choosing between "Ferrari" and "no Ferrari", it's that they are choosing between "Ferrari and I don't have any money and my wife leaves me" and "no Ferrari and I keep my retirement savings and my wife doesn't leave me."
The relevance here is that, for some people, their best option might actually be "stay at horrible job at Amazon where I'm forced to piss in a bottle", not because they like pissing in bottles, but because the alternatives are actually worse.
The only thing you can tell from a person's behavior is that, to that person at that particular time, whatever they did/chose seemed like the best option.
1.) This is all competent PR. PR is there to cast the employer in a good light, and bait-and-switch is a tactic used since before there was a formalized PR industry. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon PR was going to next say 'most of our drivers aren't Amazon employees. We can't control how subcontractors act.' Which is a technically true statement, but misses the point.
2.) The context of this article is recent comments from Amazon's social media team and a director. In an incredibly large organization like Amazon, a director (and members of the social media team) is going to be far removed from the realities of package deliverers.
To give the director and social media team the benefit of the doubt, they could be speaking the truth as they believe it. Members of the social media team probably wouldn't work in a position wherein they're forced to urinate in bottles.
The director probably isn't aware of the 'leaked document'--which was really just an email sent to an unknown audience. But they typically won't send those types of emails to directors, because they don't want directors to know that stuff.
---
Amazon has a lot to atone for. It has some abhorrent practices. But let's not pretend that Amazon is the only company around where line workers don't have time to take adequate bathroom breaks. Or that Amazon's drivers are the only last mile delivery drivers who have issues finding time/places to go to the restroom.
Can Amazon do more? Yes. Should Amazon be a corporate leader? Yes. But this a larger problem than Amazon. This happens across industries with line workers and last mile delivery jobs.
Nobody's saying that.
Amazon is becoming one of the only employers for less skilled workers ... because of Amazon's ruthless pricing, co-mingling, white-labeling, outsourced externalities, and other strategies. This is why we have anti-trust.
Whether others are also abusive or incentivize dehumanizing behavior is irrelevant.
Only irrelevant if you want to fix symptoms, not causes.
If you demonize a specific company, you might change a company's practices. This is good for the workers at that company who are treated inhumanely.
But know that by focusing on the behavior of a specific company rather than economic system that incentivizes companies to treat humans as disposable cogs, you're letting off the hook every other company that engages in the same behavior. By focusing on the behavior of a company rather than dearth of meaningful regulation to protect workers, you're enabling the exploitation of workers across a swath of industries.
If your appendix bursts, morphine will make it hurt less. But it's probably better to do surgery to handle the root cause.
Pointing out an individual's wrongs doesn't mean I cannot also advocate better regulation for all. Let this instance be another push toward that end. Apathy and "everyone's doing it" cop outs are just as damaging as calling the problem solved after a single corrective action.
Amazon is not okay with their employees pissing into bottles; they issuing the warning letter; yet some of them still do it. Not because they have to but just because they can. It's not uncommon among males when they're on a long drive to piss into bottles. When they get caught, of course they'd claim it was due to the deadline, not because they don't want to take few minutes for a detour.
> Modafinil, a novel stimulant which has several remarkable features... [1]
> Modafinil is considered a stimulant doping agent [2]
> Adderall and modafinil are central nervous system stimulant medications (psychostimulants). [3]
- [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1675850/
- [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil
- [3] https://americanaddictioncenters.org/adderall/vs-modafinil
I knew guys who popped lots of xannies at my the bigcorp I used to work at. There's also a well known culture of microdosing among some at google.
Also, many developers I know smoke weed.
Stimulants I'd expect at a place like amazon. Not sure it's as coming in places with better wlb. They have coffee for that...
Our UPS driver at least tends to stop over by one right down the road from us. We have a regular driver, which likely helps create a bond with the staff, so you can skip the need to buy something every time.
https://www.amazon.com/Standing-Resistant-Urination-Portable...
Equality often means, delicate sensitivities of either sex, are not considered.
Though it's important to note that women's bathroom needs are different from men in more ways than just the mechanics of urination. For one, menstruation is a recurring situation that has specific bathroom needs that a bottle doesn't really address.
Indeed menstruation is a different issue altogether.
It can also be used to pee in bottles.
(Poo is another matter--you're expected to bury it 6-8" down, at least 200' from the trail, at least 200' from water. If you can't meet all three of these requirements you're expected to use a poo disposal bag (commonly called a WAG bag) and pack it out.) Locally, if you can accomplish the digging you're very likely in a watercourse.
In the winter I've often been in areas with half a mile line of sight to any place you could actually get to and plenty of canyons where anyone coming around the bend is going to see you, period.
Summer provides a bit more cover at lower elevations, but as you go higher there are trees but you can see under them and in many cases getting off the trail is difficult.
If you hike long enough trails to need to relieve yourself you know there's a small chance you'll be seen, and likewise, you know there's a small chance you'll run into someone relieving themselves--if you can't stand either scenario, don't go.
I assume it's because sometimes there's enough brush that you don't want to squat more than you have to, exposing your privates to plants, insects, etc. On top of that, you need a lot less privacy to stand-and-pee than you do to squat: if someone comes across you squatting on a trail without much cover, you probably wouldn't want them catching a view of either side of you.
Perhaps it's just not-totally-rational squeamishness, but that's my understanding of the thinking behind it.
This is not to go home earlier. It's the exact same thing as their warehouses, where the targets are set so impossibly high that you have no choice but to ignore your bodily needs. Whichever manager forces this onto their employees is at the very least a sociopath.
Seems like a sane culture.
We need privatized toilets where you review the person ahead of you for how clean they left the toilet. Unlock the door with a special PIN.
I'm partially kidding, but seeing how much time I spend 'starting' and closing a car in a car-sharing app (making pictures of all corners, all areas), a better approach to these processes would be welcome.
I expect this comment to be downvoted to oblivion as well, by the PR team.
We live in a time when the economic power of the middle class is eroding rapidly, and being able to order cheaper goods from Amazon with fast free shipping was a huge benefit even before we started living through a global pandemic.
It would take a truly staggering percentage of people around the world to choose to boycott Amazon before they actually started feeling it—and that wouldn't even touch some of their other major sources of revenue, like AWS, which provides it with a lot of income these days.
> Halie Marie Brown ... told The Intercept that the practice “happens because we are literally implicitly forced to do so, otherwise we will end up losing our jobs for too many ‘undelivered packages.’”
Sounds like there may be a little more to it than you suggest.