Amazon security staff reported its own tweets as “suspicious,” fearing hack
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
It strikes me as a sarcastic joke by burnt out security staff. Which would explain why we are hearing about it.
They very much favour proactive reports, and heavily emphasised that they'd rather have a ticket and resolve it as nothing, than not be ticketed at all because you're not sure. Unusual behaviour on a twitter account are most definitely things they'd expect to have reported to them for evaluation, or expect to report themselves if they saw it.
This however, makes it possible to make security reports for political effect - after all, if your guidelines are to report anything suspicious, nobody can fault you for doing just that.
Is it also standard policy at Amazon to leak security reports to the media, or discuss them with journalists after the fact? We both know that's not the case.
Actually rereading it again I would say the source is the person that opened the ticket and not a member of the security team.
If they were taking the matter completely seriously, I would not expect them to consider publicizing it, or discussing the ticket publicly after the fact.
Reminds me of this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/business/media/the-interc...
> The Intercept scrambled to publish a story on the report, ignoring the most basic security precautions. The lead reporter on the story sent a copy of the document, which contained a crease showing it had been printed out, to the N.S.A. media affairs office, all but identifying Ms. Winner as the leaker.
>"The real security incident here is how did the intercept learn of that ticket as that should really be classified."
Looks like someone from the security or PR departments took a picture of the ticket with their cellphone and sent them to the reporter.
Security tickets are immediately encrypted and locked down. Only a few members have access typically: The person who opened the ticket, anyone with a need-to-know, and people on the IR team. Even director-level employees need to be manually added to security-related tickets to have view permissions.
Out of those two groups, Occam's razor implicates the one with a vested interest in currying favor with reporters.
I obviously wouldn't look in internal ticketing systems and THEN post to my findings to a public forum like HN. For obvious reasons.
2.) > "It seems much more likely this is typical left leaning employee activism that is prevalent at tech companies."
If standard security ticket procedures were followed, it would have been locked down to the security team and the impacted team (i.e. PR/social media).
The comment that it 'seems much more likely that this is typical left leaning employee activism' implies that there aren't left-leaning or activists within the security or PR departments. Which if you believe that... lul...
One of the many reasons I’d never want to work there
> But company personnel think Amazon’s aggressive actions on Twitter are “embarrassing.”
It's amazing how tone-deaf Bezos sounds.
I did find Amazon's responses to be tone deaf at best (mostly just disagreeing with them) but her reply to be much worse.
The fact that small companies do not, out of fear of retribution by politicians is the actual problem and speaks volumes.
I don’t know why I’m surprised; HN has shown me more and more that otherwise intelligent people are more than happy to support corporate friendly narratives and anti-progressive ones.
It seems obvious that amazon would want this to be the focus, instead of bottles of pee. They could be a great ally to democrat politicians pursuing changes - amazon shows they can be a trillion dollar biz with change X, amazon isn't chastised in WashingtonDC. Win-Win.
My understanding was that someone had made the accusation that this was happening in fulfillment centers, which are employees, and Amazon was officially denying it.
Amazon DSP drivers are hired and managed completely by third party companies.
Because Amazon is a brand upper middle class white collar types interact with. Swift and Schneider are not. Everyone thought they were at least a couple intermediaries removed from the trucker jugs.
Just wait until they discover what construction site porta-johns are like.
Amazon does not pay for the externalities of more dangerous driving in your neighbourhood, other than their subcontractors might increase their prices if their insurance starts getting more expensive. They do not pay [edit: you] for the time and effort when they have to redeliver a broken package.
You change the compensation by setting goals that are actually reachable, and then having the workers iterate together with the employer to find and fix inefficiencies. The antagonism of unreachable goals is bound to lead to public relations issues. This of course assume that you see this article or articles like it as a public relations issue, so if that view is negligible then Amazon will see no harm.
Amazon's response to dangerous driving: [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/amazon-plans-ai-powe... [2] https://vimeo.com/504570835/e80ee265bc
If a manager, or set of metrics, prevented bathroom breaks, that's a major contract violation and would be arbitrated successfully by a competent union steward.
I try to follow Hanlon's Razor, so I'll go with the best case and just assume these people are unempathtic contrarians, instead of corporate shills.
Because when you say "<insert-bad-company-of-the-day> does <insert-bad-thing-of-the-day>" which is obviously to me not unique to that company then your message sounds like meant to provoke a certain feeling against a certain company, my "manipulation" alarms start ringing and, as a protection mechanism, I stop believing everything you say. By making at least an effort to make such reporting balanced, fair and accurate you have much higher chance to get me to care.
YMMV, maybe it works for other people tho.
Someone said "it's what the middle class interacts with" but it's also about Amazon's aggressive blocking of reform or real worker rights.
What is your opinion based on? A hunch? Random number generator? Your star sign? Maybe your horoscope?
> Why is Amazon being singled out here?
That's a strawman, nobody is singling out this company. Everyone is talking about Amazon because they publicly denied this ever happens from an official account.
> How would you even change the compensation or penalty structure to account for this?
Oh I don't know, maybe... and I realize this idea is so far out there so please bear with me for a second, maybe institute mandatory 15 minute breaks every 2-3 hours into the delivery schedule? Crazy, I know.
This sentence says nothing. How do you know this is something that people choose to do?
https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/47231
Oh, and here is a literal company that sells a product meant to alleviate the need to urinate in bottles. They speak about such bottle urination near the bottom of the page:
"Amazon forces warehouse workers to pee in bottles" was a thing two years ago. I haven't heard of this being a common thing outside anecdotal accounts, and looking at the amazon employees subreddits it sounded like it was overblown. Amazon responded forcefully to that claim in their tweet, and was subsequently hit with a 'gotcha!' when the drivers were reported to be doing it.
From what I've read, Amazon's warehouses aren't a fun place to work, but not overall different from any other warehouse job. Along the same lines, their delivery jobs aren't remarkably different from other delivery jobs and the drivers peeing in bottles is a thing that happens across the board in the industry.
So you can have things like technical committees that analyse the basic facts of inflation adjustments of wages, wage changes in competing industries or economies and real wage increases. As well the unions in export-driven sectors negotiating first, and government and services employees falling in line, in order to continue to compete in the global economy.
I believe this trust also builds productivity, but looks like Jeff Bezos has a different opinion.
Google and Facebook on the other hand are directly destroying democracy and spying on you.
I'm also stopping purchases from amazon.com based on this, but I'm not yet ready or able to cut out AWS
Sure, I sympathize with this. But one person's lies are another person's truth in this day and age, unfortunately.
The memos that say "please don't leave pee in the trucks, please don't leave poop, we can figure out who you are".
This is just the same old Amazon - they optimize everything to the point that humans can't keep pace with their metrics without cutting corners.
Contractors can choose to pee where they want. But employees can sue so easily over this sort of thing. It's a specific OSHA violation.
This story depends on confusing the issue about who is and isn't a contractor, doing this to themselves.
The contractor should be let go. As the response notes, they represent the company and represent it badly.
It’s a giant hassle to do otherwise and peeing in a bottle ain’t that bad.
That's the problem when you make corporate statements that are both controversial and on shaky factual ground. The shakier the factual ground the more people might decide you are not telling the truth (as they see it) and stop doing business with you.
Again, I have _zero_ problem with a company being snarky with politicians. Criticizing our electeds is the core of the first amendment and I fully support citizens right to disagree with political figures—even political figures I mostly agree with. For example, this particular tweet from @amazonnews I quite agree with: https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1375529101931520007.
> This is extraordinary and revealing. One of the most powerful politicians in the United States just said she’s going to break up an American company so that they can’t criticize her anymore.
I have no problem with companies being "powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets". I actually have a problem with the inverse: there should be no company that is not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets.
I agree with them - this is not a good look for Amazon. I have already essentially stopped purchasing on Amazon prior to this for various reasons (endless counterfeits and worker abuses) but will likely look to disband my relationship with AWS as well if they continue.
Imagine a Walmart that was several degrees hotter or colder than you’d like your house to be, with less bathrooms and a concrete floor. Now imagine running around it all day bending over to grab things off the bottom shelf and being timed by a buzzing iPad if you’re too slow. And say you’re you’re 65 and Social Security pays half your rent.
Now imagine that you’re the part of Amazon’s supply chain that the local jurisdiction that demands you’re treated better than the other 97% of Amazon’s chosen supply chain.
Refreshing is one word for a company being honest about the fact that they are lobbying hard to make your hypothetical life 0.001% more efficient.
For the record: Amazon, you, me, or anyone else is absolutely entitled to send Elizabeth Warren snotty tweets. Or send her snotty emails. Or make snotty phone calls to her office.
She is a public servant, not a noble or a pope or whatever.
If she can't handle people being rude to her, she needs to find another line of work. The "RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH!!!" attitude is not a good look, either.
Bite me, Senator Warren. I'll "heckle" your entitled ass any time I damned well see fit to do so.
Peeing in bottles sounds good as a click bait title but it's easy to not see the forest from the trees if you just focus on one example.
I wouldn’t roll over for a politician using tweets to garner favor.
AOC cost NY tons of money and jobs because no one pushed back on her rhetoric.
This is absolutely false. Fox news is practically obsessed with her[0]. I heard various talking heads on all types of media talking about how she didn't know anything about 'business', most mocking her past job as a bartender.
I'm not a huge fan of any politician but you probably picked the worst example, she can't post a tweet without the right wing media machine raising hell. During the last election she was also primaried hard, and some of the biggest criticisms were here anti-business/amazon stances.
[0]https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2019/04/14/study-fox-...
I understand the aversion to granting tax breaks to big companies, but IMO the whole debacle just looks like NYC politicians are more interested in maintaining their political bona fides, more interested in vague notions about Amazon's 'fair share' than they are in the long term well being of the local economy.
> The new tech and corporate jobs add to Amazon's announcement in December that it would hire 1,500 more New York workers
Let’s see how many workers they’ve added in NYC a few years from now. I bet it ends up close to that 25k number anyway.
https://twitter.com/amazon_policy/status/1374739879570116610
It would honestly even be different if Jeff Bezos himself tweeted these things, but to see the Amazon corporate news account try to one-up Elizabeth Warren is so bizarre..
Edit: Source requested
[citation needed]
> According to Recode, the suspicious tweets in fact came at the behest of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who had recently conveyed disappointment to Amazon officials that the company was not pushing back against criticisms that he considered misleading.
imagine getting that mad as like the richest person in the goddamned world.
It's clear to me as well that Amazon's replies were outright lies - they are making their employees defecate and urinate into bottles, and they do get away with not paying / underpaying taxes. They're not even correcting the record, they're just lying more.
They're going to tell people what their version of reality is, and people will have to accept it; There will be no comeuppance, and alternate realities and truths are to be forcefully disregarded whenever that's more convenient than ignoring them.
Because the capacity to ignore politics is inversely proportionate to the danger politics poses to you.
Large incumbent corporations are deeply dependent on preserving the status quo, in order to preserve their business model. Preserving the status quo requires active politicking.
Example:
https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1375509172549132289?s=...
Quote: >There’s a big difference between talk and action. @SenSanders has been a powerful politician in Vermont for 30 years and their min wage is still $11.75. Amazon’s is $15, plus great health care from day one. Sanders would rather talk in Alabama than act in Vermont.
Hes the US senator for Vermont. He is charged with being a respresentative for the state of Vermont for the Union of the United States and is responsible for 1/2 of the votes for that state on Federal Laws.
He is no more powerful than any other Vermont citizen in regards to their own state laws such as minimum wage...Its like they gave the keys to the account to some disgruntled intern....
I could see, along with everything else, that being enough to at least make the question worth raising.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20532639/amazon-t...
Seems like a lot of detail (e.g. going back through the past 2 months of tweets to check the source label) for just a "hey this sucks!" protest. Also, seems risky to send a screenshot of your own ticket while logged into the ticket system, though maybe all the login template info is just outside of the cropped screenshot?
FWIW, this is how much detail i'd put in for the plausible deniability "this sucks" protest if that were me.
Unless you think this person actually believed nobody noticed these articles or the tweets? They were trending on Twitter long before this was posted, and I knew about them. Of course Amazon PR did.
Its a million times better than the usual corporate nothing platitudes.
https://twitter.com/davehclark/status/1375045409542823939?s=...
https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1375509172549132289?s=...
My wife got a photo and then immediately after they delivered packages and left I went and took a photo because I couldn’t believe it.
I had not heard about the controversy until then, but my wife had been following it. I read these tweets and I also didn’t believe they were real, they were far too aggressive.
It was strange because I felt like I needed to know if it was in fact pee or not, but I also was not willing to bend over and smell it. It had all of the appearances of pee, yet the disposal was so obviously careless and conspicuous it was as though the person wanted to be caught.
The up close photo I took shows two foamy sections.
We discussed ethical issues of the potential for the worker being fired over this. And whether it ever okay to pour a bottle of pee out in front of some homes on a bike way. We also consulted a USPS mail carrier friend about what he has dealt with and USPS’ procedure for bio breaks.
Gathering all that, I still chose to email the photos and ask Amazon how they intended to handle this.
Waiting on a reply.
Edit: This was a tough call, I added some additional details below.
If the driver had knocked on our door and asked to use our bathroom, I'd have absolutely invited him in. This happened with a Fedex driver once before. That person ended up leaving pee on the seat, which was pretty gross.
Human feces, on the other hand, is quite dangerous. Generally you have to touch it or ingest it to get sick from it, but there are lots of ways for the bacteria to spread.
So the urine isn't dangerous, but if people are urinating in public, there's a risk that they're also defecating in public. And that's more serious.
I don't have a lab, so I can't determine if it was pee. And I can't imagine you'd get to hold on to a job at Target if you poured pee out in the parking lot in front of customers.
Our friend with the USPS said "[at USPS] we’re allowed to travel as far as we need to find a restroom so no need to do it."
If this is the case at Amazon, then there shouldn't be a need to pee in bottles.
However, if this is not the case at Amazon, then what was apparently Bezos' tweet [1] was not reflective of the situation on the ground. I've written him directly before, and depending on the response, I may do it in this instance because he's not seeing what I'm seeing.
[1] https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1374911222361956359
> I can't imagine you'd get to hold on to a job at Target if you poured pee out in the parking lot in front of customers.
No, nor should anyone want you to. Even beyond any hygiene and smell issues, it's bad PR and that's not what you're paid for.
There's a rash of blaming companies for being reasonable. Including one of a CVS manager being threatened with doxxing for calling the police on a thief. This concern for the driver seems more like a larger narrative of pro-unionism.
Most people in this thread are intentionally misrepresenting the issue, using the words 'job', and 'living wage'. These are contractors and if they don't make money today they can courier for another company tomorrow. If they don't it's because they voted with their wallets.
Given those two options, it's no surprise they pick option 2. Amazon knows this yet they continue to set unrealistic targets.
As for the denial - I am unclear on if they're talking about employees as a separate group from their drivers (who may be contractors according to other comments here?). Either way, I think it's reasonable for a company to make such a statement if peeing in a bottle is not a standard practice that is allowed by their policy and if it is only done rarely or by very few people (not reflective of general practice). If the delivery targets are such that most drivers have to do this, I might think differently, but so far I haven't seen evidence of this.
It seems equally as likely that it is an issue of over-expecting what a worker can reasonably perform. Why is under performance the more likely scenario in your mind?
>it isn't clear to me that this is either widespread
If this were the only occurrence of "Amazon Contractor" and some combination of "pee", "bottle", "no time for bathroom breaks", etc. I would be more inclined to take the route of "a few bad workers". However, these stories have consistently made news since at least 2018.
Additional factors, which not conclusive themselves, that lead me to doubt the Amazon narrative include such things like 74% of respondents to a survey conducted by Organise reporting that they avoid using the washroom for fear of missing targets[1] - indicating that perhaps at least some fault lies with Amazon for setting unrealistic and unnecessarily burdensome targets.
[1]https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a3af3e22aeba594ad56d...
If other employees can meet the quota but you can't, why would you assume that the quota is wrong? Maybe it's the wrong job for you.
> I would be more inclined to take the route of "a few bad workers". However, these stories have consistently made news since at least 2018
Perhaps it has something to do with the attempts to unionize?
> like 74% of respondents to a survey conducted by Organise reporting that they avoid using the washroom for fear
Is there a cost for saying that? If this didn't rise to the level of fear, but only apprehension, would they be censured for overreaching rhetoric? If not, how trustworthy is it? And it still leaves 25% comfortably hitting quota showing that the quota itself is fine.
Spoken like someone who has lived a full and blessed life.
Unionists are lying, conflating contractors and employees, and everyone here is buying it - probably because it fits an existing narrative. I'm being told, by privileged SF types, that I need to educate myself, when they've apparently never worked a day as a contractor, or perhaps never even worked a real job (ie, uncomfortable) in their life.
The pee bottle is being used as an excuse to unionize, even though it's something contractors choose to do in all driving jobs.
Also, when I say "drive for another company tomorrow", that's the ground reality. If you show up sober and well-dressed at any courier company you'll have a magnetic sign on your car and a load of packages right away. (And couriering is generally to offices with a ton of washrooms so you can weigh that in the calculation.)
No, that's what some rich guy would say. Oh, I wouldn't do "some mildly distasteful thing" for money, I guess I have high standards, haha. No, you wouldn't last that long. I doubt you'd make it through the first early morning. If you did you'd learn that pissing in a bottle isn't a problem at all compared to hours out of your life.
The adults you're talking about, denigrating because they aren't as discerning as you, are making this decision for themselves. They'd rather make wee-wee uncomfortably and see their family again sooner. For them that $4, or $15, matters more than it does for you.
> People also downvote what they find stupid
Also, stupid people vote. So ... proposition undecided.
> boss.
Somehow I don't think you've ever non-ironically called anyone that.
Your faith in Amazon to do right is impressive - perhaps even naive. Amazon official policy is not for drivers to pee in bottles, however, it strongly incentivizes this behavior. Had the driver asked to use your bathroom, he likely would have lost precious time and have been indirectly penalized for it.
Considering all this, you took a photo that embarrasses Amazon and sent it to Amazon and asked them to "do something"? Amazon's will already assume you sent it to the press and will circle the wagons - the answer will be it was a rogue employee and he has been let go (or disciplined, if he's lucky).
Rogue contractor.
Hooray dystopias.
Basically, sit down, shut up and take it - we've got the power and if you try and object we'll can you and replace you faster than you can blink. And we might even find a way to make sure you can't qualify for unemployment.
What's the alternative? No matter how reasonable the expectations are, there will always be drivers who would rather pee in a bottle and end their shift 10 minutes early than spend 10 minutes finding a bathroom.
There are a lot of solutions to this problem. The same type of solutions any company that employees drivers have had for years.
Nonsense. I know people who would rather pee in a bottle than wait for the next gas station on the I5. I personally have pissed on the sides of roads in lots of places on long car trips.
Dumping urine in an urban environment is pretty rude. But if I could save myself 10 mins a day by pissing in a bottle rather than some creepy gas station bathroom, why not? It's just piss.
> Plus it's absolutely disgusting.
This is what it really comes down to - your victorian sensibilities about bodily fluids can't possibly imagine that anyone would gasp OMG pee in a bottle! unless the alternative is starvation or whippings.
There are plenty of people who don't feel this way. Hell, I'm sitting outside with a flush toilet less than 100 ft from me and I just pissed on a tree instead. It's just piss.
I'm not saying Amazon's practices don't incentivize this or that they shouldn't be examined, but as is common these days many people take a paternalistic and dogmatic view that will not accept under any circumstance that some people may be doing this freely.
It strikes me as cruel to report and make trouble for a man who is already so overworked as to need to pee in a bottle.
Well, that basically describes the gig economy across the board, I guess.
That said, given that the firestorm has become very public, I would expect disgruntled (or any driver, they are wage slaves) drivers to be acting more conspicuous to draw more attention to the problem, which may temporarily inflate its visibility, but hopefully it also leads to change.
I'd talk about it (spread the word like here), but avoid being specific enough to affect the worker unless it looks like they were endangering someone - but that's just me.
Your and your 1000 friends' pint/500mL of urine isn't going to do anything meaningful to the lake.
[0] https://www.outdoors.org/articles/amc-outdoors/leave-no-trac...
I agree that in the Northeast, the preference is to do it away from water sources.
I gather urinating in lakes is okay even by the strictest standards.
A tin can / bottle works in more situations. You just pour it out over the side after then rinse it in the lake.
-- W.C. Fields
I don't want to disparage the people doing those jobs, but the rideshare companies have pretty clearly added quite a lot of oversupply relative to what the infrastructure can handle; cab companies have facilities and cab stands etc where drivers can relieve themselves, where rideshare drivers are left on their own to leave their fluids in litter in the street.
Also, that isn't to say that cab companies are a great example here - that industry was ripe for a good shaking up and had a lot of really weird entrenched components, but, at the end of the day, neither side is good - we only get labour rights with laws and enforcement that actually has teeth.
The driver should have emptied the bottle into a toilet on his next break (or after his shift). Or, failing that, dump it in the woods out of the way.
If you'll notice, we're now heading down the path of playing out ever-more-elaborate strategies for individual delivery drivers to maintain homeostasis without offending the delicate sensibilities of the people they serve, instead of questioning why this is a problem in the first place.
Workers need bathrooms, and employers have to pay for them.
A simple question, do you always offer water and a restroom to blue collar workers who enter your home? If so, you are in the 1%.
I mean, if that were even a remote possibility he wouldn't have filled a bottle, would he now?
I could probably snap a few photos and call the employer based on their backpacks too.
That all assumes this person's report isn't just blackholed by front-line communication folks at Amazon, which they could always ascribe to another "out of SOP action" or just wait a news cycle or two for people to forget if a stink was raised.
Really, really not cool and really out of touch.
Wow. This seems loaded, unmeasurable, and very unrelated to anyones job.
All this could just be communicated through pretty innocuous sounding employee guidelines (maybe, "there can be no open bottles of liquid of any kind when a vehicle is in motion") or just word of mouth. A manager mentions to a senior driver that there will be some bonuses if nobody gets caught with a bottle of pee and that causes the initiative to disseminate through all the drivers.
There may be far fewer choices here than it appears and the best choice is probably to get OSHA involved and maybe get some new worker safety and rights legislation through congress.
As well as conspicuously dumping piss outside customer houses he probably speeds through school zones.
Contractors don't get a wage, that's key to this whole discussion. And if contractors don't make a profit they shouldn't take the contract. This kerfuffle is in the middle of big cities, not some tiny company town in the outback. They have all the same options anyone else does, it's not like they're forced to drive for Amazon.
What if a livable wage is only possible if you quote more packages than is reasonable due to the intense pressure amazon has on the contract delivery market?
But I get your point - the issue, I think, is that under-performance in a job role should be a rarity. You should be hiring people that are likely going to comfortably exceed your minimum expectations and compensate them appropriately. If someone isn't a fit for a position it's most optimal for the company to never hire them (to avoid the cost of training and any capital costs associated with the new employee) but, barring that, it's optimal for both parties to break off the arrangement ASAP since the employer isn't getting the value they expect for their cost and the employee is going to be getting a whole lot of stress.
If it's the case where a significant portion of drivers are marked as underperforming then you're either 1) being dishonest about the job expectations in an effort to penalize decently efficient employees wrongfully or 2) presenting the position in a misleading or confused manner and not properly screening employees - either way it's on the employer, not the employee, if the issue is widespread.
It really seems like the issue with strict performance requirements in warehouses and with drivers is pretty widespread so I'd first look to attribute this to amazon rather than the folks they are hiring and, with assistance from inference along with lots of personal biases, I'm pretty certain Amazon is using artificially inflated performance targets as a way to minimize paid compensation while cycling through the glut of available labour knowing that, in a lot of states, being accepted to a position after submitting an offer and refusing it will result in a discontinuation of unemployment and a constant stream of applications is required to maintain unemployment checks.
A business can essentially hold you hostage with the US unemployment system by under-selling the actual job expectations and then using the threat of being fired with cause for performance reasons to complicate your chances of getting back on insurance.
Thankfully we're talking about contractors and none of that is the case.
> I think the percentages need work since if 20% of the tens of thousands of drivers you employ/contract do a thing then clearly your hiring policies are pretty terrible.
Not employees, they weren't hired. And the contractors aren't promised anything, they're given a chance to prove themselves.
There are cases where the contractor style of employment is valid and advantageous for the worker. But when it comes to the gig economy contractors are CINO (contractors in name only) - they're employees that companies like treating differently to get out of paying insurance for and that's it.
But contractor vs employee is a useful distinction for everyone and trying to fix all the other issues by neutering what contractor means goes the wrong way.
Contractors, INO or otherwise, have freedom to pick their shift and their employer on almost a daily basis, if not more frequently. Drivers have Uber and Lyft apps open, etc. Amazon drivers can give Bezos the finger and drive for a courier firm with no notice and no black-mark on their employment history.
> in every meaningful manner these drivers are employees - they aren't independent courier services that happen to work part-time for Amazon, they're drivers that only run Amazon deliveries but are forced to operate as an independent company for Amazon's benefit
There's no force involved. Even economic. The drivers drive for them despite having the same job options that non-drivers do, and they choose this.
Yea - I think this is the core portion of what makes this more difficult to stomach during a pandemic - the other options are few and far between and the job market is highly distorted right now.
Most folks on HN still have cushy jobs (I work in a healthcare adjacent market so our market segment is actually doing quite fine) but a lot of folks that were either jobless going into covid or were laid off/furloughed due to it are in a hard place. Unemployment laws are such that folks can be forced to take contract gigs if they're available or else fail to qualify for unemployment and that can put folks in a really awkward position financially.
There is some serious exploitation here due to the lack of options. Something like UBI and national healthcare like we've got up here in Canada would seriously improve lives for folks that find themselves unable to cover expenses without working themselves to the bone and I think that everyone should have a right to a pleasant life. It's quite a tough situation.
Suitable work definitions can never require you to lose money by working. And that's without the peeing-in-a-bottle type tricks to be more profitable. You're also allowed to include all of your costs (gas, depreciation, etc) in the calculation. If you had a Hummer you'd be paying more for gas than if you had a smart car so the value of the contract changes.
> UBI and national healthcare like we've got up here in Canada would seriously improve lives for folks that find themselves unable to cover expenses without working themselves to the bone
National healthcare is helpful because it covers 'acts of god'. UBI seems like it would be harmful to the economy by inflating itself into irrelevance while destroying wages.
> I think that everyone should have a right to a pleasant life
I think that everyone has the right to pursue that, and must not have unreasonable obstacles placed in their way.
But saying that someone deserves a thing implies that someone else is required to provide it. Your rights can't place a burden on me so that can't be a right.
That's correct - maybe it's more accurate to say that I don't believe anyone else has the right to deprive others of a pleasant life. It goes with my general philosophy to strive to ensure that people I interact with in life find that interaction either neutral or pleasant and don't suffer from my existence.
Similarly, why do humans sometimes need to pay for urinating (I'm looking at you German SaniUnfair), but animals don't?
They don't have time to use a proper restroom. That's why they're peeing in bottles.
What with all the sorts of people in the world, how many folks would've invited them in vs. thinking the driver was weird and potentially reporting the action?
Asking to use your restroom (during pandemic times) seems pretty likely to trigger a customer complaint possibly even one as pleasant as "They were courteous and didn't leave a mess, but why are they being forced to use residential bathrooms, don't they have time off to pee?" - that's a complaint that doesn't reflect poorly on the driver at all but may still end up getting the driver fired if it causes a PR stink.
Without stronger labour laws and without a union drivers are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Especially with covid, where are you supposed to pee if you're spending all day driving around doing deliveries or as a taxi driver?
Dude...
Not sure where you live but where I'm from, letting a stranger into your home is the same as giving them permission to rob you