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Comment by bredren | Hacker News Reader

We had a driver pour out a bottle of pee directly onto the street in front of our place from his open driver’s side van window on Saturday afternoon.

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.

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> 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.

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.

A bit surprised you sent the photos to Amazon. That person is likely to be fired. A bit of pee on the street is not going to harm anything or anyone (otherwise the streets around bars would be an enormous biohazard), although it's obviously gross.

Is human pee any more gross than dog pee? This isn't a rhetorical question - I'm genuinely asking.

I’m unsure, but cat pee is in a class of its own. That stuff is evil.

Human pee transmits human diseases.

As does dog pee. Which covers every sidewalk and corner you've ever stepped on.

It generally does not. Most human urine is fairly sterile. And even if you've got a bladder or kidney infection, it's the same bacteria that you have on your own skin already -- it infects the urinary tract when forced inside (most often by sex).

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.

Human urine very rarely transmits human diseases, unlike feces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urine

Another option was sending it to media, which I presumed would have gotten attention. I thought the person had a better chance of holding on to the job if it was handled without publicity.

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

Can you share the email you sent them? Almost certain you got them fired in a pandemic.

Amazon's drivers are contractors if anyone is pushing them to pee in bottles, it's themselves. So there's no actual answer to this issue. Are they not being paid enough, such that they can't pee, or are they making an reasonable decision to pee in a bottle in order to save 15 minutes and make more money. Considering they keep taking the contracts one has to assume that they're profitable, at least usually.

> 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.

The issue with blaming contractors in this case is that they can't afford to lose the job. It probably pays well enough but their options are 1. get fired because they couldn't meet target deadlines, 2. pee in a bottle and risk getting caught.

Given those two options, it's no surprise they pick option 2. Amazon knows this yet they continue to set unrealistic targets.

How do you know they are setting “unrealistic targets”? What if only some employees pee in bottles because they’re bad at their job/unproductive? Why would it be Amazon’s fault if a driver who’s falling behind uses this as a hack to appear productive when they really should just get a different job?

We have reports from the workers stating so. We also have a denial from Amazon saying they don't have workers peeing in bottles. Seems that denial hasn't held up too well.

We have anecdotal reports from a few workers saying so. We also have leaked documents saying that Amazon does not allow peeing in bottles as policy. If a random employee does not follow the policy and pees in a bottle, that seems like the employee's fault. If the employee is doing so to make up lost time so they can appear more productive, it seems like that's an issue of under performance that they're hiding by peeing in a bottle. Either way, it isn't clear to me that this is either widespread among Amazon's employees or the fault of the company instead of the individual.

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 like that's an issue of under performance that they're hiding by peeing in a bottle.

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...

> 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?

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.

>These are contractors and if they don't make money today they can courier for another company tomorrow.

Spoken like someone who has lived a full and blessed life.

I have heard similar complains from bus drivers that don't have time to have a toilet break, see: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&u=https:/...

If you're wondering why this is getting buried, educate yourself on how Amazon "contracting" works. It's just a scheme to cut costs and shift all responsibility elsewhere.

It's getting buried because people downvote what they can't argue. Amazon isn't doing anything different than any other company, or anything that has been a problem before now.

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.)

People also downvote what they find stupid, boss. I made in a bottle in a car before; I wouldn’t do it again for $4 or whatever. Guess I don’t have what it takes to do contract work.

> Guess I don’t have what it takes to do contract work.

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.

> Another option was sending it to media, which I presumed would have gotten attention. I thought the person had a better chance of holding on to the job if it was handled without publicity.

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).

> the answer will be it was a rogue employee and he has been let go (or disciplined, if he's lucky

Rogue contractor.

Rogue contractor who has had sexual misconduct charges leveled at them for urinating in public - and let that be a lesson to all you other contractors to stay in line.

Hooray dystopias.

stay in line - as in: bring more than one bottle to piss in so you don't have to hastily dump and re-use it? Ick...

I think stay in line - at least the way I'm thinking of it, is a lot more negative than just bring an extra bottle. It's a demand for employees to skirt the rules or else they'll be punished and if they're caught skirting the rules they'll also be punished - oh and since you're a contractor you lack any rights normally afforded employees.

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.

> Had the driver asked to use your bathroom, he likely would have lost precious time and have been indirectly penalized for it.

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.

That's assuming that their scheduling makes it so that they could actually ever end their shift early. Given how wide-spread this issue is I think it's more fair to assume that taking a 10 minute break would be penalized by Amazon.

Um... I do not agree that there will always be drivers who prefer to pee in a bottle. I do not believe that there are office/home workers who always prefer to pee in bottles. The alternative is access to bathrooms.

There are a lot of solutions to this problem. The same type of solutions any company that employees drivers have had for years.

> I do not agree that there will always be drivers who prefer to pee in a bottle

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.

Do you work in a job where you can't stop the clock for 10 minutes to take care of bodily functions? The only choices here are between getting penalized for lateness, pissing in a bottle, or finding a new job, and they amount to the same thing - bottle or new job. Plus it's absolutely disgusting. I think if it were personal choice alone, people would be more discreet. This story implies they're so pressed for time they can't even toss the bottle in the trash because they have to refill it... I can't even begin to imagine how that becomes a normal everyday activity at a company without somebody questioning how things got this way.

You have no idea what was in the mind of the driver, but you're passing pretty strong judgement.

> 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.

If I was a driver constantly on the move I'd probably pee in a bottle on occasion too. I can be lazy and I don't believe that peeing in places outside of a toilet is necessarily gross, so I could see it happening if I was working in a residential suburban area with no proper restrooms at hand. If work conditions were otherwise good I wouldn't feel dehumanized or exploited for it.

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.

Uhm. Why do you limit your reasoning to people doing this to stop their shift early?

A non-hellish non-dystopia where it would be presumed people need to urinate somewhere within their fixed 8 hour shift and maybe even more than once if they chose to work overtime?

Jeff Bezos is always saying things that are obviously not the facts on the ground. He didn't know this, Amazon couldn't have known that, meanwhile they're always caught covering something up or responding to the same complaints internally.

Another option would've been not to do anything. If a dog peed on the street would you be upset about it and report it? How about if a bird defecated on the street? Why is human urine so much worse?

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.

So Amazon is blackmailing us with the delivery people as hostage?

Well, that basically describes the gig economy across the board, I guess.

You... ratted out the guy who delivers your packages to his corporate masters for doing the very human homeostatic requirement of urination? Seriously?

Peeing in a bottle wasn't the thing that was reported. Emptying a bottle of urine in front of the customer's home was the problem.

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.

Perhaps he had to urinate again, and did not have an additional bottle? What then should he have done?

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.

The solution to this problem is not "dump a bottle of piss out on someone's lawn," it's "expand labor laws to cover this very obvious human rights issue and then hammer Amazon with it until they shape up."

Workers need bathrooms, and employers have to pay for them.

We agree on the best outcome. What should workers do in the meantime?

"And in the mean time, report all violators to Amazon" is the implicitly unsaid thing that people here are disagreeing with, not the obvious statement that labor laws should be expanded and enforced.

Let's not escalate this into imaginary situations. He didn't dump piss on anyone's lawn.

I don't know if it's employers that have to pay for them. Society needs available bathrooms; they don't need to be gated behind employment or being a customer

I used to do apartment maintenance and I considered asking someone to use their bathroom completely unprofessional. I peed in bottles and never thought it a big deal.

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%.

Oh, I agree. Everybody deserves regular breaks during the workday. People have to eat, drink, pee, etc. Lack of such breaks doesn't, IMO, excuse peeing in my yard.

Well, this is where we are. Delivery drivers are being crunched to make deliveries. Having someone pee in your yard just comes with the territory. Don't try to get them fired if they do that. I assure you many dogs pee in your yard any given day.

So it's the yard now? Even if it was the yard, while that is definitely a dick move, getting a delivery worker fired over it is more of a dick move.

It wasn't in anybody's yard, it was in the road. And they didn't pee there, they emptied a bottle.

>The driver should have emptied the bottle into a toilet on his next break

I mean, if that were even a remote possibility he wouldn't have filled a bottle, would he now?

Drunk tech workers pee on the street in front of my house near Dolores park all day long, should I be calling the cops on them?

I could probably snap a few photos and call the employer based on their backpacks too.

At least now Amazon cannot say they know nothing about it.

You're underestimating the determination of willful ignorance - also, they can always claim this incident was just some weirdo that they then fired for acting inappropriately and then point to some BS statistics about driver job satisfaction.

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.

I 100% believe that drivers pee in containers - heck, my grandfather and I used to do the same when fishing - they make containers with handles specifically made for this.

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.

Why wouldn't you just pee into the water into which you are fishing?

Are you serious?

Where do you think the fish pee?

You're in a boat in the middle of a flat lake. Picture it.

In tiny bottles.

Do you happen to “move your bowels” into the lake aswell?

Because you are contaminating the water. Don’t do this.

Every acre-foot of lake is over 325K gallons or well over a million liters. A typical destination lake will have over half-trillion (0.5 x 10¹²) gallons of water in it.

Your and your 1000 friends' pint/500mL of urine isn't going to do anything meaningful to the lake.

I enjoy public lands quite a bit; people really should adhere to Leave No Trace[0] principles quite strictly - which says to urinate at least 200 feet from water sources. People always want to be a lawyer about why each rule does or doesn't apply to their specific situation. And we all suffer for it.

[0] https://www.outdoors.org/articles/amc-outdoors/leave-no-trac...

BTW, it depends on the climate. Somewhere like the Grand Canyon that is quite dry other than the big river flowing through it along with some streams and other tributaries, the preference is to pee in the river.

I agree that in the Northeast, the preference is to do it away from water sources.

> Urine will not harm vegetation or soil, according to Leave No Trace, however it may attract wildlife. When locating a discrete spot, follow Leave No Trace guidelines to travel on durable surfaces as well as stay 200 feet away from water sources. Dilute the urine afterwards by pouring water over it.

I gather urinating in lakes is okay even by the strictest standards.

I don't think a reasonable reading of the principles you linked generates the rules you are saying they do.

I remember an open reservoir being emptied because surveillance video showing a person peeing in it got publicized; millions of gallons gone to waste because people are more disgusted by human urine than they are by decomposing possums.

Animals pee in that water.

Fish and animals die and decompose in that water.

That works well when you're far enough from others, male, and you can keep your balance in a small boat while standing.

A tin can / bottle works in more situations. You just pour it out over the side after then rinse it in the lake.

The same reason that there's the "no alcoholic beverages" rule right above the "no pissing" rule. Once upon a time someone either did it in poor taste or complained in poor taste and now it's against the rules and there's yet another entry on the big sign by the boat launch saying so. So everyone keeps doing it but they have to hide it for plausible deniability.

"Water? Never touch the stuff. Fish fuck in it."

-- W.C. Fields

It was on the Detroit river, a major shipping lane and the boat was tiny, I’d be flashing everyone and I was a kid and self conscious about pissing in front of people, still am.

Drivers break the rules all the time for various reasons. At one point I loved messing with drivers and would say 'so how many log books do you have'. My record is 6 (not sure how he kept that all straight). But usually they do whatever they can to have extra time to do other things. Lets say your trip takes 12 hours. If you push it all the way and do not stop maybe you can make it in 9. That gives you 3 hours to do 'other' things and get paid for 12 (harder to do these days with automated logs).

And what do you expect them to do with their piss? Drink it? How jaded to human suffering must one be to report something as minor as this to a company known for having awful labor practices…

Keep it in the bottle until the shift ends? Dump it in the woods? Lots of choices that don't include dumping directly in front of a customer's home.

If they take a detour maybe they'll end up with a demerit for deviating from the optimal driving route and be docked pay - if they come back to distribution with a bottle of pee the company may also dock them for something like... I dunno "storing human waste in a vehicle used for transporting food stuffs" then dock their pay or fire them. Amazon is strongly motivated to discourage drivers from coming back to their shipping centers with bottles full of pee since either labour organizers or reporters might jump on that to use against the corporation.

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.

That driver was a contractor, deciding to pee in his own bottle. He chose to take more packages than he could deliver and is rushing to cut corners.

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 that level of "too many packages" is the only way the driver could avoid getting a demerit for under performance?

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?

What if 80% of drivers don’t do this? Maybe the other 20% need to just get a different job if they aren’t able to avoid under performance without resorting to time saving tricks.

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. If you worked as a dev and 20% of your co-workers end up committing corporate espionage then the place you work is almost certainly Los Alamos.

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.

> A business can essentially hold you hostage with the US unemployment system

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.

Contractors are employed persons. They're distinct under the law in the US for some fully BS reasons but 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 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.

I agree about the legal dodgery here. The way healthcare is available via employers means that contractors and part-time workers are hurt unreasonably. The solution to that is letting people keep their plan when quitting a job, reupping a plan that expired, and mandating set rates where health-insurance costs the same regardless if you're a company or an individual. This stuff is broken.

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.

> 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.

> Unemployment laws are such that folks can be forced to take contract gigs

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.

> 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.

It is enervating hearing anecdotes like these from wealthy people who seemingly believe the same necessary excretions they have aren't a privilege lower classes deserve

it's especially shit because the whole goddamned economy runs on whiz-in-bottles. It's not an amazon problem (to be clear: I hate amazon for perpetuating it); it's the whole goddamned ball of wax. If no one whizzed in bottles, parked in the bike lane, double parked in a one lane road, then the economy would grind to a goddamned halt. So we have to admit that we want the rules and norms of good taste flouted when it's to our benefit, or we have to admit that we've built an unjust world.

You might not realize that this was an asshole move, but it was absolutely an asshole move.

Really, really not cool and really out of touch.

Amazon will tell you that it is a completely separate subsidiary and act like they have no control over it. I called them about a driver who blew through a stop sign and furthermore did a hasty 3 point turn in a driveway almost hitting my car. I had to blow the horn the truck was inches away. They too are at the mercy of whatever algorithm tells them they should deliver and are punished otherwise. Customer service could not do anything they directed me to the delivery subsidiary who stonewalled me as well.

> 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.

They don't have time to use a proper restroom. That's why they're peeing in bottles.

Can you please not snitch on people like that and instead talk to them? There are dogs that piss on the street and nothing bad happens. If this becomes regular then yes, talk to them and if they don't stop report them. But seeing 1 indiscretion and pulling the trigger on the guy is not ok.

Blows me away that he/she would even consider trying to get the driver fired over this. That individual works for a poverty wage and clearly isn’t given time to use the restroom by their employer. And your first instinct is to get them fired. Disgusting.

Off topic, but I'm curious. Say a human empties a pee bottle on a public sewer drain and a dog pees on that same drain. I don't see much difference except one of them urinated in public. Chemically they're the same, but I'm more repulsed by the human waste, why is that?

Probably because we hold humans to a higher standard than animals - we've all been raised to hold it until it's appropriate which is when we're inside and on a toilet. Some animals can be potty trained, it's a bit weird but good for them - most animals are just trained to not wee on the couch and outdoors is left wide open for them as they need. It's pretty socially acceptable for dogs to pee in public and, if you found it offensive, I am afraid I have some bad news for you about the miniature public outhouses they build for squirrels.

Interesting though experiment.

Similarly, why do humans sometimes need to pay for urinating (I'm looking at you German SaniUnfair), but animals don't?

You couldn't have asked him in during covid and they couldn't have asked. Unless this was really close to your front door you should have let it go.

The fact that you reported it is far more disgusting and petty than a driver dumping it out.

Lack of available bathrooms across cities is a big problem in and of itself.

Especially with covid, where are you supposed to pee if you're spending all day driving around doing deliveries or as a taxi driver?

Why would you send the photo to Amazon? You send that to a labor reporter or social media. Are you trying to get this guy fired??

I watched my ikea delivery driver pee on the hill across from my place right before delivering the package to me. it's probably not a solely amazon thing even though they are well known for it.

There are certain places near my house where some rideshare drivers like to idle, where the gutter always has soda bottles full of urine in it.

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.

Not paying for proper facilities for maintenance and breaks is just what we in the biz call "disrupting". You might be able to undercut an entrenched business a bit by using fancy tech stuff - but using fancy tech stuff and ignoring the laws everyone else has to follow? That's where the money is.

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.

To bring it back to Amazon, it's even better if you can plausibly deny breaking the rules by orchestrating your system such that the people you're heavily incentivizing to break the rules and generally behave antisocially are non-employee business associates who you very clearly told (in very fine print) not to break the rules.

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

What were the biggest factors in reporting them? The average delivery driver works way harder and probably commits way fewer immoral actions then the average HN user for a fraction of the salary.

> probably commits way fewer immoral actions

Wow. This seems loaded, unmeasurable, and very unrelated to anyones job.

Ever heard of "trucker bombs"? There is nothing stopping a truck driver from stopping for pee breaks. They choose not to to save time.

> This was a tough call

Dude...

Next time, mind your own business.

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