“14-hour days with no break, no bathroom”: Jeff Bezos sued by former housekeeper | Hacker News Reader

“14-hour days with no break, no bathroom”: Jeff Bezos sued by former housekeeper

news.sky.com

34 pointswahnfrieden28 comments

The article says he had two companies managing his properties for him, I really doubt that Bezos was in charge of the housekeepers bathroom situation. This is just another instance of a corporation abusing their employees but it is tied to Jeff Bezos so it is getting more press.

I know hating Bezos is in vogue, but I would also point out that she was making 6 figures, got fired, and is now seeking a 9m payout. The fact that Bezos name is even mentioned instead of the company who actually manages these issues smells like someone trying to get a settlement to me.

Yeah it is despicable being ultra wealthy and desiring servants who need to do backflips to be neither seen or heard, not sure if it entitles you to $9m tho.

I hope he sees this :)

Relevant:

Jeffrey Epstein's household manual: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21128538-gx-606

> She was hired in 2019 for a housekeeping role that required her to "work around a family without being seen", according to the complaint.

Is this is a common requirement for a housekeeper to act like a burglar?

It’s a completely common, and actually expected, thing for maids employed by premium hotels. I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t do it for a household as well.

Interesting. I would suppose however that hotels have facilities (like, many backdoors) that can support such work, but households not necessarily?

Old English manors definitely have passages specifically for the household help. I’m not sure if American mansions are designed with that or not.

Next time I see reels of fancy houses or hotels I will imagine that there are maid-ghosts running away from the camera’s view.

Not sure how common this is but I recall that Larry Ellison Oracle took it a step further and has emitters on his cars and sensors on his home that tell the help to vanish by the time he shows up.

yes and preferred

many places built for this purpose have alternate hidden passages to assist with this

it is still seen as good service when this is done well

some restaurants accomplish this too and it is a night and day difference for wait staff to only appear at the correct time instead of hovering, guessing at an interval that is either too long or too short, obviously staring, or inattentive

Since this is a lawsuit, the plaintiff's side is the most extreme version of what happened, so the truth is likely more moderate, even if it's still ugly.

I'm reminded of this article about being a nanny (arguably higher on the totem pole than a maid) for ultra rich and how demanding (shitty) it is. So for a maid I'm not surprised it ends up being worse:

https://nationalpost.com/life/forget-the-money-and-perks-bei...

At least he’s consistent in his expectations of employees.

Why not just hire two housekeepers and divide the workload among them?

Is Jeff, or whoever the head butler is, so ruthlessly efficient that the cost of a second employee is intolerable?

This was the situation for all of the housekeepers, it's only one that is finally taking action due to repeat urinary tract infections caused by their job requirements.

To use the bathroom they had to crawl out of a window, down a hidden path, into a maintenance building, and then into a basement area to use the toilet.

The issue wasn't just the workload, the issue was that these workers were meant to be hidden from view, and certainly not allowed to share the same facilities as the owner. That sort of equality is unpalatable to the elite.

This behavior is not new and was common among royal courts of centuries past.

Does holding it cause UTIs? Also the article says she is taking action because she got fired, demanded a $9m payout, was denied, then filed the lawsuit. Not because she was getting so many UTIs.

It’s implied she sought the payout because of the current complaints

This is a company that takes pride in the fact that during their early days, they had to use shoddy desks made out of doors[1], so this comes as no surprise to me.

[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/how-a-door-became...

the doors were more expensive than actual desks, because they could only use solid wood doors. it was continued for its effect as a symbol, worth paying for. Nothing to do with efficiency directly.

Need to save money ?

It’s probably a good idea to wait for the trial to play out before passing judgment.

Between Elon Musk’s recent antics and Jeff Bezos’ insane performance expectations, one would have to wonder how billionaires manage to stay alive with their ginormous God complexes.

Tim Cook is such a chad of capitalism. No scandals, no cheating on his spouse, no useless hail mary projects, no “my rocket is bigger” games, no embarrassing twitter addiction. The guy just wakes up every day at 4am, creates value for shareholders until 10pm, then sleeps and does it again the next day. Quietly collects half a billion a year for his hard work. When he is in the news, he sounds totally human. Here he is biking alone on Sand Hill. Here he is at the grocery store. Bezos and the rest look brilliant but juvenile by comparison. Jobs legacy lives on in his pick, although he himself had some of these holes.

Is he, though, or is it simply not reported about? There are two kinds of people you never hear about - Those whose real behavior is spoken about in whispers, like Kevin Spacey, and those who are actually quiet saints, like Fred Rogers. None of Tim Cook's public behavior makes me think he's Mr. Rogers.

Given the scrutiny of tech CEOs you'd think something would have leaked by now if there was something truly scandalous there. Who knows, maybe he is just really good at hiding it, but so far indications are that he might really be the most sane and least eccentric of the lot.

See also: the antics of kings and other aristocrats during almost all of history in Europe, and probably everywhere else

When you’re powerful enough, you can start and lose wars and still be fine. The stuff we’re taking about in the news recently is nothing compared to what was common even a century ago

I honestly don't see Jeff Bezos personally managing the housekeeper(s). Like how does this happen? Is it Jeff mandating: "No I enforce my housekeepers to work 14-hour per day without breaks."?

The buck clearly stops somewhere, every software engineer who has worked at a large corporation has experience with this.

I don't get what you mean.

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