Well that's not creepy at all. Tweets read like they're written by a PR agency. Never known a near-minimum-wage warehouse worker who answers tweets with turns of phrase like "On the contrary..."
You should see the scale of similar manipulation efforts that exist on Reddit. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of accounts that completely overtake a sub to drive a certain viewpoint. Any decently intelligent person can see what’s going on but I’m afraid there is a large number of people who are non the wiser. I’ve seen this sort of social manipulation on a grand scale across numerous large online publications with yahoo news being the worst offender.
From my experience - not particularly, but unless you work at AWS and get media training, Amazon engineers are heavily discouraged from discussing the company on social media.
My contract also explicitly forbid me from talking about any technologies in use within the company, up to and including programming languages. That might just be an artifact of the time and place that I was hired, though, as the company definitely grew much more open over the years.
I've been out of Amazon for nearly three years (after working there for eight) and I still find myself reflexively being nervous about what I say!
I live in Vermont, running an open source Patreon project that isn't designed to maximize capital. I know lots and LOTS of minimum wage or near-minimum-age people, and a good selection of much wealthier people. Right now I'm substantially below minimum wage as a sole proprietor, but managing it. Obviously I cannot hire in these conditions, so I don't.
I see NO correlation between that and intelligence, verbal proficiency, articulateness: indeed, if you're smart enough to recognize the obvious purpose of the exercise you'll self-edit until you sound even more like a PR agency, lest you have to return to picking boxes full-time rather than getting to compose tweets for part of your time.
One caveat: if you're poor and desperate, your bandwidth will be taxed (see 'Scarcity: a talk for people too busy to attend talks'). That doesn't compromise people so badly that they appear unintelligent and uneducated, though, and if it's your job to seem glib and intelligent you'll work at it.
tl:dr; do you seriously assert that poor people are too stupid to write and speak well? I sure hope not.
No, what I was trying to say is that an average actual non astroturfing warehouse worker wouldn't answer questions like a trained PR lackey. Read the tweets, the sentence structure, phrasing and uniformity in writing styles between supposedly distinct individuals is obvious.
What do you think Amazon's requirements are for this paid position, and do you think they would be sloppy and tolerant of bad performance here and nowhere else?
Anybody doing this is already a good speaker and writer, and understands what's expected of them. Otherwise they wouldn't be allowed to do it. Again, I know large numbers of poor people who are perfectly capable of this erudition.
If you've got a masters in English Literature, it's probably this or Wal-Mart or death.
This is really fascinating. I want to know about the culture of the person who authorized this. They seemed to be lacking essential cultural norms for north america.
Some questions I'd start asking are:
-Have they ever been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder or some type of high functioning autism?
-Are they from a third world country? Do they lack social norms we'd typically associate with people's attitudes about working in a factory?
-This this real life?
It's such a damaged artifact of modern de-industrialization. I really need to know why this is a thing...
>Their most frequent topics of conversation are how they get bathroom breaks, the pleasant temperature of the warehouses, the excellent benefits and suitable wages, friendly management and how the job isn’t monotonous or tiring at all.
In other words, they took a list of everything everyone complains about, and just decided to refute them point by point in the most condescendingly Orwellian way possible, rather than fixing them, because "disagree and commit" and I guess "frugality uber alles."
...it sounds like they did fix them? People used to complain about not getting bathroom breaks and unpleasant temperatures. Either they're lying, or they did fix those things and are informing people of it.
If you're accusing them of lying, that's fine. But what you claimed was that these are just talking points "instead of" fixing the issues. So, they are claiming they fixed the issues. Are you claiming they are lying about that?
Plenty of untrue statements are asserted as fact in good faith and without intention to deceive. Asking for evidence is not the same thing as an accusation of dishonesty.
Um, what? These people are representing themselves as employees of Amazon, who work in these factories. Unless they are lying about that, then they are in a position to know. Therefore, if they are making an assertion and it is untrue, they are lying. This isn't that complicated.
This is a really weird line to take. Obviously by "rather than fix" he means fix and demonstrate. Otherwise, why is is up to anyone but Amazon to prove that they have fixed the issues? You are misdirecting the burden.
People get bathroom breaks, but those count against your rate, and people do sometimes get written up for taking them, although that's as much a matter of Amazon encouraging ruthlessness in management as anything. I know of one anecdotal story of a worker who was apparently written up for the time it took them to clean up after their own nosebleed.
In the FC where I work, the temperatures are definitely not pleasant, but HR insists we simply aren't aware of how perfect the climate control is.
I think it's one of those things that depends on where you work and who you work under.
Somebody complained about the heat on the board* a while back, and the site lead said it was up to code. They have their network-wide internal standards. I forget what the ceiling for acceptable temperature is, but it gets pretty hot in the summer, especially if you're doing inbound. I don't worry about heat-related injuries or anything, but I wouldn't call it comfortable.
* What is it, Voice of the Associates? Something like that. It's a big whiteboard in the breakroom. You write down your login and a message for management/IT/HR and they write a response.
They’re not chatbots - the replies are too specific and organic in some of the tweets I read. I’m guessing Amazon told these workers that someone would convey their general sentiments on their behalf. That or this is satire, I hope.
My observation: The article doesn't say that it is automated, just that they're drones (meaning: always behaving the same way). I assume they hired a few people to do this (optionally through some other company). It seems like they got a few standard responses and they need to stick to that. Might be e.g. in Manilla or somewhere in India. Reasoning is that they really stay to the script. The responses are so similar, normally you'd try to tweak it more so it is more natural. I noticed for outsourced stuff they tend to stick more to the script no matter if it makes sense or not. It's up to the manager to notice that the something needs to be tweaked.
Remember when we used to call them shills instead of “brand ambassadors?” Good times. Now we have this Brave New World PR doublespeak that reflects the dehumanizing nature of working on the floor at Amazon a bit too well.
The difference is a shill hides their affiliation. These accounts are all clearly marked as being from Amazon. How is it any different from the various $Airline_Cares accounts on twitter that reply to customer complaints about bad service?
One of the "Ambassadors" responses from the article:
> "I can safely say that none of MY ideas have panned out anywhere near what Jeff Bezos has accomplished."
The most one can hope is that this is a bona fide Tweet from an employee who-- for whatever reason-- desires to self-deprecate in a completely voluntary, unremunerated defense of the company they work for during their off time.
Because if this is a PR drone posting self-deprecating statements in the name of an actual employee that's pretty humiliating behavior.
You're probably right. Maybe the distinction is that Amazon has gotten a lot of bad press about its warehouses so the cognitive dissonance felt by the observer is more pronounced.
I wonder if the recruiters for these “totally optional roles” are the sort who would also provide helpful reminders that wearing 15 pieces of flair is just the bare minimum.
> Look, we want you to express yourself, okay? Now if you feel that the bare minimum is enough, then okay. But some people choose to wear more and we encourage that, okay? You do want to express yourself, don't you?
-- Office Space, 1999
I can almost feel the soul leeching sensation behind the forced cheerfulness. Though that could be a bit of projection if these are PR people pretending to be workers instead of workers acting as PR people.
But it's still disturbing in a more direct way than news reports about workers peeing in bottles to help shave time to hit performance targets.
I'm not even disturbed. I'm just very puzzled that there are people who would think these messages were anything but pure PR propaganda. It's so blatantly obvious to me.
...and it might just be my unfamiliarity, but "FC Ambassador" just reminds me of football more than anything else. That part of their branding isn't working, if they're trying to get into the minds of people who aren't familiar with the company.
You’d be surprised what people will believe. I once commanded 11m Facebook fans. It was surprisingly easy to convince a certain percentage of people to do whatever you tell them to do. Some people are so gullible blind and stupid that it makes you lose some faith in humanity when you see how easily manipulated they can be.
"FC Ambassador" is Amazon jargon. An FC is a fulfillment center, and an ambassador is an L1 associate who's gone through training for coaching new hires... or something like that. They don't really have added responsibilities where I am. I've heard the role is a bigger deal in distribution centers.
These accounts certainly seem like they are being directed or encouraged by corporate. I know quite a few of the ambassadors at the warehouse where I work and I don't think any of them would post these kind of responses on Twitter without some kind of direction from above.
Also, in case there is confusion with the term "ambassador", from my understanding this is mostly an internal title for associates who lead some training sessions for new hires. It doesn't come with any pay or benefit increases, it's just a nice thing to do if you like training new hires and want an occasional break from your normal duties. These aren't really meant to be outward facing brand ambassadors, at least that's been my understanding.
> People get bathroom breaks, but those count against your rate, and people do sometimes get written up for taking them, although that's as much a matter of Amazon encouraging ruthlessness in management as anything. I know of one anecdotal story of a worker who was apparently written up for the time it took them to clean up after their own nosebleed.
Last year, for some reason, I was so emotionally invested in an interview at Amazon I was researching their leadership principles and such like some sort of bootlicking rube. I'm very glad I didn't get that job. Whatever Jeff Bezos' vision is matters not to me, and I can't wait until America decides to put community and quality before convenience and cheapness (I may wait forever, I know).
I suppose the reason I was so invested was the idea that if I had that job on my resume, I could get a job anywhere. Doesn't seem like a good reason to do something.
So I want to be very clear that based on extensive reports I've read in the press, and anecdotes that have been shared online, what krapp said definitely goes on, but no, personally I have never witnessed that.
There are two main reasons why it's possible that I've never run across such cases, the most logical one being that I've worked primarily in a Delivery Station and not a Fulfillment Center. From what I've experienced the Delivery Stations are, for lack of a better term, not run as "efficiently" as the FC's, so the metrics that are used to track employee performance aren't quite as well quantified. There is still obviously a lot of performance tracking with regards to rates, but due to the less efficient and structured layout of the DS, there seems to be a bit more leeway given.
Also, I think I've been extremely fortunate with the management that I work under and they seem to take worker safety and the overall work environment very seriously. I can't imagine any managers at my station writing anyone up for taking bathroom breaks, and definitely not for handling a bloody nose. Again, just to be clear, I'm not at all refuting the accuracy of those reports, issues like that have definitely occurred in Amazon warehouses, but the environment at my warehouse seems to be significantly more worker friendly. I think this is probably due to our station managers' oversight.
Also, I've only been working at Amazon for slightly over one year, so it's possible that they have been making genuine progress on these issues.
(I've worked in an FC for over a year. I'm an L1, not a PA or manager.)
Most functions in FCs are "direct": they have rate expectations that are automatically tracked. Every minute you're in a direct function counts toward your rate. You can go to the bathroom whenever you need to, but it'll lower your rate. (Some functions are "indirect", meaning that they don't involve use of any digital tools and so can't be tracked.)
"Time off task" is also automatically tracked. If you go some amount of time without scanning anything -- I think it's five minutes -- that'll show up on your time. Managers know that people have to go to the bathroom and usually won't make a big deal out of it, but if you take an unusually long time in the bathroom you might get written up. TOT writeups are supposed to be automatic but I think managers have some discretion.
I think I was written up for a bathroom break before -- I'm not sure, since my FC isn't very good at delivering feedback -- but I was in there for half an hour, so it was sort of understandable.
There haven't been issues with bathroom breaks where I am, but there's only one floor. The site in the story with associates peeing in bottles apparently had multiple floors, with bathrooms only on the bottom floor. It'd be difficult to take a bathroom break while maintaining the expected rate and low TOT at sites like that.
I think rate expectations are consistent across the network, meaning that managers, or even site leads, can't adjust them to account for things like distance to the bathroom.
In short: you won't get written up for taking a bathroom break, and you can just go to the bathroom when you need to, but you might get written up for low rates or high time off task, and you might end up with low rates or high time off task for going to the bathroom if it's far away or you take a long time.
I'm basing this on the articles about it. I've never personally seen it happen. I've seen people duck out to the bathroom to take phone calls and they don't seem to have run into any trouble over it; but where I work, the bathrooms aren't far from the floor.
If you have to go down four stories to get to the bathroom, on the other hand, it'd be pretty hard to maintain the rate, and if you don't maintain the rate you'll probably get written up for that.
So just to give you a little background info, the DS I work at runs 24/7 using multiple shifts. The bulk of the work is done by the night shift which usually runs from around 11pm to 5:45am. This is the largest shift with 150+ associates and the one that is under the most time pressure. Packages have to be unloaded from trucks and make their way through the warehouse on a conveyor belt system to be stowed in bags that the delivery drivers pick up in the morning. The main duties consist of unloading the trucks, diverting the packages down different lanes, picking the correct packages off the moving belt and placing them on a rack, and then stowing the packages into their appropriate bags located on shelving units. Each one of these steps is done by a different person. I'm providing some extra info here so you get a feel for how the warehouse runs. Basically anyone leaving their post even for a few minutes will result in packages not being properly sorted/stowed and the conveyor belts getting backed up and potentially jammed.
The policy at our station is that if you need to go to the bathroom when not on break or lunch, you need to tell either a line lead, shift assistant, or the people working next to you so that they can cover your post while you're gone so things don't get backed up or packages don't end up spilling on the ground. That's pretty much it. I've worked the night shift before and drink large amounts of water so I could rarely make it through a shift without using the bathroom one or two times in addition to the times I went while on break and lunch. It was never a problem, we would just cover for each other.
If being pilloried for that kind of management behavior costs Amazon sales and effectiveness, it's a weakness that must be stamped out exactly as much as it has to.
Progress is a loaded word. If you said that Amazon has been doing serious optimization on that stuff, I'd call that more accurate. Bear in mind that part of the pressure is 'don't get PR-worthy nosebleeds or have to pee all the time'; in no way is this an effort to make workers comfortable or complacent.
It's just that having people fall over dead, or getting punished for nosebleeds, or pissing in bottles to make quota, are such bad PR that they have to be optimized away. You can't go THAT hard. There's a limit to how hard you can push before it starts to look bad, so you end up having to be just as grimly competitive about the details of work environment.
Anyone thinking Amazon is trying to maximize worker suffering is a fool: there's a point where it becomes a liability, and they will optimize until it's just on the safe side of 'horror story'.
I think the truth of the matter is, Amazon's network is big enough to allow a significant amount of variance in employee experience (despite Amazon itself being culturally adamant about reducing variance as much as possible.)
Some workers do wind up camping in their cars and peeing in bottles to make rate, most don't. What people wind up complaining about tend to be exceptions rather than the rule, but those exceptions do exist.
1. Amazon has some incentive program that basically allows workers to take on a "marketing assignment" for some sort of bonus. If so, how is this different than contriving good reviews about your restaurant on Yelp?
2. Amazon has developed or is paying for third party software that lets their PR people quickly manage and create activity on multiple Twitter accounts from a central interface.
I feel the same way. I know a lot of warehouse associates are active on some of the Amazon Instagram pages, but that's mostly just silly pictures and activities. I don't think anyone would post such detailed responses on their own when they aren't being paid.
They wouldn't offer a bonus. They'd offer entry into a drawing for an Amazon gift card. But I haven't heard of any such program either, nor of any attempt to get us to run PR for them, other than occasionally sending out emails asking us to review Amazon on Glassdoor.
(IME, most FC associates never check their Amazon email accounts, so they wouldn't see that.)
For some reason my station never even offers Amazon gift cards during contests, it's usually Subway, Starbucks, Target, or occasionally a Visa prepaid card.
And I'm fairly certain most associates at my station aren't even aware they have an @amazon email address so they definitely aren't checking it. Nice to see another L1 around here.
> 2. Amazon has developed or is paying for third party software that lets their PR people quickly manage and create activity on multiple Twitter accounts from a central interface.
I feel like this would be infinitely cheaper, more quantifiable and easier to set concrete milestones/targets for their campaigns than telling employees to tweet on Amazon's behalf and hoping for the best.
All it takes is for one of these ambassadors to get fired/quit and their pro-Amazon platform becomes an anti-Amazon soapbox.
In Amazon’s early days(pre Twitter obviously) there were plenty of warehouse workers who could have written far better tweets that sound less Borg Collective-y
It was pretty hard(physically) back then, even before simple tilt tray sortation equipment.
Everything was manual.
And zero air conditioning in the first early generation distribution(now fulfilment) centres.
Hiring, even in distribution(fulfilment) operations, had quite a high hiring bar.
This was done to help develop the near future Human Resources capacity of the company.
So we had an inordinately high % of Amazon Associate stock pickers with undergraduate and graduate degrees.
Quite an eclectic and quirky bunch of quite over educated folks doing a lot of manual labor trying to get the orders out the door and not drown in them.
It was a much much smaller company back then.
We were just trying to survive the never ending need to get customer orders out te door and “average up” with each new hire.
Intellectual capacity per person was quite high, but our operational execution would be far lower than what is achieved today.
We were failing/learning as we were going.
More exploration, less exploitation(in the process sense).
Exploitation as an employee wasn’t a problem in the early days from my perspective.
We all knew what we were getting into. 100% commitment and acting like an owner.
As headcount exploded, individual understanding of Amazon’s mission, ethos, etc declined as it become more job-like, and less purposeful.
Growth rate compelled hiring more specialists and less multi-purpose generalists....who could write non Borg Collective like Tweets.
I guess what I’m saying is the culture in the early days was more like a pirate ship full of idiosyncratic individualist buccaneers than Borg.
I'm pretty sure that one's satire, probably in response to this article. I looked at a few others in the search results, and they didn't seem to be satire.
People talk about blockchain and ML/AI as the revolutionary technologies of the day, but I think public manipulation via the Internet (social media at least, probably more) may turn out to be more significant.
Is it real and does it work? Undoubtedly, there are people who believe it works and invest a lot of resources in it, from businesses to political movements to governments (Russia and China, for example). We can see that disinformation can be effectively spread, and it seems hatred and other things as well. Arguably, we can see it to a degree in Facebook's and Google's (and others') valuations. We discuss it, from a different perspective, on HN regularly. But what are the technical details of this new tool: In what situations does it work and in what does it not? How powerful is it? How much does it cost? How does it work on a detailed level? What are the key components of this machine? Is anyone talking - we know it's done widely, so it seems that information about this technology should be available. (I'm not asking for speculation - we have heard plenty of that - I'm looking for actual technical knowledge.)
Another way of looking at it: Perhaps it's analogous to the Creel Commission - innovations in manipulation via a new communication technology.
For example, how did Amazon and others turn around Seattle's new tax so quickly and effectively? IIRC, it was widely supported and then public opinion reversed itself in a matter of months.
I believe Snowden shined a light at some of the disinformation programs that are operated by the govt. I know for a fact these types of campaigns exist on a regular basis on a grand scale.
Of late Amazon has been working hard internally to improve its company image. There are frequent emails about reviewing Amazon on glass door, they also provide images of the Amazon smiley and encourage employees to use this as a background on their social media profiles. They encourage employees to follow and retweet the Amazon news handle on Twitter. So this one does not seem organic and is part of Amazon drive to improve the image about working culture, definitely pr.
Let's say you're a company with a serious PR problem about the working conditions in your warehouses.
You set up 15 Twitter accounts claiming to be employees of your warehouses. You make sure the accounts are laughably bad at concealing the fact that they are shills, with cookie-cutter bios and responses that are obviously canned talking points. This ensures that the accounts are discovered and written up by various publications, and the articles widely shared.
The articles, while laughing at how transparently phony the accounts are, inevitably mention that you are now offering tours of your warehouses (which makes you sound trustworthy since you're not hiding anything), and embed the Tweets that say you pay more than other companies in your industry and offer medical benefits. (Since this information is falsifiable (capable of being proven false, but not necessarily false) it's credible even though it's coming from a shill account.)
You've probably not made anyone's opinion of you worse (you look more stupid than malevolent), but you've gotten your message in front of eyeballs and it might make some people think better of you.
It's amazing how well this works despite being obvious propaganda. I felt my own opinion on Amazon Fullfilment Centers change as I read the article.
One thing that makes propaganda like this so effective is that journalists generally do not bother to verify any propaganda claims (eg. does Amazon really pay 30% more?), so even if they write articles making fun of you they still repeat your message.
Can you explain a little about what you felt changing in your opinion here?
What I got out of it was that Amazon had previously been dehumanizing their workers to the point that the PR drones have to now overtly brag about complying with OSHA laws.
The questions it prompts are pretty straight forward.
Does Amazon actually pay ~30% better now than their competitors (or anything close to that)? Do they offer dental, vision and healthcare coverage for all employees?
If those things are true, then I think better of Amazon because of it. I would have guessed none of those things were true otherwise. The media and essentially all comments online proclaim that Amazon employees are being tortured horrifically on a daily basis and paid absolute bottom tier wages across the board. Those articles and opinions have, to one degree or another, tilted my opinion of Amazon in a negative manner.
Can anyone here speak to if those positive things are true and or mostly true? I have no idea. I'd think better of Amazon if they were.
I'm not exactly sure how much better Amazon pays, if at all better, here in SoCal starting pay is around $12-$14 per hour for L1 associates, but anecdotally I feel like this is on the higher end when compared to similar jobs, at least compared to the jobs I've held. I can't speak to the insurance coverage provided since I'm a part time worker but from what I've heard, while pay isn't great, the insurance seems to be pretty good once you're eligible.
I will say that from what I've seen my station managers take safety very seriously. Some of this must extend up the corporate ladder because I had a friend who was injured on the job here and Amazon did a very good job of making sure he got the care he required. He actually wanted to come back to work much earlier than Amazon would allow, he missed his coworkers, but they wanted to make sure he was completely healed and made it clear that he shouldn't rush things. He was being paid worker's comp during this time. This certainly made a good impression on me.
I also really appreciated how straight forward the hiring process was. I was unemployed and homeless, I actually lived on an empty lot behind our warehouse for a while, when I was hired and out of all the jobs I applied to Amazon had the most streamlined hiring process. This might not seem like a huge deal but when you're already struggling it was nice to not have too many hoops to jump through to try and land a job.
Obviously due to my background I'm probably viewing my work overly positively, it feels pretty great to finally have a little bit of savings, I've saved up around $1500 over the past year and this is the most money I've had in my entire life, but overall I've enjoyed my time at Amazon. But again, from the reporting I've seen there are still some pretty glaring systemic problems within the company.
Edit: I saw a poster comment under this post asserting that I was being paid to post here in defense of Amazon, the post has since been deleted after receiving some downvotes, for the record I did not downvote the poster, but I will address their concerns. I can certainly understand why my post might raise suspicions. To give some background I have another account on HN that I've been active on for approximately three years and have a bit over 2000 karma. I post a few times a month, and by post I mean I usually just ask tons of questions about topics I have a limited understanding of and the kind people here try their best to explain things to me. I wanted to keep this account separate form that one since I don't post anything Amazon related using my normal account. I hope I don't sound like too much of a shill but I'm somewhat excited to finally be able to contribute to a topic I have some understanding of.
I think a lot of people have forgotten or never experience the satisfaction of doing work - especially after being out of work for a while. Keep it up! :)
On Amazon worker treatment generally it's hard to tell whether it is propaganda or maltreatment. Jeff Bezos is obviously a powerful man with a lot of people under him and that attracts all sorts of interest/enemies. It is also not unusual for companies to treat workers poorly - but my instinct is skeptical of media because it's difficult not to notice some Californians are notorious for drama development. I've done a lot of not-by-the-book stuff on building sites - we just didn't keep records and convert them into issues because we used common sense to be safe and it's good work but we could have easily made it sound dire and hit our employer with all sorts of costs that ultimately would have made us less valuable.
Right, for someone who sits behind a keyboard all day, working on your feet in a warehouse packing boxes, in a kitchen cooking burgers, or outside hauling lumber around a construction site in the rain, sounds like horrible work.
If Amazon warehouses were that bad, people wouldn't work there. I'm sure people get hurt, it's physical work. It's not a job you're going to enjoy if, like most adults, you are overweight and out of shape.
Not just in California but media today dramatize everything to get readers. The goal of almost any news story is to "go viral" to get clicks/views.
> If Amazon warehouses were that bad, people wouldn't work there.
I don't know how the conditions at Amazon warehouses truly are, but this statement doesn't sound correct to me. I can think of countless examples of workers that accept from sub-optimal conditions to outright modern slavery simply because they can't find an exit to the system of cheap labor exploitation.
Maybe this can be scoped down to some developed countries or some cities in developed countries, but certainly doesn't hold true for most developing countries and certainly not for past history in basically anywhere.
> It's not a job you're going to enjoy if, like most adults, you are overweight and out of shape.
This is the real headline, everybody is guilty.
Swear to God if Kim Jong Un somehow managed a hostile takeover of America or my country - then forced us all to do calisthenics each morning - sure it'd start horribly but by the end of the month we'd be singing the praises of Our Dear Leader.
In response to you mentioning saving 1500 USD: You commented in another post that you lived out of your car (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15790455). There still seems to be something wrong. Maybe not Amazon, maybe all the companies around there. People with a fulltime job should earn enough not to be living out of a car!
Just to clarify that post was from quite a while ago and at that time I was living out of my car, I'm actually now sharing a room in an apartment. But I certainly agree it's not a good thing when people who are working are living out of their cars or worse.
People working a full-time job should also be able to afford their own room. It's no knock on you and your lifestyle, but I think we can do better than the standards of the 1920s.
No offense taken, and I'll be the last person to argue that anyone working in a country as wealthy as the USA shouldn't be able to afford a modest home, good healthcare, access to education, and some wiggle room for savings, at a minimum.
I hope I don't sound like too much of a shill but I'm somewhat excited to finally be able to contribute to a topic I have some understanding of.
I must admit the first thing I did was look at your comment history as your post sounded suspicious. If it was mixed in with other posts I'd have been inclined to take it more seriously than I can now.
I'd certainly say it's wise to be suspicious of any posts praising a company by current employees, and my posts are no exception. It would probably add more wight to my comments if I posted from my normal account but I don't feel comfortable doing that when talking about my employer, the potential risk for me isn't worth it. With that being said hopefully my comments don't come off quite as unashamedly positive and corporate as those Twitter accounts, which sound pretty over the top to me.
> He was being paid worker's comp during this time. This certainly made a good impression on me.
Just to be clear here: this is required by law, not something that the company is doing out of the goodness of its heart. It's also a fraction of what one's normal wages would be, which I would say is a more likely explanation for the injured person's eagerness to return than that "he missed his coworkers".
> they wanted to make sure he was completely healed and made it clear that he shouldn't rush things
I won't fault them for this, as I don't have details like what/how serious the injury was. But often a better alternative to no work at all is to temporarily reassign the person to another role where their injury is not an issue (desk job of some kind, generally). This way the employee continues to get full or near-full wages.
EDIT: Also, forgot to point out that work restrictions are defined by a doctor who treated the injured person, not by the employer. They can get in serious trouble for forcing someone to work in excess of those restrictions. So again, not really a sign of benevolence.
It is, but the cost of worker's comp insurance coverage for an employer is very closely tied to claims experience. If an employer has a track record of a lot of claims, their worker's comp insurance is going to be very expensive. So there's still an incentive for the employer to operate safely and minimize employee injuries.
I appreciate you taking the time to explain this in more detail for me, I'm admittedly not clear on how this worker's comp stuff is supposed to be handled, thankfully I've never suffered any type of work related injury.
While I didn't mention it in my post my coworker was reassigned to less labor intensive duties once he returned to work. And from my understanding the doctor who treated him ok'd him to return to his normal duties but our direct manager had no problem with him taking longer in this less physical role.
I'm just adding this detail to paint a better picture but I think you've done a good job illustrating that this is the minimum that Amazon in required to do and they shouldn't be praised for doing what the law requires. I'm certainly not here to try and do PR for Amazon, just sharing my personal experiences.
Actually, is it? Isn’t that a state by state thing? For the record I’m not positive but coming from an at-will State like FL that is also heavily favored to corporations, I am not certain.
I would certainly question that line about paying 30% more. Without more details, it could easily be a distortion… For instance, comparing labor wages in an urban market like Seattle to a national average that includes places like rural Nebraska. Next I would wonder, why would Amazon pay so much more than their competitors? Would their shareholders accept that as fiscally responsible?
> Can anyone here speak to if those positive things are true and or mostly true? I have no idea.
I still don't understand. If you have no idea whether the things they claim are true, why has your opinion of Amazon's treatment of workers improved?
Is it that you don't think Amazon would be having their employees claim things that are misleading? We already have myriad claims of Amazon pressuring workers not to use the bathroom outside of breaks. And the same article mentions that the workers have to sign NDAs[1].
I think it was an observation of their mental process at work, in which we tend to remember things we read as facts even if we do not know they are true (or even if we know they are not true at the time of reading). In other words: the change of opinion was not necessarily rational, why is why they said "It's amazing how well this works despite being obvious propaganda."
Because the very act of storing information in your brain gives it credence, even if you don't go through the extra effort to verify whether it is correct. With repeated exposure it can become a belief, even a belief so strong that you will hold onto it in the face of evidence it is false. This can happen to anyone; it's a fundamental feature of how our memory works.
It works especially well for information that does not affect you personally, because you're less likely to go through the extra effort to verify whether something is true.
If your boss tells you that your salary is $100k/year, you're going to check that on your paycheck!
If your boss tells you that garbage collectors make $100k a year, you might not believe it, but you might also not bother to put in the effort to check. But if you remember it later on, the very act of bringing it out of your memory will reinforce it to you.
And if you don't go specifically check on the accuracy, you're also more likely to rely on social signals like, who is telling me this? Is this a person who I identify with? Does it seem like a person or an institution I should trust?
In this case, you are reading a news article from TechCrunch, a well-known, successful, and long-running news site. Any information you read there comes wrapped in however much trust you associate with TechCrunch. So if a claim is passed on in an article, it comes with some level of default trust.
And even if you don't like TechCrunch, the default level of trust is affected just by the act of reading the article. By default we tend to trust ourselves, so when we do something (like read an article), the default trust is pushed above zero, just because we're the one who read it! This effect is why most people think they are above average drivers, for example.
So: reading an article about an ad campaign, that contains the ad and its claims, can affect how you feel about the advertised product... even though you know it's an article about an ad campaign!
In marketing this is called "earned media" and it is valuable because it hijacks your trust for the media source to support the ad claim. A spectacular example was the "Swift Boat Truth" ad against John Kerry, which barely ran on late night TV, but was widely covered by the news media. It had a huge impact on Kerry's campaign for president.
In school I was interested in debate until I learned some of the rules, then I lost all interest. I expected to find a contest to effectively communicate and apply facts, but I found the opposite - a contest to be better at twisting, denying, or just ignoring facts. An effective debater is more likely to deceive me, not educate me.
I've not looked into it since high school, so I sometimes wonder if I misjudged, but links like that wikipedia one make me think I correctly avoided it.
I've been debating with a lot of alt-right people lately on Facebook and have been studying their debating tactics and how they apply them to support q-anon, and pizzagate, and Trump.
It's really fastinating to see all of these strategies played out in the real world.
I use these strategies to identify what they are doing and cut through the sophistry and attempt to reach the truth.
The nice thing about online debating is that you have time to think about and analyze the others argument vs on the spot debate where emotions get involved.
Note the tweet says they pay 30% more than "traditional retail stores". I don't think that's the right comparison. Pick & pack in a warehouse is much more physically demanding than being on the floor at Best Buy. The better question is do they pay more than UPS, or for that matter, picking strawberries?
> The amounts associates reported receiving in VCP [Variable Compensation Pay] were underwhelming. One claimed his highest monthly payout was $48. Another averaged around $60. The only reason these paltry bonuses are relevant at all is that Amazon itself uses them to arrive at the over $15 per hour figure it estimates as its average Fulfillment Center worker’s pay. “Hourly pay rates are competitive and we offer great benefits – we encourage anyone to compare our pay and benefits to other retailers,” Amazon told Gizmodo in a statement for this piece. Glassdoor lists average warehouse pay for Amazon at $12.33, less at, Home Depot ($12.96), Costco ($13.43), and Target ($14.57). Even stacked against Walmart, its main competition and a business with its own set of unsavory practices, Amazon still comes up twenty cents short on hourly pay.
I feel this particular mind trick may be restricted to members of the HN community - who might already be very willing to give Amazon the benefit of doubt in the first place.
Note that, as you say, the information may be completely fabricated (or it may be "technically true", but attached to a lot of catches and conditions that the "ambassadors" conveniently didn't mention)
Also, while the article didn't research the claims, it did put them next to the (vastly better verified) claims of the ex-workers who reported absolutely undesirable working conditions. Even if they beat the pay for industry average, would that matter so much if they in turn offer vastly below-average working conditions?
I vote with my money, constantly. So Amazon was out long ago. Plenty of people I know pay attention to who owns what. To us, it's irrelevant how much they sockpuppet.
Where do you buy used books? I like the local bookstore as mch as the next guy, but I don't know of any reliable source for used books other than Amazon.
Things like AbeBooks and Book Mooch exist. They just aren't as immediately convenient, so, the question is - as is often the case on the internet - convenience or morality.
Also, I don't understand the presumption that independent stores are better on any of the dimensions that Amazon is bad. In my experience as a factory or call-centre worker, the smaller the business is the more likely it is that they will try to avoid tax on cash transactions, ask their workers to work unreasonable hours or accept average rates of pay that are less than minimum wage, violate health and safety laws, etc.
The thing to keep in mind is that clickbait writers will take liberties when citing these twitter accounts, cutting up the quotes to make them sound natural.
If someone wanted to prove how social networks can be used to manipulate the stock market, this would be an excellent mechanism for doing so. Set up a bunch of droid bots for your competitor and then watch the press eat them alive.
Had anyone ever done a piece of investigative journalism on the actual conditions at Amazon? A company that big will have some terrible managers, and the fact that it’s not discovering those easily, is problematic, but that doesn’t mean the entire company is rotten.
I’m a manager in a Scandinavian municipality, and because I work with lean and efficiency I get to see all sides of our operation. I’ve seen departments run so badly that employees were crying every day, and it took HR a year to fix it. I’ve seen departments where sleeping with the boss was the main road to a pay-raise. Hell one of our senior managers who sleeps with employees at the Christmas party, still works for us because nobody wants to step up in public. Some departments have 30% sickleave while others have 2%.
That doesn’t mean the overall working conditions are bad at the municipality. In fact we score 9/10 in employment satisfaction. This in itself is a bit of a problem though, because it’s higher than it should be, but that’s another story.
when you employ hundreds of thousands, you’re bound to have some really bad stories among them. Amazon may be all bad, and I could easily have missed the story that actually did the research, but I simply haven’t seen one.
A funny memory is how the right-wing mocked this article relentlessly, before Jeff Bezos was bad in their minds. I can't wait for Alex Jones et al to become advocates for warehouse workers all of a sudden.
Don't overlook that these filmmakers are heavily incentivized to create a dramatic story. No one will watch a film that says "Yep, it's a pretty normal warehouse, and they even pay a little more than their peers", and the filmmakers certainly won't win respect or accolades for putting out such a piece. This is a well-known problem with any "reality-based" programming; the incentives of the documentarians are primarily to provide an exhilarating narrative.
> This is a well-known problem with any "reality-based" programming
Panorama isn't a "reality-based" programme. It's an undercover investigative programme.
The problem with "reality-based" programming is that some scenes are completely falsified or exaggerated (with the knowing assistance of the show 'participants'). Most of them even have to put a disclaimer at the end of the show saying as much.
Notwithstanding that every produced show is going to have some slant to a point, to classify the linked video as "reality-based" is completely and utterly disingenuous.
The side of Amazon that works in offices and makes good money also has a reputation as a bad place to work, compared to other major tech companies. See the "Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk" article from the NYT a few years back. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-... Anecdotally, as you say, that does seem to depend a lot on your department--good local management can make a lot of difference--but you don't see anywhere near that many horror stories coming out of Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. It does seem that Amazon, as a company, is less concerned about the welfare of its white-collar employees.
And if they don't mind abusing their highly paid, highly skilled knowledge workers, I would be amazed if they gave a single fuck about their unskilled laborers.
I live in Seattle and thus a notable percentage of my social circle works for Amazon corporate.
None of them love working at Amazon, and only a few like it there, but most are pretty miserable.
I think the stock performance is keeping most of them there with how Amazon’s vesting schedule tends to be heavily backloaded. One guy did comment that he loves the scale of the things he’s working on, which I guess I get, but he always complains about the overall culture.
That's the way to get the warehouse workers to comply. Arguably it's BETTER (certainly more effective) if it's that way all the way up the chain, because you'll get buy-in if the lower rungs see that the upper rungs of the latter are pushing themselves just as hard or harder.
If Jeff Bezos cries at his desk, into his apparently meaningless kabillions of dollars, because he just CAN'T quite keep up with what he expects of himself, that would be the final piece of the puzzle. I would suggest that's not impossible: it'd fit the pattern.
At that point the question you ask isn't 'is this fair or are the people getting exploited'. Instead you ask 'are all these people crazy? Do we need to have some kind of intervention?'
The key point here is that you can't assume the situation is designed to abuse lowly workers and coddle management. I think a key innovation at Amazon is, everyone cries at work and/or dies in harness, no exceptions.
It's fair to talk about whether that's acceptable. From all the horror stories, and from my understanding of business, they manage to extend the abuse as high up as possible, and it might go a lot higher than you think. The goal is to make a company full of desperate, last-ditch warriors that try to destroy all competition to their last dying frothing breaths: again, no exceptions.
Should all society work like this? I think that's debatable, but allow an Amazon to do it and they'll steadily kill everything else, and that's the intention.
This matches a recent experience of mine working on a dev team at a large tech company. We joked about ADD or "Abuse-Driven Development," because we would always hear our bosses say, "X needs to be in tomorrow or I'm going to get screamed at," "Okay, which of these is going to be a bigger beating if it's missing," "I live and die by this product," "It's my ass that's on the line for this," etc. Not only that, but they would brag about how little they were being paid and how late they worked every day. We would get emails from them after 1AM regularly. I never encountered any behavior like that at any other company.
Yep. It seems to be a US thing, incidentally. I worked at Amazon in Edinburgh for eight years, and it was pretty nice. Not perfect, certainly, but there was definitely a lot more respect for work-life balance, and a lot less pressure to perform or be fired.
One of our UK folks moved to the Seattle office, and noticed a serious difference in culture: much more pressure, more expectation that you would work any number of extra hours to get things done by the deadline, much higher rates of burnout and turnover.
For what it's worth, in eight years I never saw anybody cry at their desk.
Microsoft in the past had a pretty notorious employee performance system called "stack ranking" where basically no matter how well you did your job you could get classified as a "bottom performer" because a certain percentage had to be ranked lowest. It was a contributor to poor morale and employee stress. Many sales-oriented companies (Oracle?) will have similar performance metrics, e.g. next-to-impossible sales goals, etc. Amazon is not the only company to have a high-pressure work environment.
As a Seattle-ite, I know people at Amazon and at Microsoft.
The Amazon stories are pretty consistent in their awfulness. The people doing more clerical/support stuff seem to have a better time than especially engineers. People usually bail in less than a year, even those who are indentured for moving expenses. There was an especially sad case where a new Amazon employee moved in next door after relocating his family from another part of the country - initially enthused, but it all went to hell and they fled.
Microsoft is much more a hodgepodge. Certainly from the top down it's become so much better post-Ballmer. Actual experiences depend on your group even more so than Amazon, but at least the top is pretty benevolent. I know creative people who truly love their Microsoft lives (and I'm envious), but I've had the occasional interviews with them, all dysfunctional in unpleasant ways (e.g. having someone blow cigarette smoke in your face while making a personally dismissive statement). I keep trying because they are in fact a decent employer in the greater scheme of things.
Thing is, all those department managers -- the good ones and the bad ones -- are working under the same hierarchy and, eventually, under the same people. When there's just one or two isolated cases of pricks who are quickly booted, that's an accident, but when this is business as usual, it's company culture. Every department is one promotion, lateral move, sabbatical or resignation away from being ran by a maniac. So there's no solace in the idea that well, as long as you're in the right team, it's pretty good. It's as if all of it were rotten.
Besides, this has made it to the press more than once, so it's not like even the most disconnected senior management team wouldn't know about it. It's known, it's been known for years, and since nothing appears to have happened for years, it's a pretty safe bet that this is just how the company is ran. That's the kind of rot that spreads easily.
Bear in mind that being really crazygonuts evil is a weakness: it's a vulnerability, begging for legislation or boycott. There's absolutely not a direct correlation between evil and profitability, unless maybe you're a banker.
Amazon's a storefront. They have to serve two masters, one of which is the customer. The other is their reputation among capitalists and rivals.
On the one hand they must promise to deliver better prices and choices than other storefronts, all while assuring customers that they have happy workers and aren't doing anything horrifying.
On the other, they must continue to convince Wall Street and possible rivals that they're the most brutal tyrants on the block and will inevitably kill and devour ALL competitors, all the more because they don't pay dividends and earn people money based on their expansion alone.
Amazon's designed to use psychology to get all employees working like Spartans. If you see this behavior in a sports team, or in open source, typically you go 'hey, cool' and approve of the fierce eagerness to strive. It's part of the human experience and can be used in many ways.
If it's used to condition warehouse workers to accept a situation where they're compensated, but driven to efficiencies that kill a percentage of them, that raises the question of what's the responsibility of those managers. To run a group of humans at those levels of output requires coddling them to some extent, and 'giving them the choice' to walk away (but if you're compensating them even a little better than usual they'll get used to it and resist walking away, even at their own peril: especially if they're thinking Spartan)
This desire to perform and be part of a team isn't something imposed on humans by evil corporations. It's a natural human tendency, which is why Amazon's strategies work. What Amazon does is exploit that as hard as they're allowed to do.
Offering the chance to shill for part of your shift, and offering this only to an elite who're able to do it effectively, is a really clever social exploit. Will it continue to be allowed? Maybe. It's very much the kind of thing that's bending 'the rules' for their benefit, and to do it properly you kind of have to be Amazon. Remember that the whole purpose of the exercise is to further crush any competitors, including those who might have marginally better labor practices… or buy and destroy anything that might have better labor practices, for instance Whole Foods.
It's fair to argue that turning employment into a monoculture in which everything out there works this way (thus foul and no fouler, we hope) is a bad thing to do.
>Offering the chance to shill for part of your shift, and offering this only to an elite who're able to do it effectively, is a really clever social exploit. Will it continue to be allowed? Maybe. It's very much the kind of thing that's bending 'the rules' for their benefit, and to do it properly you kind of have to be Amazon.
That strategy or similar has been going on for a long time, Amazon isn't doing something unseen before and they are probably just copying it from what they've seen. I've seen a local utility run an ad featuring claimed employees talking about their employer/company in a positive on television.
I've also seen similar ads from an oil industry company, and others.
> That doesn’t mean the overall working conditions are bad at the municipality. In fact we score 9/10 in employment satisfaction. This in itself is a bit of a problem though, because it’s higher than it should be, but that’s another story.
That's not another story at all, it completely undermines your point. "We can't be doing so bad because we score well on this metric (oh BTW this metric is obviously being gamed somehow)" does not convince me that you're actually doing okay at all.
It has been proven time and again that if a company is doing well financially, their internal people policies are not paid attention to.
All the people centric PR that companies dish out is simply another strategy to make more money without employee revolt.
Having said this, it's not completely company's fault. The financial system judges companies solely on their profits and future outlook, not employee happiness and well being.
200 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadAre there similar PR initiatives within Amazon engineering aimed at us?
My contract also explicitly forbid me from talking about any technologies in use within the company, up to and including programming languages. That might just be an artifact of the time and place that I was hired, though, as the company definitely grew much more open over the years.
I've been out of Amazon for nearly three years (after working there for eight) and I still find myself reflexively being nervous about what I say!
I see NO correlation between that and intelligence, verbal proficiency, articulateness: indeed, if you're smart enough to recognize the obvious purpose of the exercise you'll self-edit until you sound even more like a PR agency, lest you have to return to picking boxes full-time rather than getting to compose tweets for part of your time.
One caveat: if you're poor and desperate, your bandwidth will be taxed (see 'Scarcity: a talk for people too busy to attend talks'). That doesn't compromise people so badly that they appear unintelligent and uneducated, though, and if it's your job to seem glib and intelligent you'll work at it.
tl:dr; do you seriously assert that poor people are too stupid to write and speak well? I sure hope not.
Anybody doing this is already a good speaker and writer, and understands what's expected of them. Otherwise they wouldn't be allowed to do it. Again, I know large numbers of poor people who are perfectly capable of this erudition.
If you've got a masters in English Literature, it's probably this or Wal-Mart or death.
Some questions I'd start asking are:
-Have they ever been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder or some type of high functioning autism?
-Are they from a third world country? Do they lack social norms we'd typically associate with people's attitudes about working in a factory?
-This this real life?
It's such a damaged artifact of modern de-industrialization. I really need to know why this is a thing...
There is no signal in that noise.
Just noise!
In other words, they took a list of everything everyone complains about, and just decided to refute them point by point in the most condescendingly Orwellian way possible, rather than fixing them, because "disagree and commit" and I guess "frugality uber alles."
Sounds about like Amazon, yep.
On what basis? All we have is PR talking points presented, deceptively, as genuine opinions of real employees. That doesn't seem like evidence.
This is in the site guidelines btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I didn't say the words you quoted.
Kind of to a point.
People get bathroom breaks, but those count against your rate, and people do sometimes get written up for taking them, although that's as much a matter of Amazon encouraging ruthlessness in management as anything. I know of one anecdotal story of a worker who was apparently written up for the time it took them to clean up after their own nosebleed.
In the FC where I work, the temperatures are definitely not pleasant, but HR insists we simply aren't aware of how perfect the climate control is.
I think it's one of those things that depends on where you work and who you work under.
* What is it, Voice of the Associates? Something like that. It's a big whiteboard in the breakroom. You write down your login and a message for management/IT/HR and they write a response.
Nothing to see here.
> "I can safely say that none of MY ideas have panned out anywhere near what Jeff Bezos has accomplished."
The most one can hope is that this is a bona fide Tweet from an employee who-- for whatever reason-- desires to self-deprecate in a completely voluntary, unremunerated defense of the company they work for during their off time.
Because if this is a PR drone posting self-deprecating statements in the name of an actual employee that's pretty humiliating behavior.
> Look, we want you to express yourself, okay? Now if you feel that the bare minimum is enough, then okay. But some people choose to wear more and we encourage that, okay? You do want to express yourself, don't you?
-- Office Space, 1999
I can almost feel the soul leeching sensation behind the forced cheerfulness. Though that could be a bit of projection if these are PR people pretending to be workers instead of workers acting as PR people.
But it's still disturbing in a more direct way than news reports about workers peeing in bottles to help shave time to hit performance targets.
/apropos of nothing
...and it might just be my unfamiliarity, but "FC Ambassador" just reminds me of football more than anything else. That part of their branding isn't working, if they're trying to get into the minds of people who aren't familiar with the company.
Also, in case there is confusion with the term "ambassador", from my understanding this is mostly an internal title for associates who lead some training sessions for new hires. It doesn't come with any pay or benefit increases, it's just a nice thing to do if you like training new hires and want an occasional break from your normal duties. These aren't really meant to be outward facing brand ambassadors, at least that's been my understanding.
Disclosure: I work at an Amazon warehouse.
> People get bathroom breaks, but those count against your rate, and people do sometimes get written up for taking them, although that's as much a matter of Amazon encouraging ruthlessness in management as anything. I know of one anecdotal story of a worker who was apparently written up for the time it took them to clean up after their own nosebleed.
Does this ring true to you?
I suppose the reason I was so invested was the idea that if I had that job on my resume, I could get a job anywhere. Doesn't seem like a good reason to do something.
Grand Tour is my weak point though...
There are two main reasons why it's possible that I've never run across such cases, the most logical one being that I've worked primarily in a Delivery Station and not a Fulfillment Center. From what I've experienced the Delivery Stations are, for lack of a better term, not run as "efficiently" as the FC's, so the metrics that are used to track employee performance aren't quite as well quantified. There is still obviously a lot of performance tracking with regards to rates, but due to the less efficient and structured layout of the DS, there seems to be a bit more leeway given.
Also, I think I've been extremely fortunate with the management that I work under and they seem to take worker safety and the overall work environment very seriously. I can't imagine any managers at my station writing anyone up for taking bathroom breaks, and definitely not for handling a bloody nose. Again, just to be clear, I'm not at all refuting the accuracy of those reports, issues like that have definitely occurred in Amazon warehouses, but the environment at my warehouse seems to be significantly more worker friendly. I think this is probably due to our station managers' oversight.
Also, I've only been working at Amazon for slightly over one year, so it's possible that they have been making genuine progress on these issues.
What exactly is the policy on bathroom breaks?
Most functions in FCs are "direct": they have rate expectations that are automatically tracked. Every minute you're in a direct function counts toward your rate. You can go to the bathroom whenever you need to, but it'll lower your rate. (Some functions are "indirect", meaning that they don't involve use of any digital tools and so can't be tracked.)
"Time off task" is also automatically tracked. If you go some amount of time without scanning anything -- I think it's five minutes -- that'll show up on your time. Managers know that people have to go to the bathroom and usually won't make a big deal out of it, but if you take an unusually long time in the bathroom you might get written up. TOT writeups are supposed to be automatic but I think managers have some discretion.
I think I was written up for a bathroom break before -- I'm not sure, since my FC isn't very good at delivering feedback -- but I was in there for half an hour, so it was sort of understandable.
There haven't been issues with bathroom breaks where I am, but there's only one floor. The site in the story with associates peeing in bottles apparently had multiple floors, with bathrooms only on the bottom floor. It'd be difficult to take a bathroom break while maintaining the expected rate and low TOT at sites like that.
I think rate expectations are consistent across the network, meaning that managers, or even site leads, can't adjust them to account for things like distance to the bathroom.
In short: you won't get written up for taking a bathroom break, and you can just go to the bathroom when you need to, but you might get written up for low rates or high time off task, and you might end up with low rates or high time off task for going to the bathroom if it's far away or you take a long time.
If you have to go down four stories to get to the bathroom, on the other hand, it'd be pretty hard to maintain the rate, and if you don't maintain the rate you'll probably get written up for that.
The policy at our station is that if you need to go to the bathroom when not on break or lunch, you need to tell either a line lead, shift assistant, or the people working next to you so that they can cover your post while you're gone so things don't get backed up or packages don't end up spilling on the ground. That's pretty much it. I've worked the night shift before and drink large amounts of water so I could rarely make it through a shift without using the bathroom one or two times in addition to the times I went while on break and lunch. It was never a problem, we would just cover for each other.
Progress is a loaded word. If you said that Amazon has been doing serious optimization on that stuff, I'd call that more accurate. Bear in mind that part of the pressure is 'don't get PR-worthy nosebleeds or have to pee all the time'; in no way is this an effort to make workers comfortable or complacent.
It's just that having people fall over dead, or getting punished for nosebleeds, or pissing in bottles to make quota, are such bad PR that they have to be optimized away. You can't go THAT hard. There's a limit to how hard you can push before it starts to look bad, so you end up having to be just as grimly competitive about the details of work environment.
Anyone thinking Amazon is trying to maximize worker suffering is a fool: there's a point where it becomes a liability, and they will optimize until it's just on the safe side of 'horror story'.
Some workers do wind up camping in their cars and peeing in bottles to make rate, most don't. What people wind up complaining about tend to be exceptions rather than the rule, but those exceptions do exist.
1. Care about tweeting about their company.
2. Talk like that.
However, I think this could be real if:
1. Amazon has some incentive program that basically allows workers to take on a "marketing assignment" for some sort of bonus. If so, how is this different than contriving good reviews about your restaurant on Yelp?
2. Amazon has developed or is paying for third party software that lets their PR people quickly manage and create activity on multiple Twitter accounts from a central interface.
I feel the same way. I know a lot of warehouse associates are active on some of the Amazon Instagram pages, but that's mostly just silly pictures and activities. I don't think anyone would post such detailed responses on their own when they aren't being paid.
I haven't heard of any such program, but if it existed, I guarantee Amazon wouldn't offer a bonus for it.
(IME, most FC associates never check their Amazon email accounts, so they wouldn't see that.)
And I'm fairly certain most associates at my station aren't even aware they have an @amazon email address so they definitely aren't checking it. Nice to see another L1 around here.
I feel like this would be infinitely cheaper, more quantifiable and easier to set concrete milestones/targets for their campaigns than telling employees to tweet on Amazon's behalf and hoping for the best.
All it takes is for one of these ambassadors to get fired/quit and their pro-Amazon platform becomes an anti-Amazon soapbox.
Everything was manual.
And zero air conditioning in the first early generation distribution(now fulfilment) centres.
Hiring, even in distribution(fulfilment) operations, had quite a high hiring bar.
This was done to help develop the near future Human Resources capacity of the company.
So we had an inordinately high % of Amazon Associate stock pickers with undergraduate and graduate degrees.
Quite an eclectic and quirky bunch of quite over educated folks doing a lot of manual labor trying to get the orders out the door and not drown in them.
It was a much much smaller company back then.
We were just trying to survive the never ending need to get customer orders out te door and “average up” with each new hire.
Intellectual capacity per person was quite high, but our operational execution would be far lower than what is achieved today.
We were failing/learning as we were going.
More exploration, less exploitation(in the process sense).
Exploitation as an employee wasn’t a problem in the early days from my perspective.
We all knew what we were getting into. 100% commitment and acting like an owner.
As headcount exploded, individual understanding of Amazon’s mission, ethos, etc declined as it become more job-like, and less purposeful.
Growth rate compelled hiring more specialists and less multi-purpose generalists....who could write non Borg Collective like Tweets.
I guess what I’m saying is the culture in the early days was more like a pirate ship full of idiosyncratic individualist buccaneers than Borg.
Just the bio alone seems to give it away:
https://twitter.com/fc_ambassador/with_replies
Maybe only this one is satire? Hard to tell which level of galaxy brain this is.
Is it real and does it work? Undoubtedly, there are people who believe it works and invest a lot of resources in it, from businesses to political movements to governments (Russia and China, for example). We can see that disinformation can be effectively spread, and it seems hatred and other things as well. Arguably, we can see it to a degree in Facebook's and Google's (and others') valuations. We discuss it, from a different perspective, on HN regularly. But what are the technical details of this new tool: In what situations does it work and in what does it not? How powerful is it? How much does it cost? How does it work on a detailed level? What are the key components of this machine? Is anyone talking - we know it's done widely, so it seems that information about this technology should be available. (I'm not asking for speculation - we have heard plenty of that - I'm looking for actual technical knowledge.)
Another way of looking at it: Perhaps it's analogous to the Creel Commission - innovations in manipulation via a new communication technology.
For example, how did Amazon and others turn around Seattle's new tax so quickly and effectively? IIRC, it was widely supported and then public opinion reversed itself in a matter of months.
You set up 15 Twitter accounts claiming to be employees of your warehouses. You make sure the accounts are laughably bad at concealing the fact that they are shills, with cookie-cutter bios and responses that are obviously canned talking points. This ensures that the accounts are discovered and written up by various publications, and the articles widely shared.
The articles, while laughing at how transparently phony the accounts are, inevitably mention that you are now offering tours of your warehouses (which makes you sound trustworthy since you're not hiding anything), and embed the Tweets that say you pay more than other companies in your industry and offer medical benefits. (Since this information is falsifiable (capable of being proven false, but not necessarily false) it's credible even though it's coming from a shill account.)
You've probably not made anyone's opinion of you worse (you look more stupid than malevolent), but you've gotten your message in front of eyeballs and it might make some people think better of you.
One thing that makes propaganda like this so effective is that journalists generally do not bother to verify any propaganda claims (eg. does Amazon really pay 30% more?), so even if they write articles making fun of you they still repeat your message.
What I got out of it was that Amazon had previously been dehumanizing their workers to the point that the PR drones have to now overtly brag about complying with OSHA laws.
Does Amazon actually pay ~30% better now than their competitors (or anything close to that)? Do they offer dental, vision and healthcare coverage for all employees?
If those things are true, then I think better of Amazon because of it. I would have guessed none of those things were true otherwise. The media and essentially all comments online proclaim that Amazon employees are being tortured horrifically on a daily basis and paid absolute bottom tier wages across the board. Those articles and opinions have, to one degree or another, tilted my opinion of Amazon in a negative manner.
Can anyone here speak to if those positive things are true and or mostly true? I have no idea. I'd think better of Amazon if they were.
I will say that from what I've seen my station managers take safety very seriously. Some of this must extend up the corporate ladder because I had a friend who was injured on the job here and Amazon did a very good job of making sure he got the care he required. He actually wanted to come back to work much earlier than Amazon would allow, he missed his coworkers, but they wanted to make sure he was completely healed and made it clear that he shouldn't rush things. He was being paid worker's comp during this time. This certainly made a good impression on me.
I also really appreciated how straight forward the hiring process was. I was unemployed and homeless, I actually lived on an empty lot behind our warehouse for a while, when I was hired and out of all the jobs I applied to Amazon had the most streamlined hiring process. This might not seem like a huge deal but when you're already struggling it was nice to not have too many hoops to jump through to try and land a job.
Obviously due to my background I'm probably viewing my work overly positively, it feels pretty great to finally have a little bit of savings, I've saved up around $1500 over the past year and this is the most money I've had in my entire life, but overall I've enjoyed my time at Amazon. But again, from the reporting I've seen there are still some pretty glaring systemic problems within the company.
Edit: I saw a poster comment under this post asserting that I was being paid to post here in defense of Amazon, the post has since been deleted after receiving some downvotes, for the record I did not downvote the poster, but I will address their concerns. I can certainly understand why my post might raise suspicions. To give some background I have another account on HN that I've been active on for approximately three years and have a bit over 2000 karma. I post a few times a month, and by post I mean I usually just ask tons of questions about topics I have a limited understanding of and the kind people here try their best to explain things to me. I wanted to keep this account separate form that one since I don't post anything Amazon related using my normal account. I hope I don't sound like too much of a shill but I'm somewhat excited to finally be able to contribute to a topic I have some understanding of.
On Amazon worker treatment generally it's hard to tell whether it is propaganda or maltreatment. Jeff Bezos is obviously a powerful man with a lot of people under him and that attracts all sorts of interest/enemies. It is also not unusual for companies to treat workers poorly - but my instinct is skeptical of media because it's difficult not to notice some Californians are notorious for drama development. I've done a lot of not-by-the-book stuff on building sites - we just didn't keep records and convert them into issues because we used common sense to be safe and it's good work but we could have easily made it sound dire and hit our employer with all sorts of costs that ultimately would have made us less valuable.
If Amazon warehouses were that bad, people wouldn't work there. I'm sure people get hurt, it's physical work. It's not a job you're going to enjoy if, like most adults, you are overweight and out of shape.
Not just in California but media today dramatize everything to get readers. The goal of almost any news story is to "go viral" to get clicks/views.
I don't know how the conditions at Amazon warehouses truly are, but this statement doesn't sound correct to me. I can think of countless examples of workers that accept from sub-optimal conditions to outright modern slavery simply because they can't find an exit to the system of cheap labor exploitation.
Maybe this can be scoped down to some developed countries or some cities in developed countries, but certainly doesn't hold true for most developing countries and certainly not for past history in basically anywhere.
This is the real headline, everybody is guilty.
Swear to God if Kim Jong Un somehow managed a hostile takeover of America or my country - then forced us all to do calisthenics each morning - sure it'd start horribly but by the end of the month we'd be singing the praises of Our Dear Leader.
I must admit the first thing I did was look at your comment history as your post sounded suspicious. If it was mixed in with other posts I'd have been inclined to take it more seriously than I can now.
Just to be clear here: this is required by law, not something that the company is doing out of the goodness of its heart. It's also a fraction of what one's normal wages would be, which I would say is a more likely explanation for the injured person's eagerness to return than that "he missed his coworkers".
> they wanted to make sure he was completely healed and made it clear that he shouldn't rush things
I won't fault them for this, as I don't have details like what/how serious the injury was. But often a better alternative to no work at all is to temporarily reassign the person to another role where their injury is not an issue (desk job of some kind, generally). This way the employee continues to get full or near-full wages.
EDIT: Also, forgot to point out that work restrictions are defined by a doctor who treated the injured person, not by the employer. They can get in serious trouble for forcing someone to work in excess of those restrictions. So again, not really a sign of benevolence.
While I didn't mention it in my post my coworker was reassigned to less labor intensive duties once he returned to work. And from my understanding the doctor who treated him ok'd him to return to his normal duties but our direct manager had no problem with him taking longer in this less physical role.
I'm just adding this detail to paint a better picture but I think you've done a good job illustrating that this is the minimum that Amazon in required to do and they shouldn't be praised for doing what the law requires. I'm certainly not here to try and do PR for Amazon, just sharing my personal experiences.
I still don't understand. If you have no idea whether the things they claim are true, why has your opinion of Amazon's treatment of workers improved?
Is it that you don't think Amazon would be having their employees claim things that are misleading? We already have myriad claims of Amazon pressuring workers not to use the bathroom outside of breaks. And the same article mentions that the workers have to sign NDAs[1].
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/under-pressure-...
It works especially well for information that does not affect you personally, because you're less likely to go through the extra effort to verify whether something is true.
If your boss tells you that your salary is $100k/year, you're going to check that on your paycheck!
If your boss tells you that garbage collectors make $100k a year, you might not believe it, but you might also not bother to put in the effort to check. But if you remember it later on, the very act of bringing it out of your memory will reinforce it to you.
And if you don't go specifically check on the accuracy, you're also more likely to rely on social signals like, who is telling me this? Is this a person who I identify with? Does it seem like a person or an institution I should trust?
In this case, you are reading a news article from TechCrunch, a well-known, successful, and long-running news site. Any information you read there comes wrapped in however much trust you associate with TechCrunch. So if a claim is passed on in an article, it comes with some level of default trust.
And even if you don't like TechCrunch, the default level of trust is affected just by the act of reading the article. By default we tend to trust ourselves, so when we do something (like read an article), the default trust is pushed above zero, just because we're the one who read it! This effect is why most people think they are above average drivers, for example.
So: reading an article about an ad campaign, that contains the ad and its claims, can affect how you feel about the advertised product... even though you know it's an article about an ad campaign!
In marketing this is called "earned media" and it is valuable because it hijacks your trust for the media source to support the ad claim. A spectacular example was the "Swift Boat Truth" ad against John Kerry, which barely ran on late night TV, but was widely covered by the news media. It had a huge impact on Kerry's campaign for president.
I wish I had a debating technique named after me.
I've not looked into it since high school, so I sometimes wonder if I misjudged, but links like that wikipedia one make me think I correctly avoided it.
It's really fastinating to see all of these strategies played out in the real world.
I use these strategies to identify what they are doing and cut through the sophistry and attempt to reach the truth.
The nice thing about online debating is that you have time to think about and analyze the others argument vs on the spot debate where emotions get involved.
> The amounts associates reported receiving in VCP [Variable Compensation Pay] were underwhelming. One claimed his highest monthly payout was $48. Another averaged around $60. The only reason these paltry bonuses are relevant at all is that Amazon itself uses them to arrive at the over $15 per hour figure it estimates as its average Fulfillment Center worker’s pay. “Hourly pay rates are competitive and we offer great benefits – we encourage anyone to compare our pay and benefits to other retailers,” Amazon told Gizmodo in a statement for this piece. Glassdoor lists average warehouse pay for Amazon at $12.33, less at, Home Depot ($12.96), Costco ($13.43), and Target ($14.57). Even stacked against Walmart, its main competition and a business with its own set of unsavory practices, Amazon still comes up twenty cents short on hourly pay.
Note that, as you say, the information may be completely fabricated (or it may be "technically true", but attached to a lot of catches and conditions that the "ambassadors" conveniently didn't mention)
Also, while the article didn't research the claims, it did put them next to the (vastly better verified) claims of the ex-workers who reported absolutely undesirable working conditions. Even if they beat the pay for industry average, would that matter so much if they in turn offer vastly below-average working conditions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect
I’m a manager in a Scandinavian municipality, and because I work with lean and efficiency I get to see all sides of our operation. I’ve seen departments run so badly that employees were crying every day, and it took HR a year to fix it. I’ve seen departments where sleeping with the boss was the main road to a pay-raise. Hell one of our senior managers who sleeps with employees at the Christmas party, still works for us because nobody wants to step up in public. Some departments have 30% sickleave while others have 2%.
That doesn’t mean the overall working conditions are bad at the municipality. In fact we score 9/10 in employment satisfaction. This in itself is a bit of a problem though, because it’s higher than it should be, but that’s another story.
when you employ hundreds of thousands, you’re bound to have some really bad stories among them. Amazon may be all bad, and I could easily have missed the story that actually did the research, but I simply haven’t seen one.
Sure, see https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-... for one example.
Edit: in fact, it’s available here on YouTube: https://youtu.be/UQATFbLvIHk
Panorama isn't a "reality-based" programme. It's an undercover investigative programme.
The problem with "reality-based" programming is that some scenes are completely falsified or exaggerated (with the knowing assistance of the show 'participants'). Most of them even have to put a disclaimer at the end of the show saying as much.
Notwithstanding that every produced show is going to have some slant to a point, to classify the linked video as "reality-based" is completely and utterly disingenuous.
And if they don't mind abusing their highly paid, highly skilled knowledge workers, I would be amazed if they gave a single fuck about their unskilled laborers.
None of them love working at Amazon, and only a few like it there, but most are pretty miserable.
I think the stock performance is keeping most of them there with how Amazon’s vesting schedule tends to be heavily backloaded. One guy did comment that he loves the scale of the things he’s working on, which I guess I get, but he always complains about the overall culture.
If Jeff Bezos cries at his desk, into his apparently meaningless kabillions of dollars, because he just CAN'T quite keep up with what he expects of himself, that would be the final piece of the puzzle. I would suggest that's not impossible: it'd fit the pattern.
At that point the question you ask isn't 'is this fair or are the people getting exploited'. Instead you ask 'are all these people crazy? Do we need to have some kind of intervention?'
The key point here is that you can't assume the situation is designed to abuse lowly workers and coddle management. I think a key innovation at Amazon is, everyone cries at work and/or dies in harness, no exceptions.
It's fair to talk about whether that's acceptable. From all the horror stories, and from my understanding of business, they manage to extend the abuse as high up as possible, and it might go a lot higher than you think. The goal is to make a company full of desperate, last-ditch warriors that try to destroy all competition to their last dying frothing breaths: again, no exceptions.
Should all society work like this? I think that's debatable, but allow an Amazon to do it and they'll steadily kill everything else, and that's the intention.
One of our UK folks moved to the Seattle office, and noticed a serious difference in culture: much more pressure, more expectation that you would work any number of extra hours to get things done by the deadline, much higher rates of burnout and turnover.
For what it's worth, in eight years I never saw anybody cry at their desk.
The Amazon stories are pretty consistent in their awfulness. The people doing more clerical/support stuff seem to have a better time than especially engineers. People usually bail in less than a year, even those who are indentured for moving expenses. There was an especially sad case where a new Amazon employee moved in next door after relocating his family from another part of the country - initially enthused, but it all went to hell and they fled.
Microsoft is much more a hodgepodge. Certainly from the top down it's become so much better post-Ballmer. Actual experiences depend on your group even more so than Amazon, but at least the top is pretty benevolent. I know creative people who truly love their Microsoft lives (and I'm envious), but I've had the occasional interviews with them, all dysfunctional in unpleasant ways (e.g. having someone blow cigarette smoke in your face while making a personally dismissive statement). I keep trying because they are in fact a decent employer in the greater scheme of things.
Besides, this has made it to the press more than once, so it's not like even the most disconnected senior management team wouldn't know about it. It's known, it's been known for years, and since nothing appears to have happened for years, it's a pretty safe bet that this is just how the company is ran. That's the kind of rot that spreads easily.
Amazon's a storefront. They have to serve two masters, one of which is the customer. The other is their reputation among capitalists and rivals.
On the one hand they must promise to deliver better prices and choices than other storefronts, all while assuring customers that they have happy workers and aren't doing anything horrifying.
On the other, they must continue to convince Wall Street and possible rivals that they're the most brutal tyrants on the block and will inevitably kill and devour ALL competitors, all the more because they don't pay dividends and earn people money based on their expansion alone.
Amazon's designed to use psychology to get all employees working like Spartans. If you see this behavior in a sports team, or in open source, typically you go 'hey, cool' and approve of the fierce eagerness to strive. It's part of the human experience and can be used in many ways.
If it's used to condition warehouse workers to accept a situation where they're compensated, but driven to efficiencies that kill a percentage of them, that raises the question of what's the responsibility of those managers. To run a group of humans at those levels of output requires coddling them to some extent, and 'giving them the choice' to walk away (but if you're compensating them even a little better than usual they'll get used to it and resist walking away, even at their own peril: especially if they're thinking Spartan)
This desire to perform and be part of a team isn't something imposed on humans by evil corporations. It's a natural human tendency, which is why Amazon's strategies work. What Amazon does is exploit that as hard as they're allowed to do.
Offering the chance to shill for part of your shift, and offering this only to an elite who're able to do it effectively, is a really clever social exploit. Will it continue to be allowed? Maybe. It's very much the kind of thing that's bending 'the rules' for their benefit, and to do it properly you kind of have to be Amazon. Remember that the whole purpose of the exercise is to further crush any competitors, including those who might have marginally better labor practices… or buy and destroy anything that might have better labor practices, for instance Whole Foods.
It's fair to argue that turning employment into a monoculture in which everything out there works this way (thus foul and no fouler, we hope) is a bad thing to do.
That strategy or similar has been going on for a long time, Amazon isn't doing something unseen before and they are probably just copying it from what they've seen. I've seen a local utility run an ad featuring claimed employees talking about their employer/company in a positive on television.
I've also seen similar ads from an oil industry company, and others.
That's not another story at all, it completely undermines your point. "We can't be doing so bad because we score well on this metric (oh BTW this metric is obviously being gamed somehow)" does not convince me that you're actually doing okay at all.
All the people centric PR that companies dish out is simply another strategy to make more money without employee revolt.
Having said this, it's not completely company's fault. The financial system judges companies solely on their profits and future outlook, not employee happiness and well being.