How Somali workers in the US are fighting Amazon’s surveillance machine | Hacker News Reader

How Somali workers in the US are fighting Amazon’s surveillance machine

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When I order anything off Amazon, which is more and more rare these days, I wish there was a shipping option of “let the workers go pee” or “donate 30 minutes off task to a worker” or “don’t penalize the driver”. I don’t need the speed. There are just some items that you can only get at Amazon.

But overall, with the number of fakes, the treatment of employees, the complete shit show of site design and browsing tools, not to mention the dark patterns and other nonsense, shopping on Amazon is a guilty chore, one that I take only as a last resort.

Good for these people for getting some workplace victories, but it would be so much better if Amazon gave in willingly and actually ran the warehouses and delivery operations with an ounce of compassion, even if it came at the cost of some speed slowdown.

Maybe the button option on the website should read “choose to get your item faster but three employees will have to hold their pee or go in a soda bottle”. Let’s see how many people would choose that.

I appreciate your writing this.

Unfortunately we (and more importantly the workers) are facing an entity which does not perceive compassion or dignity - similar to how we don’t see ultraviolet light.

What can be measured - is measured - is profit and efficiency. There’s no equivalent to Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index.

The price of infinitely growing profits is the constant increase of agony for the workers and the enshittification of the service and product - because the profit needs to come from somewhere.

Someone said that every Amazon order starts an invisible Rube Goldberg machine of human suffering which delivers a thing to our doors.

Yes, what if we made that machine visible? What if we had a choice to alleviate some of the suffering, some of the time?

Would the explicit admission of the fact that we participate in sadistic treatment of human beings and the choice to diminish some strangers’ agony… help?

Don’t know but would be one hell of a social experiment.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/?amp

They can measure some approximation of happiness by doing regular, anonymous surveys. They can count the bottles of pee which are most definitely not a sign of happiness, or the # or injuries.

Thought experiment that radicalized my thoughts on our economic system: with all the data being collected on people about their behavior, habits, quality of life, demographic differences etc, we could probably know the reality acutely of many societal ails, and this find better ways to fix them. Instead it is being used to effectively continue human suffering so a few can be powerful and feel special.

“let the workers go pee” or “donate 30 minutes off task to a worker”

You mean:

1. Donate 15 minutes, which at a Amazon warehouse rate about $20/h, is about $5.

2. Donate 30 minutes, or about $10.

Worker speed affects both 1. Latency (How fast you get it), but also 2. Throughput (How much packages Amazon sends per worker/hour)

Are you seriously willing to donate that much on a regular basis? Do you think ordinary people will want to do so? If so, such a button makes sense.

The reality is decent work conditions should be built in and any "cost" spread across all customers (and heaven forbid reduce Amazon's margins a tiny amount).

Maybe the executives can have catheters installed on themselves first since the opportunity cost of their going to the bathroom is so damn high.

You first, buddy.

Spread across 60 pick items an hour...

The times I've experienced "prime membership" [0], Amazon generally offers "no rush shipping credits" of $1 towards "digital content" [1]. Obviously their cost basis for that is much lower than the face value. But assuming 50% discounting, 100% labor cost overhead, and using the 60 packages/hour figure in a sibling comment, only 20% of customers would have to choose the option for a worker to get a 15 minute break every 2 hours.

The popularity would also be a great indicator of how many customers resent their practices, before they simply disappear.

[0] free trials of course, because why would I pay to subject myself to a sunk cost fallacy?

[1] aka stuff that you're better off torrenting

I think you are looking at much higher rates. The question is not what it cost to them, but what they will make from that much time. They may pay the worker 20 dollars an hour, but that worker may be earning them 100 or 200 or even 1000 an hour, and that is Amazon's loss if they get an hour's break.

I am not an amazon employee, and this is standard in every industry ... the employee salary is just a small part of what it costs an employer. The corporate office, the worker's office (or warehouse), the management overhead etc., all add up to what it costs the company per hour of employee work and that is the bare minimum we should plan to donate (per above formula), and then what I mentioned is the profit side of things which would be even higher.

Given how much profit that employee means to the company, you think they could afford to treat them better lmao.

If Amazon lowers attrition I don't think those numbers are necessarily true. Experienced workers are more effective and mess up less than newbies.

> When I order anything off Amazon, which is more and more rare these days, I wish there was a shipping option of

The best way to signal this is to not buy from Amazon and instead buy from elsewhere.

The poster you’re replying to already said that it’s something they only do as a last resort – when purchasing “items that you can only get at Amazon”.

Personally, I haven’t bought anything from or via Amazon since 2010 but if there was no good alternative solution, I probably would.

That puts the blame on the customers. “You didn’t check the box, not our responsibility “. What’s worse is that it gives a leg up to the immoral in the competition that is life. No, this is something that has to be fixed at a political level.

But that would reduce shareholder value. If the employees want to be treated well, they should just become shareholders aswell.

What kind of developer is writing the sort of software that enables Amazon to do this? I can't help but feel these people are total garbage. We have so many opportunities. There's no excuse for writing software that tortures people the way they do at Amazon. Even if the developers didn't know that was the purpose for the software - then quit, stop maintaining it once you figure it out.

If you make this software for Amazon, then I hope you'll end up on the floor in the warehouse yourself. You deserve it.

Let’s put it in context. McDonald’s offers 20 minutes. At Amazon you get 30 minutes. Calling it torture is extreme. These articles are written for people who have never worked these kinds of jobs.

Call it what you want, if a developer knowingly writes software that causes people to pee in bottles at work then that person is garbage, period.

Isn't the issue the size of the warehouses meaning that 30 minutes is used just to walk to the toilet?

Just because other people suffer even worse doesn't mean we can't acknowledge the suffering of these people and see it as a bad thing.

When I worked at McDs, I never had to go through security to get to the bathrooms. At Amazon, all the bathrooms are outside the security perimeter. And US courts have ruled that time wasted waiting in line to go through security screening does not have to be paid for by employers.

Should we be blaming the developer or the guy who just bought his second >$500 million super-yacht ?

The ones who are getting promotions. This is what Amazon does. Amazon is a great big dark machine that drains the life essence and squeezes money out of retailers, workers, employees, and even mother nature herself so it can pass along the savings to consumers. How else would a credit card with 5% cash back be possible?

Credit card cash back is orthogonal to your first point. What supports 5% cash back is likely induced brand loyalty/stickiness plus financial surveillance data mining.

I don't know about schools in the US, but my computer science curriculum had a mandatory class called Computational Ethics or something along those lines, where the entire point was to teach people not to build shit like this and that we'd be morally responsible for the things our software does to society.

> We have so many opportunities.

Speak for yourself.

Amazon is planning on closing the warehouse in Shakopee, MN where many of these Somali workers currently are.

This actually isn’t too surprising. This location has had issues with Somali workers protesting, striking, etc for the past few years.

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2023/01/30/amazon-minnesota-sh...

Knew it must have been MN with the Somali mention

“Time off task” sounds like something that should have been in 1984, but I bet even Orwell couldn’t have imagined something so…Orwellian.

There comes a point when workplace efficiency measures goes off the rails.

About 40 years ago, I got a job in a books warehouse for a few months before toddling off to Plymouth Polytechnic (a bit like a University, UK, back in the day).

The job involved picking orders for despatch. We'd get line printed picking lists on the classic wide, tractor fed paper with green "staves". We'd then wander the warehouse with a trolley and pick the orders and dump them carefully on pallets at the despatch point. Within a week or two I knew where nearly everything is held and that is a lot of books, the picking sheets had silo codes anyway. So, my old job sounds rather like ye olde Amazon (which started off as a book distributor) We also did things like repricing which sound quite innocent until you face a couple of pallets of "Letterland A-B-C" and you know your pricing gun will need several kilos of tags.

Now, here is the difference: That firm (Smiths) gave all staff an hour lunch break, and two formal 1/2 hour breaks mid morning and mid afternoon. You could also take a break at any time for whatever reason (fags!). You had a base salary and a quota for various jobs. Hit the quota and you get more money. The quota was very reasonable. The basic was pretty decent too. I loved working there and I was compensated way better than the norm.

So wind on a few decades and a very different company - Mine, and it's IT consultancy, and I have staff. I encourage flexibility from my staff. If you want to trot off for an hour for a doctors appointment - that's fine and don't bother asking either. Family first: snags at home - bail out and sort, appraise us if you can when appropriate.

I know that I have staff with "time off task" and I do it myself too. The job gets done to the customer's satisfaction and that is our KPI and that is measured. I suspect Mr Amazon has forgotten to remember that his employees are human and to value and work with them as such.

Seems large corporations have forgotten the rule of "don't shit where you eat" and are now competing for who can shit where they eat the most and still not catch cholera, while calling it "efficiency". And of course anyone telling them to not shit where they eat is some lazy socialist. Human nature I suppose, it's on those of us of working age to start cleaning up the shit just like our grandparents and great-grandparents did in their day. Getting the 40 hour work week and Social Security took decades of blood, why should our problems require any less?

Except that the problems aren't really so different, are they? We seem to be making the same mistakes across generations, and learning the same lessons - which seems like a tragedy that can be avoided.

I suppose Amazon’s argument is that they are paying “above market wages for above market job performance”.

I think some interesting questions are: Why can Amazon still stretch workers in this way even with an ongoing labor shortage?

At what point does it make sense to go all in on automating many of the picking jobs? The equivalent of $30/hr? $40?

Because new wage slaves get imported all the time.

This kind of thing is really why unions came to be in the late 19th - early 20th century.

> It was these conditions that fueled a raft of organizing efforts in Amazon facilities across the U.S., including the nation’s first successful union drive at a company warehouse in New York last year.

The question not answered here is: why don't the Minnesota workers form a union? State legislation is fine as far as it goes, but the Legislature is not going to have a place for workers to file a grievance, or a strike fund (probably) to support them if they do go on strike.

I believe they tried and Amazon is now planning to close the fulfillment center where most of the Somalis mentioned in this article work.

It will be interesting to see if Amazon and others try to shift some operations a short drive across the river to Wisconsin as a result of this legislation.

I like amazon unlike the popular sentiment here. Just avoid products with those weid bold square brackets in the description.

This is the right way to address it's treatment of workers. A lot of companies who cause social problems like this can also be addressed by simply passing laws. Businesses don't have rights, only natural people do.

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