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Comment by TurkishPoptart | Hacker News Reader

I was fired by an algorithm in early 2019 when working for Amazon Flex. Basically, on the app, "blocks" would appear, which would be a set $ amount for approximate X number of deliveries to X location. Then you would drive to a "fulfillment" center to pick up your boxes. You had to be quick to grab a block before someone else did. Occasionally I would drop a block and grab a higher-yielding one. It wasn't clear to me that this was frowned upon by the app. After a few weeks of this work, I was "deactivated" without any warning. I called their customer "service" line and was told that I was deactivated in their system and there was no recourse for me. That really sucked.

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The gig economy industry has managed to steal back decades worth of workers rights, and the worst thing is that this will take decades to undo.

Almost everyone has been groomed to defend these corporate behemots' rights to stomp on our lives like if they were defending the right of a small mom and pop shop to kick out a rowdy drunkard.

When a company has a bigger revenue than most contries' gdp they shouldn't play by the same rules, they need to be held to a different set of standards.

> The gig economy industry has managed to steal back decades worth of workers rights

If workers didn't think these jobs were better options than whatever existed before, they'd still be working jobs other than these.

People opted in to this.

Workers were convinced that the jobs are better based on advertising from these companies. That doesn't mean the jobs actually are better options.

The jobs aren't outcomes of nature. The legal and regulatory landscape creates a situation where these are the best jobs available.

Those laws and the regulators may be strongly influenced by deep-pocketed employers such as Amazon.

That, or maybe a bunch of better jobs went away.

eh, the gig economy is just the tail of republicans antilabor laws.

technology is more ruthless in its application

The other side likes that too, I can assure you. Otherwise they would tackle it through legislation. They won't and it is not due to a lack of ability or that their mechanisms are shot down. They just need to blame it on the other club and some people that believe them. Et voilà...

Absolutely true,

When I see people slaving away on a bicycle in any kind of weather, delivering groceries or boxes of food, I feel pity. I know they earn very little, have very few benefits, and literally zero chance of moving up. It's a dead end job. It's modern poverty. It's the tiny house equivalent of a job.

I used to bike for Deliveroo in France, as a delivery driver. Nowadays people pay refugees and illegal immigrants 100€ a week for them to deliver in their name.

I've personally met those refugees, I've personally heard their slavers boasting about it. I'd estimate their proportion in Paris around 30% of all Deliveroo drivers. In smaller cities it's not as common.

These slavers will open accounts in the name of their whole family, and they keep 75% of what those poor guys will make.

> When a company has a bigger revenue than most contries' gdp they shouldn't play by the same rules, they need to be held to a different set of standards.

This is the part where it stops making sense to me. I don't see why it's morally more just for a mom and pop shop to abuse workers than it is for a big corporation. If it's wrong to treat workers poorly, it should be wrong for everyone to treat workers poorly. This logic implies that the amount you're "allowed" to abuse your workers is on a sliding scale with income. Big corporations should be nice to workers, small businesses are allowed to not be nice to workers, so are businesses in poor countries allowed to be outright awful to their workers? It sounds like the start of a justification for slavery in third world countries.

You can make the argument that Amazon can afford it, and mom and pop shops can't, but I don't find that a convincing argument. It bears the same issues as above. If we establish a sliding scale, we can't simply ignore the implications at the extremes.

Personally, I think we just need to raise the bar across the board. It's bad when Amazon does it, and it's bad when small businesses do it. Small businesses shouldn't get a break on labor violations.

> I don't see why it's morally more just for a mom and pop shop to abuse workers than it is for a big corporation.

You are of course right, and we don't want abuse at either scale. I think GP is also relying on mom and pop shops not having enough economic power to abuse workers at that level.

A local business usually can't afford burning through workers like cigarettes, it would go out of business at the 3rd contractor (and hopefully these 3 people can take legal action without a barrage of lawyers sucking their life savings).

Amazon can afford to burn through thousands without seeing any clear impact on its bottomline. That's where rules should be stricter IMO.

This reads like from some dystopian sci-fi book.

You're in one

It’s better to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission.

But what happens when there is no one to ask for forgiveness from?

Don’t you ever think – “what would the world be like if the bad guys won?” Who said they didn’t? It is all in the eye of the beholder. If we apply some ethics like the golden rule to modern existence, then you spend your time debating where to apply it because it’s near impossible.

Yet still preferable to the alternative

I guess we could literally be shot as soon as you leave the womb, so I guess you're right

I'll bite, what's the alternative?

At a minimum, this is a false dichotomy. Stopping for a moment to think creatively, there are many alternatives. Many of those alternatives would probably serve human welfare better than what we have today.

Living in the country that produces and exports the most weapons, and that also extracts the most hydrocarbons, I came to believe that I lived a superior life via effective propaganda. Now I come to see that these actions are not only against my values, but that they also cause great harm.

There must be superior alternatives.

I’m really curious, as another citizen of that country, how does the exports of weapons to foreign places cause us personal harm?

I have been reading SF for most of my entire life and I am not sure I can think of a single book that presented "de facto rule by extremely powerful corporations" as a good thing. They're pretty much always villains when they show up.

By the time I've eaten lunch, I've been exposed to propaganda from every media portal in a fairly relentless manner both in the form of advertising and manufactured messages disguised as news. That may include comments created by algorithms and posted by bots impersonating persons. I can't deny that existence increasingly feels inauthentic by design and that alone creates subtle anxiety every day. Add in the constant high-attention grabbing headlines, images, or videos – are those the cause of my escapist dreams?

Like you, science fiction has been a cornerstone of my life since early childhood. For the longest time, I believed our digital selves we're capable of being functional alter egos in a new digital medium separated from physical existence, but that is not what happened. Instead, our real selves and the digital world have merged and in many ways they are inseparable. The pitfalls of this intertwined world are all too visible as society finds itself in drastic divides ranging from political views to music tastes. This coming from someone who believed positive technology advancements would outweigh the negatives, but I can only see the downsides lately. I think I lost the plot and it is all too blurry now. Maybe I need a vacation.

to me it sounds idiotic. i guess if you consider idiocracy a dystopia. "the computer did the auto-layoff thing and now we don't have any money!"

Amazon has plenty of money though? Their bet is that no matter how badly they treat their workers, there will be more. They seem to be right. Worse case they have to start treating them well now and still saved all that money in the past. Hardly idiocracy.

brawno made a lot of money too

oh, i just realized that maybe you don't know i'm referring to the movie "idiocracy".

Oh, I knew the reference,I just had you confused.I thought you meant Amazon was the idiot running out of money in this situation, but I think now you meant the workers working for them are? That makes more sense.

The only question was how much poo we wanted there to be.

Though gross, That one sentence should tell us their entire line of thinking.

Absolutely nothing will happen to them and they know it. Mistreat one guy, there are 10 others to take his place. There is zero incentive to treat people well.

Unionizing would help, but that doesn’t seem to be happening either

This is the reality for anyone working in an app-based marketplace. The workers are the product, and they're treated like a product.

More like the scene from Maximum Overdrive where the trucks come to the fuel station and demand to be filled with fuel.

This makes me think of the part of the GDPR that deals with automated decision making: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

"The UK GDPR gives people the right not to be subject to solely automated decisions, including profiling, which have a legal or similarly significant effect on them." I guess that would probably be buried in an employment contract at Amazon, but it might form the basis for a court case if it wasn't actually spelt out.

Just because a human has designed the algorithm doesn't make it non-automated: "A process might still be considered solely automated if a human inputs the data to be processed, and then the decision-making is carried out by an automated system. A process won’t be considered solely automated if someone weighs up and interprets the result of an automated decision before applying it to the individual."

Even of spelt out in the contract, laws trump contracts. Just a matter of having the patience, and money, to fight the court battle…

Yeah, for sure. But if GP was fired like this then a bet a bunch of people were, and if they were in the EU they might be able to make it a class action.

> Just because a human has designed the algorithm doesn't make it non-automated: "A process might still be considered solely automated if a human inputs the data to be processed, and then the decision-making is carried out by an automated system. A process won’t be considered solely automated if someone weighs up and interprets the result of an automated decision before applying it to the individual."

Lawyers have a tendency to create employment for other lawyer-type professions it seems.

I think this is horrible treatment. For one, it was not transparent as to what's happening. For two, the termination was instant with no recourse.

I don't think human vs automation is the question here. This would not look better if a human boss would evaluate you, and just say in one morning that you're fired, so don't come in. Like in the Back to the Future movie.

People say you miss out on things by not owning a smartphone but I think it's becoming increasingly clear that you really don't.

I was working in early 2019 as well. I used a program to grab blocks quickly instead of just looking at the screen for hours to wait for a block. I did receive an email warning but did not get fired. I also spoofed location so I can tell the app I am at the warehouse on time even if I was late.

> I also spoofed location so I can tell the app I am at the warehouse on time even if I was late.

This is called fraud. It isn't legal.

By using a fraud retransmitter algorithim, you can spoof the system to retrofit the app and hyperconverge onto an optimal, legal solution.

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