Jeez. This article really highlights the abuses on which Amazon (and other similar jobs, think Uber, Foodora or whatever) are built upon:
> feigning nonchalance as I handed a cup of urine to the attendant and bid him good day.
I consider mandatory drug tests a massive invasion of privacy that only persists because workers don't (really) have the ability to shop around employers who don't do them. Besides they're only screening for illegal drugs but don't care about the really dangerous things (a lack of decent sleep being the worst).
> An honest recounting of this job must include my sometimes frantic searches for a place to answer nature’s call.
This is dehumanizing. This could be easily solved by requiring employers to provide e.g. these tiny camping toilets in the van - they don't take up much space (one parcel, maybe), and a "seat" can easily be fitted by rearranging a couple of rack plates without losing storage space.
But the biggest issue is this:
> Before it was taken out of service for repairs, I was often stuck with a ProMaster that had issues: Side-view mirrors spiderwebbed; the left mirror held fast to the body of the van by several layers of shrink-wrap. The headlights didn’t work unless flicked into “bright” mode, which means that when delivering after dark, I was blinding and infuriating oncoming motorists. [...] That’s when I heard a thud-thud-thud from the area of my right front tire, which was so old and bald that it had begun to shed four- and five-inch strips of rubber, which were thumping against the wheel well.
This is illegal and dangerous, both for the driver and for all people, animals and property around them.
All the "cost cutting" of Amazon doing deliveries instead of UPS, Fedex etc. does have to come from somewhere, and here it is done on public safety. I'm fine with competition, but not if public safety and worker/human rights are sacrificed for short-term profits for Jeff Bezos.
And what's the biggest issue: as a consumer, you do not have a choice when it comes to shipping - I'd gladly pay 1€ more a package if that would ensure that the delivery of my parcel is at least not outright exploitation, but Amazon (or any other web shop, food delivery service or whatever) do not offer this option, and are thus limiting the consumer power over where to shop based on moral ground.
And that's the problem. While we tech workers mostly have the luxury of shopping around employers, sometimes even based on the food in the cafeteria, much of the "lower" levels do not have the free market where both sides are on relatively equal footing.
There's always someone desperate enough to put up even with illegal stuff (e.g. unmaintained vehicles), so if a poor(ish) person has the choice between either doing that job or not being able to make rent...
This should not be "normal". Especially when laws are being violated. It is also a violation of any free market principle if (big) companies can outright ignore laws that everyone else honestly follows. Hard to compete when the other side operates unfairly.
> The driver is the only person effectively held responsible for those defects, so awful motor carriers tend to only attract awful or desperate drivers.
In Europe, for the big rigs also the transportation company owning the truck can and will be held liable. This holds true for both driving times related stuff (e.g. when the police can prove that the travel plan cannot be followed without the driver breaking the law) and vehicle safety (blown tires, overloading, rust, broken brakes, ...). Sadly, small trucks and delivery vans are exempted from lots of the rules :/
>The poor maintenance, etc, is just evidence of an awful company that doesn’t give a shit. There are many like it.
You're confusing "doesn't give a shit" with "our margins are too thin to afford any shit". Most of the "sketchy" landscapers, dumpster/trash companies and dirt haulers near you are in the latter camp. Downtime has a massive opportunity cost. Businesses are not running bald tires because they want to but because if their mechanic staff was four people instead of three that would give them no margin and you need a margin to survive.
Businesses running bald tires are just squeezing whatever pennies they can, out of need or greed.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of feeling bad for these companies. Do not. Putting lives in danger to stay solvent means you cannot afford to be in business and need to go away.
Hence regulations and inspections to ensure all players are playing by the same rules and won’t be undercut by someone unscrupulous who is willing to run bald tires.
That's where the subcontractor community is problematic.
If Amazon.com has compliance problems, it will get fixed. If Joe's Delivery Service has problems, they vanish and Joseph's Delivery Service pops up.
This became apparent when Chinatown busses were at their peak problem -- the "Lucky Dragon Bus Company 43" would replace the "Double Happiness Bus 24" within hours of regulatory action.
Drug screens for commercial drivers are federally mandated. That requirement doesn't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon (though maybe if marijuana becomes legal nationwide that will no longer be part of the test).
>(though maybe if marijuana becomes legal nationwide that will no longer be part of the test)
The test isn't going anywhere until there's a reliable field sobriety for weed. Companies don't want employees operating heavy equipment stoned, and unfortunately there's no way to test that somebody smoked in the last day or two, only that they've smoked in the last X weeks/months, depending on their habits.
> unfortunately there's no way to test that somebody smoked in the last day or two, only that they've smoked in the last X weeks/months, depending on their habits.
no non-invasive ones, anyways. :(
blood test does fine for checking whether you're high at the time of draw.
>And what's the biggest issue: as a consumer, you do not have a choice when it comes to shipping - I'd gladly pay 1€ more a package if that would ensure that the delivery of my parcel is at least not outright exploitation, but Amazon (or any other web shop, food delivery service or whatever) do not offer this option, and are thus limiting the consumer power over where to shop based on moral ground.
i see this claimed very often by the same people that laud the free market. realize the irony: if ethically sourced good were desired then Amazon would indeed offer this option. in fact they are a luxury good (read: small minority) and so to first approximation you're the only person that wants this.
Amazon doesn't give me an option for who ships packages I order from them. It's a fairly round-robin distribution of fedex, ups and usps to where I live out in the sticks.
If there was an option to pick your carrier, with say a list like such:
>This is illegal and dangerous, both for the driver and for all people, animals and property around them.
As someone who has worked as a delivery driver and is far more familiar with the vehicle inspection program in my state (yes, I know it's different for heavy trucks) than someone who has never worked as an automotive mechanic should be I wholly disagree. Vehicle downtime is enough of a PITA that anyone who can avoid it does, especially in a commercial setting. The regulatory compliance stick adds nothing positive you consider the .gov being able to swoop in find some violation over which they can screw any given operator a positive.
Whatever handheld electronic device is telling the delivery driver where to turn is a far bigger danger to the public than four bald tires. Drivers who are always in a rush and don't have time to do more than the bare minimum strapping down cargo or route planning are also a major source of accidents and near misses. Mechanical failure is a cause of a negligible fraction of accidents. It's really nothing to be worried about from a safety point of view.
I think it's also telling that many (most?) states do not have vehicle inspections. Are the accident rates any higher in states that don't than in states that do? I don't think so.
This is exactly what I wanted to say but wasn't going to put so bluntly. For private vehicles inspections are just a money wasting government program to make the government feel good about how much it's protecting people while not actually protecting people much per dollar. For commercial vehicles I think the situation is not so cut and clear but I think we could do with less inspections and more roadside enforcement.
I agree completely. For private vehicles, there's just no evidence showing that these inspection programs improve safety at all; almost all private-vehicle accidents are caused by driver error, after all, since we as a nation absolutely refuse to require any kind of real driver training, and also refuse to enforce any real driving skills, and only focus on "speeding".
Commercial vehicles are a little different I think, since 1) the drivers actually are skilled for the most part (far better than private vehicle drivers at any rate), and 2) they get a lot more use, and so have more maintenance issues. Retread tires, for instance, are a big issue with them, and really should be banned as they are in other countries. They can cause the truck with them to crash, and they can also cause other vehicles to crash by being a road hazard.
Good job! A lot of people wallow and believe that Real Work™ is beneath them, or lash out and make things up about their employer to gather pity. I have great respect for my brother, who (although he would obviously prefer to make a living some other way) gets up in the morning and does his job, and reserves his complaints for people who aren't holding up their end of the deal.
People will say all sorts of things about this; yeah it sucks to not know where and when to pee on the job, but I've had this problem even in office work. It is crappy, but it's not sheer indignity. Yeah, it sucks that they don't want you using weed at home except for a diagnosed medical purpose, but at the same time, it is no great indignity. Rail engineers and conductors here can't drink within 12 hours of a shift, and if they tested for that I don't think it would be insane. You'd be upset if somebody sparked a fat L before going to work, and then injured you while mishandling a forklift; heck, you'd probably sue Amazon (and you'd be right to), so you can surely understand why they want to nip that in the bud, even if their approach seems heavy-handed.
Of course, people here don't like talk like this. I'm not being hyperbolic enough about employment difficulties.
I have an incredible amount of respect for people in high level roles who are willing to roll up their sleeves when necessary. On the flip-side, whenever I hear things like "I'm an engineer, I don't do CSS / write tests / write documents", or "I'm an architect, I don't write code", it's a cue for me that that person is not a good fit for my team.
I'm afraid you've moved from one fading career path to another. In ten years that delivery van will be an autonomous drone carrier. A far smaller crew of humans will be just for exceptional stuff, like oversized packages and updating map details. Your wife's career in law seems much more robust.
“Lurching west in stop-and-go traffic on I-80 that morning, bound for Berkeley and a day of delivering in the rain, I had a low moment, dwelling on how far I’d come down in the world. Then I snapped out of it. I haven’t come down in the world. What’s come down in the world is the business model that sustained Time Inc. for decades. I’m pretty much the same writer, the same guy. I haven’t gone anywhere. My feet are the same.”
Maybe he doesn’t have the same stability or ‘prestige’ as his last job or his wife’s, but, hey, his last one turned out to not be so stable after all, and your ego can’t buy you a house or put food on the table.
I'm pretty sure we're in the middle of the biggest revolution this world's ever seen. And being in the middle of it is blinding us to it.
These jobs, these people slipping through the cracks are the transition to something I hope is better. But it's that in-between time, that many many people will suffer very badly.
I have people keep arguing with me that automation hasn't replaced jobs,and that more people have jobs than ever, yet none of these new jobs have any security whatsoever, and the job lifespans are so short. The automation revolution is here, we are blind to it.
> These jobs, these people slipping through the cracks are the transition to something I hope is better.
Some people may be slipping through the cracks, but others are doing far better than anyone could ever imagine. Crises do stir stuff up, but in this case the net result to society is far too positive to imply it's a bad thing.
It’s crazy how much data shows diverging lines in society between the haves and have nots, yet people are claiming all is well. It would be one thing if the whole pie was getting bigger and everyone’s share was increasing, but all the data indicates the gains are going to fewer and fewer, which makes sense since automation and globalization disproportionately benefit the owners of capital.
And here's the downfall, in my opinion, of Sport Illustrated (as well as ESPN) and why they're failing. Instead of, you know, sports... they got all political and their readers who subscribed for sports weren't interested in getting political reporting from a sports publisher.
Look at it from the other side: I like reading political reporting to a certain extent, but I don't give two shits about sports. So why would I subscribe to a sports magazine to read political articles?
I think you have a point here: if I want to read about sports, I'm not going to read The Atlantic, I'm going to read some sports magazine. If I want to read about politics, well sports magazines and nude-women magazines aren't exactly what first comes to mind... but somehow, decades ago, this seemed to be the thinking for some odd reason.
What I see here is things being corrected to the way they should have been all along. You want to look at pictures of naked women? Find a publication that specializes in that. You want to read about politics? Find a different publication that specializes in that. The two have no business being in the same magazine.
Isn't that most careers these days though? I work in the digitization department of a muniplicity in Denmark. We're LEAN-consultants, project-managers, service-designers and developers but most of what we do is about helping managers have less employees.
I don't think there is a single area we aren't covering. So that's everything from lawyers, hr-personal, various office workers to nurses, pedagogues, teachers and various social workers. Hell in the past 4 years, we've even said good bye to one person in my department and three in IT. No one has been fired though, so there hasn't really been a big focus on it. A lot of positions simply haven't been refilled. Basically we're in the process of quietly doing to every workplace what the assembly-line did to factories 100 years ago.
It's created new jobs of course, there wasn't a digitization department 20 years ago after all, but even my own field of software engineering is changing. 20 years ago you'd need a team and half a year to build what a single developer can get running in the cloud in a week today. Who knows what it'll look like when I'm 57.
He's 57. He's not embarking on a lifelong career path, just something temporary to make money for now. By the time self-driving delivery trucks take over he'll be retired.
And anyway, this is a low-skill, low-wage profession. Even if it goes away to automation in a couple decades, there'll still be plenty of others that do not. So which particular one you're working in now is irrelevant. It's not like he needs to get into retail now or forever have that door closed to him.
I really enjoyed this article. It's like "diaries of a call girl" for 50+ overqualified-but-underemployed men. Crossed with a Kevin Smith film.
If there was a github-style subscribe button that would notify me of his next article I would definitely click it. No idea if my "impression" contributed to the atlantic's bottom line (and presumably his paycheck) but I guarantee you I've never helped the bottom line of SI.
Writing is a huge business. It used to be the case the book authors often ended up with couple of hundreds of royalty. These days if you do it right, even niche authors make comfortable living. Authors with talent and in top of their games often rack up $1M-$10M in book sales. There are also plenty of writers who make their living through only blogs and many have celebrity level fame. Setting all these however require lot of tech savvyness and fine tuning over years. I hope someone can build platform that takes tech away from this problem. Overall, I think people are reading more than before and making money as an individual author is much more easier than before. The key is not being a worker for newpaper or magazine but look at yourself as tech startup founder whose product is writings.
Like music and acting, writing is one of those fields where it's very hard to strike it big, simply because there are so many others trying. You're over-estimating the chance of success here. And given how much lower the barrier to entry has become in the Internet era, I'd argue that making a living as an individual author is much harder than before, and that writing for someone else on salary is a much more sure way to make a living by writing. Do you have any source on your claim that it's much easier than ever before to make a living as an independent author?
There are massive profits being made by industry all over the world...while the typical worker struggles to survive. It seems reasonable to me for governments to intentionally create jobs (protectionism works, the best time for the middle class in the USA was when there were protectionist policies). Taking away the massive profits from industries seems like the right thing to do. What? They'll move away? Great - another opportunity to create more jobs and start an industry while you block their newly imported products.
The industries move away and carry the customers away with them.
Domestic market may be important, but not as huge, and you can't be best at everything. If you lock the domestic market to mostly / only allow local producers, you end up with lower efficiency than the world on average.
Living in a socialist country is not as nice as someone living in the US might be imagining. If Soviet Union is not a good example for you, look at Sweden (it largely stopped its 3-decade socialist experiment in early 1990s).
>The industries move away and carry the customers away with them.
Um, this doesn't seem right at all. It really depends on the industry/product, and also on the country. The US is probably the largest single market in the world, so it's pretty hard to not do business there and do well as a company, especially if you already do most of your business there. (Obviously, this doesn't apply to local/regional businesses, such as a supermarket chain in Italy or wherever.)
If Toyota was suddenly not allowed to sell in the US, that would be a gigantic blow to their revenues and business. If Ford was in this spot, it would probably be the end of the company. If Trader Joe's couldn't operate in the US any more, that would be the end of them; they can't just pack up and move to China. Amazon can't exactly pack up and move to China and "carry the customers away with them" either; that really makes no sense.
No, protectionism generally doesn't work, but only generally. Lots of countries (all of them?) are protective of some portion of their local industry, usually for national strategic interests. You don't want to tie the very survival of your people to some potentially hostile foreign nation, by relying on them for your food supply, for instance.
I was finished HS seventeen years ago, about an hour northeast of where the author was delivering packages. I distinctly remember an English teacher, trying to get us excited about the possibilities of longform print journalism, breathlessly telling the class how some of the best writers in the world work for Sports Illustrated, and that they make "good money."
I feel a sense of loss when the "biodiversity" of what appear to be financially viable careers is declining.
I love a good read as much as I love a good YouTube series. I'm not sure biodiversity is going down. I think it's just becoming (discipline + computers).
The fact that a lot of people are making really good money doing artistic endeavors on the internet suggests that those endeavours are still valued.
I wonder if maybe we don't need as many artists because they reach a global audience now with less friction than ever. Anecdotally: I never would have subscribed to a sports magazine. I'm not into sports. But SBNation's YouTube series on weird sports history has me hooked.
The volume of people making money, and the amount of money made by people doing artistic endeavors on the internet, when compared to decades past is troublingly lower.
I'm not sure what can be done, but I see an ever increasing number of people loosing benefits from, or loosing their careers entirely.
This isn't all caused by tech, but also by a change in the social contract between companies and and their employees. The idea of you working hard for a company your whole life, and even if your didn't make great pay, you were secure in the idea that you would be taken care of and have a place to work until you got your send off party and a gold watch.
When comparing what was to what is, from the perspective of security, safety, and prosperity of the worker, YouTube is barely on par with a freelance gig.
And I fear that if our country doesn't address these sort of issue very soon, we are going to see suffering in the elderly not known in our country for the last century.
Perhaps they will learn through code via boot camps and take your job. And then would you have preferred that their discipline- a profession that was not destined to be automated away- have remained viable?
I'm not so sure: the internet has rewarded certain forms of art/craft over others (e.g. easily produced, low cost of goods sold) and it's given them a worldwide audience.
As an example, where food was a poorly paid profession before, there's lots of people making lots of careers in every little aspect of food, because their audience see pictures/video online and either orders for delivery or visits in vacation.
>The volume of people making money, and the amount of money made by people doing artistic endeavors on the internet, when compared to decades past is troublingly lower.
Would love to see some actual numbers here. My guess would've been that more people are making in aggregate more money off artistic endeavors on the internet, than in past decades. Look at the music industry, whose total value peaked and started falling, but is now back and has exceeded earlier peak, due to internet streaming. Diversity, meanwhile, seem bigger than ever. In the 80's you had a few mega stars raking in all the money whileas now there are millions of small producers each making small amounts. I don't buy this "troubled times" theory. The only trouble is the fact that a lot of former producers are getting replaced, but this is encouraging because if we're in the middle of a shift and the total market isn't shrinking it probably means there is more growth ahead.
"Despite the recent uplift, revenues for 2017 are still only 68.4% of the market's peak in 1999."
And as far as I can tell, that 68.4% is based on nominal revenue. Inflation adjusted it works out to 2017 revenues being less than 47% of 1999 revenues, if I calculated correctly.
My understanding always was that the music industry even in it's heyday only ever allowed a very small number of extremely popular artists to make a real living, everybody else made mostly nothing. The share of wealth extracted by creatives seems to me to be going up while the share extracted by gate keepers is going down.
This can remain true even if the absolute size of the economy is still rising, so it can look like the rich are getting richer while the poor are also getting richer. Inequality is still rising, but the tide is lifting all boats.
I agree my statements should be backed with some solid stats, I'm traveling for holidays and on my mobile so, I won't be able to provide this, my apologies, if you wish to disregard I understand.
But if we are going to compare or discuss this, I don't think the music industry is a fair place to start, as stated that was always a pretty crappy and controlled sector for individuals. With that said, from what I have read streaming as a whole hasn't provided better opportunities to individuals either, but again admittedly I can't cite sources to back up this claim.
But I think if you look at journalism, photography, marketing and advertisement, etc. These have all gone from careers to gigs, none of which provide for a long term path for securing a future.
When you calculate the tradition benefits (medical, dental, vision, retirement) as compensation it's a pretty obvious that the gig economy cost workers a lot, Including the peace of mind of knowing you'll have a career that will be a viable path to retirement.
I like many of us, are pretty isolated from these problems in tech because of demand, but I imagine 30 years ago, a senior writer at sports illustrated did to.
If you aren't concerned from a high level, look at where the money in our economy is going, it's moving away from individuals and into corporate profits, all while corporations are removing long term responsibilities to their workers.
And example of that would be, that almost no one has an active pension system any longer.
This is basically the core thoughts behind my troubled times response.
I don't know the actual numbers, but one could also argue that diversity and the sheer number of artists could go up, because niches become viable, thanks to a global audience.
imo the computer(or rather i'd say the internet) is just to help you find a niche of people who're interested in what you have to say and are willing to pay
magazines/newspapers are used to having huge captive audiences that they can sway. the problem is this breeds suspicion and contempt among the userbase if their interests don't align.
if you are a creator,find your patrons and everything will be fine
> This proved problematic when my wife and I decided to refinance our home. Although Gina, an attorney, earns plenty, we needed a bit more income to persuade lenders to work with us. It quickly became clear that for us to qualify, I would need more than occasional gigs as a freelance writer; I would need a steady job with a W-2.
He's working for amazon to get a loan so he can refinance his house. I think that's half-true, and I suspect the other half is that he got a job there so he could write this article.
Either way I liked the article - it's a little misleading though.
That quote is a little... off? If your wife's an attorney and you can't get a refi with getting a job delivering packages, is that house massive? Why would the relatively small contribution of a delivery job push a bank over the line for a refi? Isn't getting a delivery job during the Xmas season usually temporary?
Most attorneys don't work at large firms and don't make nearly as much money as the popular imagination would hold it. There is a huge glut of law school graduates that is driving down wages outside of the white shoe firms, as well.
It’s not like his checking account was overdrawn and he has no assets to pay it. He owns a fucking house lol.
A checking account overdrawn PLUS OWNING A FUCKING HOUSE does not mean he needs money. It means he got the amazon job solely to write this article. It’s just obvious IMO
An overdrawn checking account PLUS A HOUSE is not the same as an overdrawn checking account in isolation. This guy is not poor. HE LITERALLY OWNS A HOUSE , dude. He doesn’t “need” the income any more than a rich person “needs” more riches.
Given his status as a man with assets masquerading as a man without them (“I own a house but my checking account is overdrawn, therefore I need money!!!”), It’s obvious that he took the gig primarily (or, more likely: solely) in order to write this article. Pretty dishonest that he doesn’t mention that IMO.
Instead of refinancing, it sounds to me like they need to sell their house and buy something smaller and cheaper. Live within your means (or better yet, well below your means so you can handle income changes easily).
I think that is something that you do that you fool yourself into thinking is important in some way, as if you yourself are important, when you are really not. You are a tool getting a job done for your company. Maybe the best tool (after all you got the gig) but still a tool just the same. The Presidents don't care about you and aren't your friend or you peer.
Sure it's something that you can relate that you did to impress people you know and good for career or reputation (job wise). But the truth is to that those people you have interviewed would almost certainly not take your call or be your friend anymore than most of us would end up befriending the person who takes our luggage to our hotel room. (Not saying that couldn't or hasn't or doesn't happen but very unlikely except as an outlier).
I will tell you something that I have learned about self important writers. Try getting them to even return your email unless you have something that they need. Meaning they are all on top of you when they need you for a story. But once that story is done (unless they plan another one) you will have a hard time getting any reply from them. They tend to be (by the nature of what they do) 'users' the same way many salesman are users (to get the sale). They make you feel as if they care about you personally when they do not really care at all.
Contrast this with many people here on HN who I am sure would be pretty likely to reply to a personal question or issue if you wrote and asked for some type of help. Go try that with a writer for a major (and formerly important) magazine or newspaper.
I think this attitude might have something to do with the volume of emails that people receive. I'm a minor writer for Ars Technica and I always answer every email I get about my articles (or about anything) but then again I only get about five emails per month. It's easy and fun to do at that volume. If I got 500 or 5000, this would be a different story.
isn't this because our culture has shifted to "tweeting at" authors directly and twitter is currently in the shithole?
most of the time i click the twitter link, see that the author is having a meltdown/delightgasm about some completely unrelated thing and close the app on my phone in disgust
i almost never see any "discussions" about even recently published articles on an authors public social media
if i don't see a twitter on the author profile i'm not gonna bother mailing the person on an email id that probably never gets checked
I used to fill in gaps between consulting work with delivering people's food on my bicycle. I loved it too - It had a gamified feeling to it, and was like getting paid to go to the gym.
Uber gives you an estimate when you start the trip, and I enjoyed pushing myself a little bit on the hills to try and 'beat the average'.
The pay was miserable, between $10-15/hr ($7-10 USD) depending on whether you got 2 or 3 deliveries in the hour, but in a bike friendly city it was quite a fun way to spend an hour or two getting some serious exercise.
Magnificent writing, painful story, in a real way this article articulates, in a small way, what it's like for the foundation of your career to slip away. I'm sure there are plenty of other types of careers this same article can be written for.
What I'm afraid of is that many of us reading this article now will have a similar story 20 or so years from now. Ouch!
Ok? The article should be titled "I was financially irresponsible and had to get a job at 57" instead it's some overly wordy fluff piece trying to make working for Amazon sound like some amazing adventure filled with lying to friends, calling women bitches, battling hellish throngs of traffic etc.
I mean, journalism has been a dying career field for at least a decade, author is also 57 and had they been at least aware of the need to eventually retire they should be most of the way to retiring and with even slight motivation should have been able to retire a decade or more ago leanFIRE style. The author failed to see the writing on the wall that their industry was dying, they've failed to think outside the box with their degree as well, like... being a substitute teacher and/or tutor.
"During my 33 years at Sports Illustrated, I wrote six books," Yeahhhhh 33 years at the same employer, 6 books sold and having to hump packages all day...
Then look at how the article ends, approved for a loan. Borrowing more money to make more bad decisions so they can keep churning out articles about how life sucks needing to deliver packages.
The author is wholly clueless and is going to work until the day he dies or he wanted to exercise his creative writing skills and is still holding out hope of salvaging his career as a journalist.
I generally agree with your comment, however with the substitute teacher idea, I suspect that being an Amazon delivery driver pays a lot better than that in the US. Teachers in this country are compensated extremely poorly, and substitute teachers even worse.
Seriously, I think trying to be a professional writer these days is a terrible career choice. Unless you get lucky with a few best-selling novels or something, you're probably better off driving for Lyft.
>Teachers in this country are compensated extremely poorly,
I disagree. Average teacher salary here in Indiana is $54,308 (after 'falling', even the really underfunded public grade schools in the inner city here in Indy look like they're paying around 41k) according to https://www.nwitimes.com/news/education/teacher-pay-in-india...
That figure above doesn't include benefits like pensions either. State minimum wage is $7.25, the median household income is $45,943. Teachers are handsomely paid.
A lot of people are quick to say "but teachers work evenings and weekends for free" yes they do, and they also have 2 months off in the summer which likely equals them out to 2080 hours a year (sans vacation time) if not under 2080 hours a year.
As far as subbing, my lifting coach makes makes 30-40$ subbing for a few hours a day between times he has the training facility open. Someone subbing all day makes 60-100$ a day for essentially babysitting. Yeah, it's not full-time delivery driver money but it would have given him plenty of free time to continue to pursue writing freelance, or work on more books, I think the real reason for the working full-time though was so he could take out another home loan, as he needed enough documented income to justify the bank loaning it.
Last I checked, public school teacher compensation varied radically from state to state. Some states do pay pretty well (though I have a hard time calling $54k "handsome" for a position requiring a college degree), while other states pay peanuts.
"new grub street" by George Gissing. It's about an author experiencing the same disregard for the value of writing in the 1890s (not about the money of Amazon or lack of whizz joints for mobile workers: I think victorians just pee'd wher they stood)
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] thread> feigning nonchalance as I handed a cup of urine to the attendant and bid him good day.
I consider mandatory drug tests a massive invasion of privacy that only persists because workers don't (really) have the ability to shop around employers who don't do them. Besides they're only screening for illegal drugs but don't care about the really dangerous things (a lack of decent sleep being the worst).
> An honest recounting of this job must include my sometimes frantic searches for a place to answer nature’s call.
This is dehumanizing. This could be easily solved by requiring employers to provide e.g. these tiny camping toilets in the van - they don't take up much space (one parcel, maybe), and a "seat" can easily be fitted by rearranging a couple of rack plates without losing storage space.
But the biggest issue is this:
> Before it was taken out of service for repairs, I was often stuck with a ProMaster that had issues: Side-view mirrors spiderwebbed; the left mirror held fast to the body of the van by several layers of shrink-wrap. The headlights didn’t work unless flicked into “bright” mode, which means that when delivering after dark, I was blinding and infuriating oncoming motorists. [...] That’s when I heard a thud-thud-thud from the area of my right front tire, which was so old and bald that it had begun to shed four- and five-inch strips of rubber, which were thumping against the wheel well.
This is illegal and dangerous, both for the driver and for all people, animals and property around them.
All the "cost cutting" of Amazon doing deliveries instead of UPS, Fedex etc. does have to come from somewhere, and here it is done on public safety. I'm fine with competition, but not if public safety and worker/human rights are sacrificed for short-term profits for Jeff Bezos.
And what's the biggest issue: as a consumer, you do not have a choice when it comes to shipping - I'd gladly pay 1€ more a package if that would ensure that the delivery of my parcel is at least not outright exploitation, but Amazon (or any other web shop, food delivery service or whatever) do not offer this option, and are thus limiting the consumer power over where to shop based on moral ground.
The poor maintenance, etc, is just evidence of an awful company that doesn’t give a shit. There are many like it.
The driver is the only person effectively held responsible for those defects, so awful motor carriers tend to only attract awful or desperate drivers.
And that's the problem. While we tech workers mostly have the luxury of shopping around employers, sometimes even based on the food in the cafeteria, much of the "lower" levels do not have the free market where both sides are on relatively equal footing.
There's always someone desperate enough to put up even with illegal stuff (e.g. unmaintained vehicles), so if a poor(ish) person has the choice between either doing that job or not being able to make rent...
This should not be "normal". Especially when laws are being violated. It is also a violation of any free market principle if (big) companies can outright ignore laws that everyone else honestly follows. Hard to compete when the other side operates unfairly.
> The driver is the only person effectively held responsible for those defects, so awful motor carriers tend to only attract awful or desperate drivers.
In Europe, for the big rigs also the transportation company owning the truck can and will be held liable. This holds true for both driving times related stuff (e.g. when the police can prove that the travel plan cannot be followed without the driver breaking the law) and vehicle safety (blown tires, overloading, rust, broken brakes, ...). Sadly, small trucks and delivery vans are exempted from lots of the rules :/
You're confusing "doesn't give a shit" with "our margins are too thin to afford any shit". Most of the "sketchy" landscapers, dumpster/trash companies and dirt haulers near you are in the latter camp. Downtime has a massive opportunity cost. Businesses are not running bald tires because they want to but because if their mechanic staff was four people instead of three that would give them no margin and you need a margin to survive.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of feeling bad for these companies. Do not. Putting lives in danger to stay solvent means you cannot afford to be in business and need to go away.
If Amazon.com has compliance problems, it will get fixed. If Joe's Delivery Service has problems, they vanish and Joseph's Delivery Service pops up.
This became apparent when Chinatown busses were at their peak problem -- the "Lucky Dragon Bus Company 43" would replace the "Double Happiness Bus 24" within hours of regulatory action.
Agree with the rest of what you're saying though.
The test isn't going anywhere until there's a reliable field sobriety for weed. Companies don't want employees operating heavy equipment stoned, and unfortunately there's no way to test that somebody smoked in the last day or two, only that they've smoked in the last X weeks/months, depending on their habits.
no non-invasive ones, anyways. :(
blood test does fine for checking whether you're high at the time of draw.
i see this claimed very often by the same people that laud the free market. realize the irony: if ethically sourced good were desired then Amazon would indeed offer this option. in fact they are a luxury good (read: small minority) and so to first approximation you're the only person that wants this.
If there was an option to pick your carrier, with say a list like such:
* USPS * Fedex * UPS * Amazon Logistics * DHL * Living Wages Carrier Inc
I could then direct my money to go towards the companies I favor. That would be a free(er) market, so to speak. There's no irony involved here.
Then again, I'd probably just pick UPS anyway, since Amazon doesn't have delivery drivers that come out this way.
How many customers desire fraudulent, counterfeit products?
As someone who has worked as a delivery driver and is far more familiar with the vehicle inspection program in my state (yes, I know it's different for heavy trucks) than someone who has never worked as an automotive mechanic should be I wholly disagree. Vehicle downtime is enough of a PITA that anyone who can avoid it does, especially in a commercial setting. The regulatory compliance stick adds nothing positive you consider the .gov being able to swoop in find some violation over which they can screw any given operator a positive.
Whatever handheld electronic device is telling the delivery driver where to turn is a far bigger danger to the public than four bald tires. Drivers who are always in a rush and don't have time to do more than the bare minimum strapping down cargo or route planning are also a major source of accidents and near misses. Mechanical failure is a cause of a negligible fraction of accidents. It's really nothing to be worried about from a safety point of view.
Commercial vehicles are a little different I think, since 1) the drivers actually are skilled for the most part (far better than private vehicle drivers at any rate), and 2) they get a lot more use, and so have more maintenance issues. Retread tires, for instance, are a big issue with them, and really should be banned as they are in other countries. They can cause the truck with them to crash, and they can also cause other vehicles to crash by being a road hazard.
People will say all sorts of things about this; yeah it sucks to not know where and when to pee on the job, but I've had this problem even in office work. It is crappy, but it's not sheer indignity. Yeah, it sucks that they don't want you using weed at home except for a diagnosed medical purpose, but at the same time, it is no great indignity. Rail engineers and conductors here can't drink within 12 hours of a shift, and if they tested for that I don't think it would be insane. You'd be upset if somebody sparked a fat L before going to work, and then injured you while mishandling a forklift; heck, you'd probably sue Amazon (and you'd be right to), so you can surely understand why they want to nip that in the bud, even if their approach seems heavy-handed.
Of course, people here don't like talk like this. I'm not being hyperbolic enough about employment difficulties.
http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/JJWooten/clips/mitch-...
“Lurching west in stop-and-go traffic on I-80 that morning, bound for Berkeley and a day of delivering in the rain, I had a low moment, dwelling on how far I’d come down in the world. Then I snapped out of it. I haven’t come down in the world. What’s come down in the world is the business model that sustained Time Inc. for decades. I’m pretty much the same writer, the same guy. I haven’t gone anywhere. My feet are the same.”
Maybe he doesn’t have the same stability or ‘prestige’ as his last job or his wife’s, but, hey, his last one turned out to not be so stable after all, and your ego can’t buy you a house or put food on the table.
Between the lines, his whole point is that no career is robust these days.
These jobs, these people slipping through the cracks are the transition to something I hope is better. But it's that in-between time, that many many people will suffer very badly.
Some people may be slipping through the cracks, but others are doing far better than anyone could ever imagine. Crises do stir stuff up, but in this case the net result to society is far too positive to imply it's a bad thing.
I think you have a point here: if I want to read about sports, I'm not going to read The Atlantic, I'm going to read some sports magazine. If I want to read about politics, well sports magazines and nude-women magazines aren't exactly what first comes to mind... but somehow, decades ago, this seemed to be the thinking for some odd reason.
What I see here is things being corrected to the way they should have been all along. You want to look at pictures of naked women? Find a publication that specializes in that. You want to read about politics? Find a different publication that specializes in that. The two have no business being in the same magazine.
I don't think there is a single area we aren't covering. So that's everything from lawyers, hr-personal, various office workers to nurses, pedagogues, teachers and various social workers. Hell in the past 4 years, we've even said good bye to one person in my department and three in IT. No one has been fired though, so there hasn't really been a big focus on it. A lot of positions simply haven't been refilled. Basically we're in the process of quietly doing to every workplace what the assembly-line did to factories 100 years ago.
It's created new jobs of course, there wasn't a digitization department 20 years ago after all, but even my own field of software engineering is changing. 20 years ago you'd need a team and half a year to build what a single developer can get running in the cloud in a week today. Who knows what it'll look like when I'm 57.
And anyway, this is a low-skill, low-wage profession. Even if it goes away to automation in a couple decades, there'll still be plenty of others that do not. So which particular one you're working in now is irrelevant. It's not like he needs to get into retail now or forever have that door closed to him.
> I’m an Aries, so it stands to reason that I’m partial to Dodge Ram ProMasters.
It's a shame that there isn't a way for him to continue making a living on his writing talent.
I really enjoyed this article. It's like "diaries of a call girl" for 50+ overqualified-but-underemployed men. Crossed with a Kevin Smith film.
If there was a github-style subscribe button that would notify me of his next article I would definitely click it. No idea if my "impression" contributed to the atlantic's bottom line (and presumably his paycheck) but I guarantee you I've never helped the bottom line of SI.
Domestic market may be important, but not as huge, and you can't be best at everything. If you lock the domestic market to mostly / only allow local producers, you end up with lower efficiency than the world on average.
Living in a socialist country is not as nice as someone living in the US might be imagining. If Soviet Union is not a good example for you, look at Sweden (it largely stopped its 3-decade socialist experiment in early 1990s).
Um, this doesn't seem right at all. It really depends on the industry/product, and also on the country. The US is probably the largest single market in the world, so it's pretty hard to not do business there and do well as a company, especially if you already do most of your business there. (Obviously, this doesn't apply to local/regional businesses, such as a supermarket chain in Italy or wherever.)
If Toyota was suddenly not allowed to sell in the US, that would be a gigantic blow to their revenues and business. If Ford was in this spot, it would probably be the end of the company. If Trader Joe's couldn't operate in the US any more, that would be the end of them; they can't just pack up and move to China. Amazon can't exactly pack up and move to China and "carry the customers away with them" either; that really makes no sense.
No, protectionism generally doesn't work, but only generally. Lots of countries (all of them?) are protective of some portion of their local industry, usually for national strategic interests. You don't want to tie the very survival of your people to some potentially hostile foreign nation, by relying on them for your food supply, for instance.
I feel a sense of loss when the "biodiversity" of what appear to be financially viable careers is declining.
The fact that a lot of people are making really good money doing artistic endeavors on the internet suggests that those endeavours are still valued.
I wonder if maybe we don't need as many artists because they reach a global audience now with less friction than ever. Anecdotally: I never would have subscribed to a sports magazine. I'm not into sports. But SBNation's YouTube series on weird sports history has me hooked.
I'm not sure what can be done, but I see an ever increasing number of people loosing benefits from, or loosing their careers entirely.
This isn't all caused by tech, but also by a change in the social contract between companies and and their employees. The idea of you working hard for a company your whole life, and even if your didn't make great pay, you were secure in the idea that you would be taken care of and have a place to work until you got your send off party and a gold watch.
When comparing what was to what is, from the perspective of security, safety, and prosperity of the worker, YouTube is barely on par with a freelance gig.
And I fear that if our country doesn't address these sort of issue very soon, we are going to see suffering in the elderly not known in our country for the last century.
A career in art isn't guaranteed, unless we reach a post-consumer utopia, where robots do all the work.
Hence, there's a saturation point in how much art is needed to saturate the demand, in an interconnected, digital, global world.
And those that are unable to fit into this saturated point have to find other ways of livelihood.
As an example, where food was a poorly paid profession before, there's lots of people making lots of careers in every little aspect of food, because their audience see pictures/video online and either orders for delivery or visits in vacation.
Would love to see some actual numbers here. My guess would've been that more people are making in aggregate more money off artistic endeavors on the internet, than in past decades. Look at the music industry, whose total value peaked and started falling, but is now back and has exceeded earlier peak, due to internet streaming. Diversity, meanwhile, seem bigger than ever. In the 80's you had a few mega stars raking in all the money whileas now there are millions of small producers each making small amounts. I don't buy this "troubled times" theory. The only trouble is the fact that a lot of former producers are getting replaced, but this is encouraging because if we're in the middle of a shift and the total market isn't shrinking it probably means there is more growth ahead.
Would you mind citing your data for this? What I've seen suggests the opposite:
https://www.ifpi.org/news/IFPI-GLOBAL-MUSIC-REPORT-2018
"Despite the recent uplift, revenues for 2017 are still only 68.4% of the market's peak in 1999."
And as far as I can tell, that 68.4% is based on nominal revenue. Inflation adjusted it works out to 2017 revenues being less than 47% of 1999 revenues, if I calculated correctly.
This can remain true even if the absolute size of the economy is still rising, so it can look like the rich are getting richer while the poor are also getting richer. Inequality is still rising, but the tide is lifting all boats.
But if we are going to compare or discuss this, I don't think the music industry is a fair place to start, as stated that was always a pretty crappy and controlled sector for individuals. With that said, from what I have read streaming as a whole hasn't provided better opportunities to individuals either, but again admittedly I can't cite sources to back up this claim.
But I think if you look at journalism, photography, marketing and advertisement, etc. These have all gone from careers to gigs, none of which provide for a long term path for securing a future.
When you calculate the tradition benefits (medical, dental, vision, retirement) as compensation it's a pretty obvious that the gig economy cost workers a lot, Including the peace of mind of knowing you'll have a career that will be a viable path to retirement.
I like many of us, are pretty isolated from these problems in tech because of demand, but I imagine 30 years ago, a senior writer at sports illustrated did to.
If you aren't concerned from a high level, look at where the money in our economy is going, it's moving away from individuals and into corporate profits, all while corporations are removing long term responsibilities to their workers.
And example of that would be, that almost no one has an active pension system any longer.
This is basically the core thoughts behind my troubled times response.
magazines/newspapers are used to having huge captive audiences that they can sway. the problem is this breeds suspicion and contempt among the userbase if their interests don't align.
if you are a creator,find your patrons and everything will be fine
He's working for amazon to get a loan so he can refinance his house. I think that's half-true, and I suspect the other half is that he got a job there so he could write this article.
Either way I liked the article - it's a little misleading though.
https://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib
A checking account overdrawn PLUS OWNING A FUCKING HOUSE does not mean he needs money. It means he got the amazon job solely to write this article. It’s just obvious IMO
An overdrawn checking account PLUS A HOUSE is not the same as an overdrawn checking account in isolation. This guy is not poor. HE LITERALLY OWNS A HOUSE , dude. He doesn’t “need” the income any more than a rich person “needs” more riches.
Given his status as a man with assets masquerading as a man without them (“I own a house but my checking account is overdrawn, therefore I need money!!!”), It’s obvious that he took the gig primarily (or, more likely: solely) in order to write this article. Pretty dishonest that he doesn’t mention that IMO.
That really is an interesting career progression.
I think that is something that you do that you fool yourself into thinking is important in some way, as if you yourself are important, when you are really not. You are a tool getting a job done for your company. Maybe the best tool (after all you got the gig) but still a tool just the same. The Presidents don't care about you and aren't your friend or you peer.
Sure it's something that you can relate that you did to impress people you know and good for career or reputation (job wise). But the truth is to that those people you have interviewed would almost certainly not take your call or be your friend anymore than most of us would end up befriending the person who takes our luggage to our hotel room. (Not saying that couldn't or hasn't or doesn't happen but very unlikely except as an outlier).
I will tell you something that I have learned about self important writers. Try getting them to even return your email unless you have something that they need. Meaning they are all on top of you when they need you for a story. But once that story is done (unless they plan another one) you will have a hard time getting any reply from them. They tend to be (by the nature of what they do) 'users' the same way many salesman are users (to get the sale). They make you feel as if they care about you personally when they do not really care at all.
Contrast this with many people here on HN who I am sure would be pretty likely to reply to a personal question or issue if you wrote and asked for some type of help. Go try that with a writer for a major (and formerly important) magazine or newspaper.
most of the time i click the twitter link, see that the author is having a meltdown/delightgasm about some completely unrelated thing and close the app on my phone in disgust
i almost never see any "discussions" about even recently published articles on an authors public social media
if i don't see a twitter on the author profile i'm not gonna bother mailing the person on an email id that probably never gets checked
What I'm afraid of is that many of us reading this article now will have a similar story 20 or so years from now. Ouch!
> my wife and I decided to refinance our home.
Hope it was fixed-interest.
I mean, journalism has been a dying career field for at least a decade, author is also 57 and had they been at least aware of the need to eventually retire they should be most of the way to retiring and with even slight motivation should have been able to retire a decade or more ago leanFIRE style. The author failed to see the writing on the wall that their industry was dying, they've failed to think outside the box with their degree as well, like... being a substitute teacher and/or tutor.
"During my 33 years at Sports Illustrated, I wrote six books," Yeahhhhh 33 years at the same employer, 6 books sold and having to hump packages all day...
Then look at how the article ends, approved for a loan. Borrowing more money to make more bad decisions so they can keep churning out articles about how life sucks needing to deliver packages.
The author is wholly clueless and is going to work until the day he dies or he wanted to exercise his creative writing skills and is still holding out hope of salvaging his career as a journalist.
Seriously, I think trying to be a professional writer these days is a terrible career choice. Unless you get lucky with a few best-selling novels or something, you're probably better off driving for Lyft.
I disagree. Average teacher salary here in Indiana is $54,308 (after 'falling', even the really underfunded public grade schools in the inner city here in Indy look like they're paying around 41k) according to https://www.nwitimes.com/news/education/teacher-pay-in-india...
That figure above doesn't include benefits like pensions either. State minimum wage is $7.25, the median household income is $45,943. Teachers are handsomely paid.
A lot of people are quick to say "but teachers work evenings and weekends for free" yes they do, and they also have 2 months off in the summer which likely equals them out to 2080 hours a year (sans vacation time) if not under 2080 hours a year.
As far as subbing, my lifting coach makes makes 30-40$ subbing for a few hours a day between times he has the training facility open. Someone subbing all day makes 60-100$ a day for essentially babysitting. Yeah, it's not full-time delivery driver money but it would have given him plenty of free time to continue to pursue writing freelance, or work on more books, I think the real reason for the working full-time though was so he could take out another home loan, as he needed enough documented income to justify the bank loaning it.