Amazon has used tricks, algorithms, and surveillance to discourage warehouse employees from unionizing, according to a paper published in the journal Socius.
Me 8 years ago:
I’m absolutely not getting a job at amazon, or ups, or usps. I’m not taking a job where you don’t have permission to pee. I’m a human being. I don’t care if I’m the president of the united states giving a state of the union address live on tv. If I have to pee, I’d tell the camera “Hey America, go grab a snack or something. I’ll be right back in like 2 minutes.” Fuck it, if I gotta pee, that’s just what I’m going to do. Fuck your profits for 3 minutes. I’M expelling waste.
And then my sister is like “it’s not that bad.”
Then me reading news 6 years ago that an amazon worker died of a heart attack and his coworkers didn’t even stop to call 911.
My sister thinks I made that up.
USPS is unionized. No cameras, Way less micro-management, and you can pee when you want to.
As someone who worked there for a year, the nice thing about Amazon is that managers don’t harass you—even if you come in late every single day—and the 40 hours of paid personal time granted every week is great too. It’s the kind of job where you can just put on your headphones and zone out, and never have to come in on days when you don’t feel like it. Just call off in the app.
Still wouldn’t recommend that anyone works there. Everything else about the job sucks.
40 hours of personal time granted every week is great too
Wtf is this? You have 168 personal hours every week. It is not at the decision of your employer.
You misunderstood. What I meant is that for every hour you work, you get an hour of paid time off. So if you work 40 hours one week, you could go the entire next week without showing up to work at all if you wanted to, and still get paid for it.
As someone who worked there for a year
In the warehouse?
Of course. You wouldn’t want to drive for them. The stupid AI cameras are always watching. In the warehouse nobody pays attention to you.
This is what every big company does just sometimes without the algo. This is why we need unions
You are not a human. You are a meat robot. Just something to be used up and replaced.
Negative. I am a meat Popsicle!
“Accused”? It couldn’t be more obvious.
It’s nothing new; I worked in a call center 15 years ago where the algorithms were designed to work them as hard as possible and steal commissions because they were too tired to pay attention. I should know because they told me to do that, I refused, and was fired for it.
Same old trick in a new venue. This has been happening for a long time in Asian warehousing, but has hopped the pond this last decade or so. Worker’s efficiency is set to a certain rate of efficiency, then they’re reprimanded/fired for failing to meet it. The catch is that it’s a challenging pace to begin with, and the window for successful completion almost-imperceptibly narrows, eventually becoming so ludicrously small that they must injure or maim themselves trying to beat it or even match the pace. Once they quit or cripple themselves, the company simply slides in a new candidate who doesn’t yet understand just how Hellacious the work is.
Amazon doesn’t sell anything you can’t buy somewhere else for the same price. You have no excuse to keep using Amazon. Correction, I’m sure people who buy from Amazon have excuses, but they aren’t good ones.
There actually are things that one just cannot find elsewhere easily, and most of the places that reliably carry them locally are places like Walmart which aren’t better. That said, it’s always the very last place I look.
With all this nonsense I’m going to start asking local stores if they can order stuff for me, though, and just be extra patient. For example, it’s wild how little there is for mandolins at local music stores but at least the British strings I’m going to try switching to are there so that’s something.
Wow, had no idea amazon was the only online marketplace. If we didnt have amazon, wed have to go back to thrift stores or some shit until some genius figures out how to take orders and ship goods far away again.
Also, musicians love to talk about music, and tend to work in music stores. Start calling around, they dont need to be local, most will ship to you.
To be honest, since most places ship from their physical locations(which may not have stock or carry something at all due to demand) and Amazon’s incredibly predatory practices it means that they are pretty much the only option. I’ve gotten stuff from Etsy as well(but it doesn’t help for, like, water filters and certain appliance parts), and I really have always tried to avoid Amazon, but there are just some things where they’re the only ones where I can buy some of this stuff.
And like I said, I’m gunna have to just start asking outright for stuff even if whatever store doesn’t carry it normally. It’ll take some patience but I’ll live.
Thats fair, I will say stores do take customer requests into consideration with what they stock, especially if its stuff you need to buy regularly.
Yea, we’ve all gotten so used to online shopping that we’ve forgotten what we’re allowed to do when it comes to local stores. I even worked retail in a motorcycle shop selling gear and ordered stuff from suppliers all the time.
I disagree. I am in no way a fan of Amazon. But there are some niche products that are only sold through the platform by the supplying vendor or are so specialized that there’s really no other retailer that is going to make an effort to list it for sale.
This is not true. Many of the parts I buy off of Amazon are not only cheaper, but I can get them faster as well. I wish this were not true, but I cannot spend half of my week driving for hours on end to pick up equipment at a higher price.
You can often find it cheaper than what the price is on Amazon
I hate how AI is being used to fuel toxic workplace culture.
I have a buddy whose childhood was a nightmare. It’s non stop humiliation and degredation. He would rather be a hated “adopted” gay kid (he was the maid’s kid and the fact he’s a dead ringer for the patriarch of the family is coincidental) than manage an Amazon Warehouse again.
And this is news?
