California bill passes, giving Amazon workers power to fight speed quotas
npr.org
npr.org
Lets give them a quota in attention points to point out - or be fired.
Reminds me of when people were claiming ADA exemptions for masks, as a "loophole". Then folks involved in the ADA point out it wasn't a loophole, because it was illegal to claim an exemption if you have a real condition.
Except the way laws like the ADA and HIPAA are written, it's literally impossible in most cases to check if someone is lying or not. So unless you're ready to literally gamble on your guts feeling (they can't sue you for discrimination if it was indeed false, but you have no way to check!), you couldn't do anything.
But hey, it's against the law, so I'm sure people won't lie.
See https://www.scribd.com/document/407590982/Amazon-Termination...
Scroll down to "The system also tracks an associates time off task" It basically admits that "time off task" doesn't automatically account for bathroom breaks. You have to ask a manager to include each one, during the conversation where you're being scolded for high "time off task"! The wording in this section is Amazon's wording, too. Oof.
Edit: After a bit of searching, there don't appear to be any federal laws requiring breaks in the US, and there are many states that don't have any either.
Breaks are legally mandated a lot of places where people don't get them. I've known many hundreds of people that have worked in many thousands of restaurants in all positions in the northeast cities— NY, Boston, etc. Breaks for restaurant workers— aside from 5ish minute cigarette breaks— though legally mandated, are nearly unheard of. More often than not, the much exalted 'family meal' is cheap leftovers eaten while standing up in a back hallway or while doing other work.
It's also very common for cooks to be given rules like "don't punch in more than 30 minutes before service, or punch out more than 30 minutes after service" even though you've got 2+ hours of setup and cleanup which you'll get fired for not completing. It's obviously not legal, but restaurant back of the house workers are so disempowered on a whole, that it really doesn't matter.
If you're interested in seeing more about the local restaurant work culture, check out the saga of a Boston-based pizza chain "The Upper Crust." Their brazenness was based in experience for how these things were generally handled. The fact that they were punished for their behavior is the exception rather than the rule. Almost all restaurant work complaints that get sent to the AG are ignore. I know because I've sent 4, personally, for outright wage theft and know many others that sent complaints in for similar problems.
This is obviously not true in corporate environments with more uniform employment policies.
I saw a Polish kapo beat someone who said he was too sick to work. It's almost a concentration camp out there but most of the public will never know. One day we will run out of folks to exploit but until then full steam ahead I suppose.
I was friends/coworkers with a 19 year old Mexican American mom who had just extricated herself from a small, c-grade traveling circus in Texas. A few months after joining them, the ringmaster woke her up every morning demanding she start training on the trapeze immediately, and would punch her in the stomach every day she refused. She was 16 years old and pregnant.
Check out this Frontline documentary on labor trafficking in the us:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/inside-the-hidden...
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/trafficked-in-americ...
If every worker would just take their breaks, and allow their quotas to slip, what is Amazon going to do? Fire everyone? But instead, individuals decide to look out for themselves first, and defect, which causes everyone to be miserable, including themselves.
I don't blame them in the slightest for this, but it still makes me sad. I guess this is what unions are for. Oh wait, Amazon engages in union-busting, never mind.
The thing I constantly find weird about California regulation these days is how short sighted and micro-managey it all is. This one clearly is explicitly targeted at Amazon, the AB5/Prop 22 pair is specifically targeted at Uber/Lyft, etc.
It strikes me as a deep lack of understanding about how policy making is supposed to work. Ideally, policy is supposed to be something you get experts to research holistically, present data on and implement based on certain expectations of how pros and cons are supposed to play out. California policy making looks to me more like a reactive game of whack-a-mole, trying to put out whatever is the fire du jour with hacks and bandaids and hoping the new rules don't cause any collateral damage.
And if you look at Universities, well good luck. They have a known ideological bent that would cause recommendations that are skewed the other way.
I think the underlying problem is that these employers have disproportionate power, influence, and resources, along with endless creativity. If they can't get the government fully on their side every time, they'd rather it be dysfunctional.
I was thinking exactly this while reading this article. I was really hoping to read that this was a much more generic law that strengthens worker protections, that also just happens to help with the problems in Amazon warehouses. But, nope, just feels like "injustice whack-a-mole". That's not a good way to develop policy at all.
These are corporations with more power than nation states with CEO's having more personal power than many dictators.
If you want generic laws, then break up these companies into smaller ones.
The way the quotas get set is kind of as a bell curve. You set quotas, including threshold for promotions, as some where you'll get let go. They hire people, and those folks thrive to meet the quota/make more money. If everyone is doing so well that the tip of the bell curve is too much to the right, they increase the quota. If they have trouble hiring and everyone's leaving, or if they end up needing to let go too many people, they lower it.
Of course, a company could push it way too far if they have enough power and a big enough employee pool. They can then put super high quotas and only keep people who can push it that far (probably where the whole "peeing in bottles" come from).
The concept itself isn't that weird. Maybe weird to people who mostly worked in salaried jobs that are hard to quantify.
Where it becomes a problem is when too many people are desperate enough for money that they're willing to literally harm themselves to meet their quotas or get promoted. That's probably where regulators came from with this type of law. I didn't read it, but that sounds really tough to implement.
Universal healthcare and UBI are would enable much more employer freedom in defining working conditions.
Living has always required energy, effort, and skill. How can we get around this without some sort of parasitic relationship? Do you have any recommendation for some reading for a sustainable model? From my understanding, UBI is largely unproven.
So people will still want to work. But they no longer are forced to take any job just to survive.
I'm sorry I don't have reading recommendations. This doesn't mean they don't exist, I am just not deep enough into this topic to ever have looked for them.
We'd need to, as a society, draw a line in the sand as to what "the basics" are (it's extremely subjective. I think MIT or Harvard has a site with threshold they consider the minimum, but it uses arbitrary metric like expected amount of kids, and it's by city).
Once we pick, while we should always be ready to revisit, it can't be a constant thing. If folks are robbing CVS saying they wouldn't if UBI was higher (assuming it was set to a reasonable amount to begin with. A big if), we're not much better off than where we are now.
It seem that far to often management just keep increasing the productivity requirements, squeezing more and more blood from the stones of the workforce with zero regard for the health and wellbeing of the regular employees.
... no matter how much time you spend in meetings.
Maybe the lesson is that when a metric becomes tangible, expectations to meet/exceed those metrics becomes an all-encompassing aspect of the job.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
It's not odd at all when you consider how long of an exemption list AB-5 came with.
rather, every law should scale with (economic and political) power, to create fairer markets, better representation, and more equitability, as conglomerates of any sort should be designed to benefit the public at large, not the principals only. for instance, fines for corporate malfeasance should be much higher proportionally than for small businesses (who have little/no market power). some laws try to approximate this with step functions, often a single cutoff (like "greater than 50 employees"), but those practically invite evasion (e.g., by creating 50-employee subsidiaries).
You take the explicit metric and make it unsaid. Over the course of a few months, if a worker isn't meeting their "goal", they're given a generic performance warning. If they don't improve, they're terminated.
This is why workers need a way to push back on quotas.
I'm not advocating this. But it's how most management is done. Pushing back only on quotas, without otherwise empowering the labor force, will almost certainly lead to such a regression.
define poor performers.
I've work for abusive corporations that were setting impossible goals and called employees "poor performers" and fired them when these impossible goals were not met.
(I don't love this sort of law, but it'll probably give these workers a better outcome than they have now, and likely a better outcome than the law that we're talking about here.)
At 200 per hour each customer paid 18 seconds in salary. At 15 usd/h that is 7.5 cent.
You could double the salary and half the load and pay 30 cents per customer.
i wouldnt care. on 50 usd average order its nothing
It seems like instead you could make the quotas challenging, but not to an extent that they're impossible for most people to meet without injuring themselves. You could also have some (but not infinite) flexibility to allow for bathroom and lunch breaks.
The problem seems to be that Amazon has ahead of time decided the level of "productivity" they want, as well as the amount of money they want to spend on labor, instead of actually measuring bad/average/good productivity on its own, and then setting quotas (and expectations of labor cost) based on that.
There is another obvious solution here. Increase budgets for Earned-Income-Tax-Credits or initiate a Universal Basic Income. This would increase the baseline standard-of-living for all workers, so that they would have better alternatives to what Amazon is offering. Of course, this would also mean that the average taxpayer would need to accept his obligations to his fellow citizen, and shoulder the cost of doing so. Not nearly as popular as outsourcing this responsibility to private companies.
1: set of people willing to take a job with decent pay/benefits and then find out over the course of probably months that they are in a current day episode of Black Mirror where the job has been scientifically designed to burn them out.
2: set of people willing to take a job for minimum wage with the "freedom" to hit stretch goals and make their wildest dreams come true!
I claim that set 1 has more people in it.
I offer into evidence the fact that Amazon already chose #1 when choosing #2 would have been vastly more cost effective for them if the sets contained the same number of people.
I agree that set 1 is larger and preferable to Amazon. But if set 1 is outlawed, they will simply transition to set 2 instead. Or give everyone a pay cut and hire more people. Not pay their employees the same wage for lower output.
Entrepreneur B creates a company specifically designed to require minimal labor. He hires only a small number of workers, mostly high-earning and white collar professionals. His company earns $1 billion in annual profits.
I would argue that both entrepreneurs should be equally obligated to support the social safety net. And both companies should be taxed equally to fund the social safety net. Imposing higher taxes and obligations onto entrepreneur A and his company, is a perverse way of punishing entrepreneurs for pursuing labor-intensive business models which create more job opportunities for low-wage workers. If anything, we should be doing the opposite.
You can only collude with someone you were in competition with. Shareholders of the same company by definition cannot collude with each other because they are not competing. Collusion would be Walmart and Target and Costco and Amazon unionizing together to negotiate wages.
Shareholder votes are public, but anonymous. The more typical scenario is that you hold on to the shares and create demand for the stock as a sign of your approval. Unless you own tens of thousands or more shares, you were probably not invited to the perfectly legal but private discussions about the proposals.
Shareholders recently voted against every single proposal that was also opposed by Amazon.[1]
[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2021/final-tally-amazon-shareholder...
I said "can openly" collude, not plain unadorned collude.
Amazon buys a competitor and suddenly what would be considered collusion prior is washed clean, because someone else could bid too? My whole point is how silly this transformation from illegal to legal is, if at the same time you want to prevent unions.
Unions BTW have similar restrictions to your second half of your comment (secondary strikes are illegal).
How often have you seen linepersons diligently working after a heavy storm while doing the pee-pee dance?
I think the problem is that Amazon probably does this completely backwards. Quotas should be based on tracking the output of all your workers and deciding on some percentile to use as a baseline. And this output needs to be tracked when no quotas are in place, so you get an idea of what "normal" work looks like.
Instead, I expect that Amazon essentially says "we want at least X packages to move through here every Y hours, and we want to spend no more than $A on warehouse workers, so that means we'll hire no more than B workers, so they'll just have to work as hard as it takes". That's obviously a recipe for unrealistic expectations and a lot of overwork.
Since you bring up unions, the quotas are almost certainly negotiated by the union, so (hopefully) what's negotiated will be much fairer to the workers. But of course Amazon fights against their warehouse workers unionizing, in no small part due to this.
Sure, unions have problems and labor rights are inconvenient for businesses. At the end of the day, people deserve dignity and a less miserable work experience than they getting today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_22
You know drivers can just stop working if they don't like the wage right?
Which is why there aren't many large-scale pure direct democracies out there. Most governments are set up to have at least some checks and balances to protect minority components from majority rule.
A bunch of Uber drivers I've spoken to do it as a side thing, to supplement income from other sources. The conundrum is that there are a lot of casual drivers and fewer full time ones, and those two groups generally sit on opposite ends of the debate (casuals don't want to be forced to choose between driving and their other income sources, and full time ones want employee benefits)
Ultimately, it doesn't boil down to something as sinister as a secret desire for indentured servitude, it's simply a matter of everyone being selfish. Unions are also a form of people being selfish (though collectively). IMHO, the answer isn't in bickering on whose selfishness is more warranted, it'd be more apt to question why isn't a social net provided by the government itself in the first place (in the form of public healthcare, unemployment insurance, etc) if they deem it important enough to legislate?
This is a clear corporate-money-dictating-politics thing. I used to joke that if the self-driving car thing doesn't pan out, there's a always a consultancy pivot ready for Uber. "Don't like a law? Have some taxes due? No sweat, for $20/vote we can make those pesky taxes disappear!"
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/17/uber-ly... - Anecdotally confirmed to me with some canvassing last year as well, many (easily more than 23%) were going to vote "Yes" since they misinterpreted the question to be the exact opposite
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/842 (H.R.842 - Protecting the Right to Organize Act of 2021)
It seems there are people who feel any organized entity with power is bad. Be it government, or union - the effect is the same. I can definitely agree that it can be bad, but to me it's the only entity that should be representing me. Corporations will have no incentive aligned with myself. Unions/Governments serve as a way to organize the people at large. Which to me is a wholly good thing.
This organization however does not come without risks. I think where we fail as a civilization is recognizing this power dynamic and finding ways to monitor corruption. I want to give a government power, but i also need ways to monitor them. Without know if/when an organization becomes corrupted we have no way of healing, and it will always be doomed to fail in the worst way.
I'm very pro-union. However we need to figure out monitoring. In Governments, and Unions. Otherwise in my view it's just a matter of time before they fail.
I agree with your desire for oversight and accountability for either, but there is a difference of at least institutional momentum. I don't think anyone would consider institutional momentum of the US government to be aligned with the interests of workers. I think unions have an opportunity to be better and more explicitly aligned with those interests. As an employee previously part of a union, the adversarial relationship between unions and businesses seems to, at the end, strike a balance between the competing interests of the workers and the business. A business without unions can be like a courtroom without public defenders: not a great place to be the little guy.
I don't think that's true. Those people are typically very comfortable with one "organized entity with power" that you're leaving out: private capital in its various forms. What they're doing is actually defending that against any challenges to its power.
Usually those people are laborers like the rest of us, but they've been indoctrinated to identify with interests other than their own (often reinforced by having a slightly higher status than most other laborers, or by unlikely-to-be-met aspirations of hitting the jackpot and becoming a wealthy capitalist themselves).
Private capital is not "one organized entity", especially not in "its various forms".
In most cases it's at least as organized as unions. Also, a decentralized entity is still an entity.
But my point stands, there are very, very few people who actually feel "any organized entity with power is bad." If it seems that way, something's being left out of the analysis.
It's not lost on me either that a vote of 3000 cast votes is not representative of every amazon warehouse, but I would think if it's really bad the vote would be much closer.
https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/nlrb-announces...
> The National Labor Relations Board has determined that Amazon violated labor law after workers at its Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse tried to join a union, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers Union said Monday.
> The director who presided over the NLRB hearing will recommend whether a new election is conducted, the union said in a statement, but the final decision whether workers will be allowed to cast new ballots and form a union ultimately lies with the director of the regional NLRB office based in Atlanta.
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/09/982139494/its-a-no-amazon-war...
Amazon does not choose where unions try to organize, unions do.
Skilled workers are scarce, so they already have negotiating power at the individual level and collective bargaining is just overhead and another bureaucracy to take a vig that could have gone into your paycheck.
Unskilled workers aren't scarce, so what happens if they unionize? The union strikes, the company hires a different set of unskilled workers and all the union workers get is laid off.
This is especially true for an Amazon warehouse because there are thousands of them all over the world. If the workers at a warehouse near San Francisco strike, not only can they easily hire different workers, they can just send everybody their stuff from another warehouse in Nevada or any of a thousand other places.
What unskilled workers need isn't a union, it's some way to make unskilled labor more scarce, e.g. a UBI so that people aren't so desperate for a job and can hold out for better pay and working conditions.
Maybe don't allow employers to hire 10's of millions of illegal immigrants under the table?
The problem for those workers was that although they were skilled labor, the number of employers who needed auto workers was small enough for them to act as a cartel. The concentrated market offset the negotiating power of a skilled individual, but at the same time, a company that employed a third of the auto workers in the country couldn't just replace them all if they went on strike.
But that was kind of a pathological circumstance and the better solution in that case is to do some trust busting. Or if competition increases on its own as it did from the Japanese automakers during the oil crisis.
The closest thing to that in the modern economy is the relationship between app developers and platform app stores. It's the same sort of cartelized market. But some trust busting would work there too.
And other markets don't look like that. If you're actually an employee of Google or Apple, they don't have anything like market power in that labor market, because it's the same skillset to go and work for Facebook or Microsoft or Netflix or a million other places including a large number of smaller companies and startups. And if you're a worker at an Amazon warehouse, it's not skilled labor.
> My understanding is they've been sharply eroded, but minimum wage and a 40 hour work week alone seem like incredible improvements.
Most of the claimed victories were symbolic, because they were things that were happening anyway and then legislators passed laws requiring them after they'd mostly already happened so they could say they were doing something.
Workers expect to be paid more to work 80 hours instead of 40, so given the choice between paying one worker for 80 hours and two workers for 40 hours, employers found the second option led to higher worker productivity and reliability because the workers weren't constantly exhausted and making mistakes and didn't as often quit from burnout.
Around 2% of people in the US make minimum wage. In other words, ~98% of employers pay more than that even though the law doesn't require them to, because the market does. And even without minimum wage, the other 2% would be making around the same amount of money, because the employer still has to offer enough to get the employee to accept the job.
Minimum wage is even harmful to employees because it forces them into bad trade offs they otherwise wouldn't have taken. There might have been a job paying $6/hour across the street from your apartment, but it goes away if minimum wage is $7.25 and then you have to take a job at $7.25 which is an hour away and costs you more than $1.25/hour in commuting expenses, plus the lost time and significantly increased risk of a car accident.
Likewise, the limit on hours or requirements to pay overtime can hurt workers, because if you need the extra hours, people end up taking a second job instead, which still doesn't pay time and a half but now you have two commutes instead of having one commute to a single job where you take two shifts.
The things that help workers are the things that actually increase their negotiating power. Artificial price controls don't really do that, because when your negotiating power isn't actually any better, you just end up forced to accept worse terms on some other dimension, like the longer commute.
I don't know that I'd be so sure about that: https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-offer-415-million-to-...
I agree that the market is larger, but that doesn't keep some of the big players from banding together against employee interests.
I guess there's no hard requirement that unions get involved in pay negotiations, and that's the only one I know of that seems to have workers' pay in-line with actual market factors. It's not like Tom Brady has to get paid the same amount as a lesser-performing quarterback just because they've been doing it the same amount of years.
Here in Germany, unions work as intended. The solution is simple: you can't be fired for participating in a strike. There, problem solved, no UBI necessary.
> The problem with unions is that skilled workers don't need them
Also wrong. There a many unions for skilled workers in Germany.
If you're on strike you're not showing up so you're not getting paid. They just let you stay on strike forever and in the meantime hire somebody else.
Assuming they don't just close the warehouse, so that you're not getting fired for going on strike, you're getting laid off because the job no longer exists.
But they're not, because it's unskilled labor. They can just hire anyone off the street.
> And closing a warehouse is a drastic measure that will undoubtedly cause harm to the company's finances.
If you close a warehouse, it's still a warehouse. You sell it to Walmart or Target and pretty much get all of your money back.
That's the problem with the whole thing. A strike is brinkmanship. It hurts the workers and the company both. The idea is that if you're willing to hold out longer than they are, you can get what you want. Which you might be able to do if going on strike shuts down their whole business.
But going on strike only causes the 10112 mile journey the goods take from source to destination to become a 10188 mile journey. They just route it through some other path. From the company's perspective it's a mild inconvenience that they could suffer indefinitely without ever feeling the need to concede anything over it.
Whereas for the warehouse workers, the longer they strike the longer they're not getting paid. So they blink first, and the company knows they will, so the union can't gain anything from striking and is consequently useless.
No, they can't, not quickly. First they have to find a large number of new hires (which takes time), then those new hires have to be taught how to use the equipment and do the job in general (which takes time), then it takes even more time until they're fully productive.
> They just route it through some other path.
You have this weird idea that only a single warehouse would be put on strike. Why? Do you think there would be one union per warehouse?
> Whereas for the warehouse workers, the longer they strike the longer they're not getting paid.
The way this typically works is that workers pay union dues, some of which is used to replace their pay during a strike. Those funds aren't endless, but usually sufficient to force the company to make concessions.
Again, unions actually work outside the US. Why are you ignoring the evidence that they do?
Totally disagree with this. Being skilled at your job doesn't necessarily mean you are skilled at negotiating your pay or working conditions. These are entirely different skills. We all know people who are not as good at their jobs, but are smooth talkers and good negotiators, and vice versa is true, too. I know for sure that I could be making a lot more if I had a professional negotiator, whose job and dedicated skill it was to negotiate, either collectively bargaining or bargaining on my behalf.
Most of the fields I think of when I think of successful unions in the US are ones I consider skilled
-teachers
-electricians
-carpenters
-airline pilots
-actors
Public sector unions are negotiating with a monopoly. In that sense they actually do something. The problem is that the monopoly is the government and then the union is a labor monopoly acting in opposition to the public rather than a capitalist private business. This is great for teachers but terrible for students and parents and taxpayers.
The unions in licensed industries are unions because the law privileges unions, but in practice they're lobbying organizations. Your local electrician doesn't need a union to negotiate with you when you want a generator panel installed in your house. Their actual purpose is regulatory capture, and then you have the same problem as the teachers unions, e.g. the union lobbies to make it harder for people to become electricians to reduce competition to the detriment of prospective electricians and the general public who then has to pay more for the services of the people already in the club.
And then Hollywood is a cartel in need of some antitrust enforcement, which is the one place where unions actually do something useful (but the better solution is still busting the trust).
Given how poorly public K-12 teachers are paid in the US, I don't think this is an accurate statement.
On top of that, teachers unions cause all the usual non-monetary harms, like preventing teachers who deserve to be fired from being fired, or driving off eager young teachers with stale seniority rules.
Asking for sources is pedantic when anybody can type "US median teacher salary" into google themselves, but here it is on the BLS website:
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/mobil...
Median average pay for all workers is $42k compared to $61k for teachers. Saying that they make twice as much money is either a significant mathematical error or intentionally disingenuous.
Moreover, you still didn't address the fact that teachers have a significant debt load
https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/depth...
>Overall, educators borrowed an average of $55,800—and still owe an average $58,700 because of low salaries and hefty interest rates—but those amounts vary a lot, depending on age and race.
>It’s worse for young educators. Because of rising tuition costs, two of out three educators under the age of 35 borrowed for college, compared to 27 percent of those 61 and up. Additionally, nearly half of young educators borrowed more than $65,000, compared to 13 percent of educators 61 and over. Nonetheless, many older educators are still struggling. In fact, more than a quarter of educators over the age of 61 still haven’t paid off their student debt. Of those, more than a third still owe at least $45,000.
Entirely disagree. Unions for skilled workers would mean that when you go into surgery for a car accident the doctor who is putting you back together actually had a full night of sleep that day.
Don’t actually enforce current laws on bathroom access and worker safety, and instead, just layer on new laws that “make it more illegal”.
Truly bizarre.
I'm sure there are more productive or fulfilling things for people to be doing than shuffling boxes around.
I guess my point is that the potential for automation doesn't seem a compelling argument to worsen working conditions
The root of the problem is that Amazon's $15/hr minimum attracts talent as a result of the price of things, including rent, continuing to rise, sometimes up to 15% YOY - people are often required to either work 16 hours a day at 2 jobs or work 8-10 hours at Amazon to reach the minimum income needed to have nice-enough living conditions.
Regarding the matter of education, it is not always an option to do what ones enjoy for a living no matter the acquired knowledge and the degree that confirms that. Some work is more valued than other. The market, we, decide that by our selective spending. One can become expert in the ancient history and end up working at Starbucks just because there is no need for their knowledge.
I love the irony that they work in "Fufillment Centers".
>Now unionize!
And the comment is already [dead]. That feels like it could only happen if there were bots downvoting instantly
Flagged to death will say both flagged and dead.
And for good reason, judging by their other comments.