Amazon’s answer to delivery driver shortage: Pot smokers

“If a delivery associate is impaired at work and tests positive post-accident or due to reasonable suspicion, that person would no longer be permitted to perform services for Amazon,” she said.

To get the contract you must be the lowest bidder. In order to do that you need to pay drivers as little as possible. Raising wages means losing money.

This is an extension of prison labor.

I mean, sure, Amazon can raise their wages to compete, and then we run out of... school bus drivers? I'm not sure that's any better.

At a point, you either need to increase the labor pool (by pulling people out of unemployment, retirement, etc) or seriously automate the profession, and we're just not there with delivery services right now.

Edit: Regulate as in drug testing for past use in an employment context, like what the story is talking about.

some of the highest performers I have ever worked with, and pot was a daily for them.

I know this is unpopular on internet news sites but I assure you that your social reputation isn’t that great if you smoke the stuff generally and that’s not going to change because of the propensity of people to be unreliable or dicks. The only thing that’s faulty is your perception of it.

But I have worked with many frequent users who smoked daily, and their job. They didn't mind doing terrible jobs.

I'm suprised people arn't talking about habitual pot smokers vs. occasional. If used to smoking--it's no big deal.

Same with alcohol. An alcoholic can drive perfectly well at .08, or a bit higher. An occasional drinker probally shouldn't be drinking and driving.

I heard TX takes into account tolerance when prosecuting DUI's.

Could be better informed by numbers here. But hard to say because there aren't reliable tests for "high right now", and maybe not for "tired" either.

Yeah! All the millennials who can't buy a home are just self-inflected by not bidding high enough! Government policy certainly didn't' contribute to either!

False, at least where I am.

I learned to drive school bus, and they drug tested my class before we were allowed to test, and every month, there were random drug tests.

I quit after 1.5 days because of the stress and the constant push to get kids to school on time over safety.

Specifically, if it's known that these jobs test for Marijuana use, you're cutting off the portion of the applicant pool that knows this but still uses anyway, which stochastically reduces the likelihood that a candidate will eg show up to work intoxicated (fwiw, I'm a big fan of marijiana: I use it regularly, am a commensurately lighter drinker relative to my peers, and I'm pretty sure I'm making the right choice in terms of health and responsibility)

Like I said, it's an arbitrary bar and a path-dependent one, and a counterfactual equilibrium in which alcohol or another intoxicant was tested for would work just as well. But it's not irrational for employers to use it in certain labor market conditions. There are analogues in other labor markets, like requiring a college degree to be a firefighter; the false positive rate only really starts to matter if you start finding it difficult to find qualified applicants.

Tech jobs, by contrast, already have plenty of bars that their employees need to clear. In this context, any candidates swept up in blunt drug tests are likely to be false positives, and the use of the bar is a net negative for the employer.

Thus if it's determined that people need a certain reaction time to drive safely, that could be one thing tested.

Clearly setting the levels and the particular capabilities might well be contentious, but by aligning the test(s) with what's needed for the task it's fairer and in certain ways more robust: for instance, you could be under the threshold for alcohol/cannabis but if you combine that with legal medicines that cause drowsiness or simply happen to be extremely sleep deprived, you might pass a traditional test but the combined effects would lead one to fail a capability test.

It also helps in other ways too, such as fairly treating older people - you might be a sharp 75 year old and yet come up against some age limit. This let's you continue so long as you maintain the capabilities. Then if things start to change it's clear and takes some of the awkwardness out of the discussion about whether one is still fit for a job.

Of course the risk is that people are pseudoscientific or arbitrary in setting the capabilities to a level that doesn't align. We've all seen the unrealistic hiring prerequisites that managers ask for if left to decide (must have ten years experience of XYZ!) In the wrong hands these could be used unfairly (eg setting totally unrealistic levels precisely to screen out groups they don't want).

Do you mean to imply or assume that 50-somethings are unfamiliar with marijuana? It was already common for Baby Boomers, who are older than that.

What happens is that open-minded, pot-smoking 20-somethings think 50-somethings are close-minded and ignorant. Then 30 years later many of those 20-somethings are the exact same as their predecessors. Instead of dismissing the older generation, the 20-somethings might consider how they will avoid that fate.

The drunk driver will tell you that they're basically sober, and will be shocked when everyone can tell from their behavior that they're drunk.

The stoned driver will tell you how stoned they are, and will be concerned that everyone else on the street can tell from their behavior.

(These are, of course, broad generalizations. There will be exceptions.)

Who cares if they smoke pot when not working. We don't need high/impaired people on the road.

As long as they're not high/drunk when they're working, what's the issue?

It is antisocial behaviour, has a health impact and needs to have a consequence.

Do you fart in public? Should your butt be plugged in public too?

We should aalso inflict "consequence" on the SUV drivers who clog the roads in the town I live in; I have medically-compromised lungs, so the stink of diesel fumes isn't just an annoyance for me.

Let's also punish people who use wood-fired stoves in built-up areas. I live in a smoke-controlled zone, but for some reason builders are allowed to install these stoves in new-build homes, provided the model of stove meets certain standards. Well, that's cool; if the stove itself is safe, it must be the owner, operating it incorrectly. So let's give them some consequence too.

These offences aren't much like smoking a ciggie, which last about 7 minutes; the amount of fumes produced by a ICE per minute is much greater than that produced by a smoker, and the ICE generally runs for much longer than 7 minutes. Wood-fired stoves are normally run continuously for several hours, and not for heat; they are used to generate a nostalgic and aesthetic effect. If that harms others, or even if it just creates a bad smell, let's be harsh.

I'm also keen to impose "harsh consequence" on dog owners who allow their dog to deposit smelly stuff at my front gate, and who then fail to pick up that shit and take it away with them. This is a particular problem if you get a 3-week cold snap; 3 weeks-worth of dogshit all thaws at the same time, and the smell of dogshit coming out of deep-freeze pervades entire neighbourhoods. And of course, pot-smoke doesn't contain toxoplasmosis.