Amazon offers 'wellness chamber' for stressed staff
bbc.com
bbc.com
I do like Amazon, but they seem very afraid of unionization, and seem to be going overboard on what a spectacular caring employer they are, along with caring about the enviornment too.
I noticed millions are going to be spent on electric delivery trucks. Why do I fear our taxes will be going to their marketing hootenanny in forms of credits?
The Amazon version has the nickname 'despair closet' [1].
[1] https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/mental-healt...
Don't forget, everyone:
"Work hard, increase production, avoid accidents, and be happy."
[1]: THX 1183, https://youtu.be/U0YkPnwoYyE
It might work well.
It's akin to Foxconn's suicide nets.
I doubt that is what they are for.
It isn't at all clear this reflects bad workplace conditions. It could be innovative.
This is unacceptable.
> never mind actually clear the grounds, if you wanted to go to a park.
Now adding parks to these centers sounds like an idea. Of course most penny pincers would scream at the amount of money that would cost compared to a suicide booth.
(I'm fully supportive of people seeking wellness programs and therapy, but I squint and become cynical when employers offer it themselves, because the long-term alignment of interests isn't always clear)
Amazon could make it so the pay and working hours they offer their employees allowed them to spend more undisturbed time there.
I suppose wellness chambers are cheaper, though.
A company that indirectly punishes people for bathroom breaks can only end up abusing such initiative. If this booth is ever widely rolled out, it will eventually be used to weed out "low performers".
The hard part is factoring out/in the core philosophy of those metrics.
Like designing a target and then designing all your arrows to meet it.
The film attempts to compare the way corporations are systematically compelled to behave with what it claims are the DSM-IV's symptoms of psychopathy, e.g., the callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, the reckless disregard for the safety of others, the deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect the law.
edit: surprisingly positive review of the film in The Economist - https://www.economist.com/business/2004/05/06/the-lunatic-yo...
Now whether this is purely an outcome of the regulatory landscape and how the legal system works or the outcome of simply natural selection for large entities regardless of the environment I don’t know.
Anyone that ever was in a position of a people manager in any corporate entity even a relatively small one knows exactly just how poorly these policies are structured from an individual perspective.
I manage people right now and if I see someone struggling whether it’s on a personal level or professional one my options are severely limited.
If I have a direct report that is clearly struggling with some personal issues taking them out for a coffee and asking them about what is going on would pretty much be against company policies and could put my position and the company at risk. The best I could do is essentially send out a refresher on some mental health help line that the company uses anything else opens me to a liability.
It also assumes that managers are always competent enough and have sufficiently good soft skills to handle these sort of situations since involving HR is always “against the employee” as HR is there to protect the company.
Unions might solve this issue but sadly unions aren’t immune to the same corruption that plagues any sufficiently large and political organization so the union becomes self serving rather than serving the employees.
Some countries have better solutions like having an employee board in every company but in large corps these tend to be plagued by corruption as well.
>No popular idea ever has a single origin. But the idea that the sole purpose of a firm is to make money for its shareholders got going in a major way with an article by Milton Friedman in the New York Times on September 13, 1970.
Are you trying to say Amazon is the victim here, having no other choice other than inflicting this dystopian nonsense on their workers ?
Corporations are active participants in the creation of the regulatory state. They are not victims here.
This is art. You will hear a buzzer. When you hear the buzzer, stare at the art. BUZZ
If they were serious about that it would have comfy sofas and billiard tables or something.
Worker 1: "Where's Jerry?"
Worker 2: "Oh, he's in the booth again .."
Worker 1: "What a loser .."
God damn, it must be like the Stanford prison there, with the white collar workers not treating the blue collar ones as humans any more. But maybe I'm extrapolating from a conjecture.