I'm not really impressed by this article. The two main points:
> An investigation by ProPublica identified more than 60 accidents since June 2015 involving Amazon delivery contractors that resulted in serious injuries, including 10 deaths
A better investigation would count the number of miles traveled and compare the rate to the general population. Driving is the most dangerous thing most people do: 37k people died on the road in 2017.
I'd like to see actual numbers here--driving is an inherently dangerous activity, and therefore needs to be looked at through statistics, not character pieces (like this article does).
> citing agreements that require them, as one puts it, to “defend, indemnify and hold harmless Amazon.”
This sounds pretty standard. However, if this is the case, then
> often Amazon directs, through an app, the order of the deliveries and the route to each destination
seems like it may be a problem. Either the contractors have the autonomy to do things like they need to to stay safe, or Amazon should take that liability themselves.
> A better investigation would count the number of miles traveled and compare the rate to the general population. Driving is the most dangerous thing most people do: 37k people died on the road in 2017.
The alternative to Amazon's delivery contractors is not civilian drivers, so that comparison wouldn't be interesting.
The comparison should be against small-to-medium delivery trucks, as used by UPS, FedEx, and USPS.
I live an hour from Costco and Wal-Mart. I've gotten over the "guilt" of having Jermey, the UPS guy, bring packages to my door. In the weeks where I don't have something delivered he is driving right past my house - and I'm kinda in the middle of nowhere. It isn't uncommon for him to hit at least 2 houses out of the dozen or so that are past me.
If I (and everyone in the area) decided to drive an hour to get to a "real" city with stores, there would be so many more cars on the road. Why not let the big brown truck bring them to our area?
> Why not let the big brown truck bring them to our area?
The article and controversy are explicitly about how Amazon has been replacing the big brown truck with dozens of private vehicles, most of them the size of cargo vans or smaller.
People were not accusing Amazon of causing congestion before, when they were exclusively using UPS, USPS, and FedEx.
I don't think you're typical. People shop at Amazon for many reasons -- price, selection, loyalty programs, etc.
Even if you are typical, your comment isn't relevant to the original topic.
The point is that Amazon created enormous demand for fast delivery, and then it replaced large delivery operations with Uber-like individual "contractors" that aren't professionals, are crunched for time, and are causing problems for urban areas.
Maybe all of that would be fine if Amazon (or there customers) were paying the price, but they're not.
What's worse is that, in some cases, "the price" is someone's life.
1. how many of the things you bought on amazon were things you would have bought at the store otherwise, and how many are things you bought because it was effortless to buy?
2. how many of the things you bought did you need next day delivered? If there were delivered slowly, by a USPS or UPS/fedex driver on a regular route, that would not have been an extra car on the road.
Ok I agree with you. Fine great. What are those numbers?
The "drive it home" point of this article is a picture of a grieving mother flipping through a scrapbook looking at pictures of her dead kid. One of ten dead people caused by Amazon's drivers since 2015. 27 people per year are killed by lightning.
Every death is a tragedy, but I'm not that concerned about something that is an order of magnitude less deadly that lightening. Driving a car is three orders of magnitude more deadly than lightening, but it doesn't scare me enough to prevent me from from hopping into my car 2-5 times per day.
The numbers would be useful, but only Amazon has them.
The qualitative case the article is making is this:
1. Amazon enforces brutal delivery speeds, giving drivers huge incentives to behave recklessly (and, in fact, rewarding the most reckless drivers).
2. Amazon profits from this.
3. People are harmed (sometimes in mild ways, like getting stuck in traffic, but sometimes by dying).
4. Amazon aggressively refuses financial, legal, or moral responsibility for the harm that's caused, sometimes suing to get away from it.
Even if it's "just" one person and lightning is more dangerous, the point is that Amazon is creating danger that would not otherwise exist, profiting from it, and refusing to be pay the costs.
It seems like almost no one commenting on this article read it.
Yeah, again, it’s all in the article. That’s where the evidence is. I’m just repeatedly restating the article for people who didn’t read it.
I think it’s fairly uncontroversial that Amazon doesn’t publish data about its delivery contractors.
These types of articles were triggered by individuals being hurt or killed by Amazon contractors, trying to get Amazon to accept responsibility, and failing.
I agree; one thing I often see in articles critical of Amazon citing number is that they fail to account for the absolute absurd number of actors it employs, comparing more to large-scale societal elements like cities or small states rather than the generic corp that rents out the top 40 floors of a downtown skyscraper.
For some fun with with large numbers, Amazon currently employees more people than the state of Wyoming has residents(647,000 to 577,000). Over the course of four years Amazon has killed 10, (or hell, lets make it 50 to compensate for under-reporting) people by traffic accident; the population of Wyoming managed to achieve that rate of death themselves in about the span of a month (or six months for the larger figure) [https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D76/D65F000].
I think those are just direct employees too, if they are fanning out onto contractors I wouldn't be surprised if they are ultimately controlling Walmart levels of employees (2.2 million).
Putting more vehicles on the road means more deaths though. I personally think that people's obsession with getting things quickly isn't really sustainable and panders to parts of our character that we would rather do without. "I want it now" reminds me of Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka.
are they really putting more vehicles on the road though? That is, are they replacing a larger number of people driving themselves to stores with a smaller number of professional delivery vehicles?
Amazon is directly putting additional vehicles to the road as a fourth shipping carrier, where USPS, FedEx & UPS already run trucks through these neighborhoods.
If Amazon wanted, they could expand their use of existing infrastructure, namely USPS (which is legally obligated to service homes and businesses) rather than create redundant, poorly maintained secondary infrastructure.
Amazon's FBA program is entirely focused on paying as little as possible to get parcels delivered. There are no living wages, or properly maintained delivery vehicles to be had for the workers that carry Amazon's parcels.
It's not like you can just fit all of Amazon's load on existing carriers, they would probably need to put more trucks on the road if they absorbed Amazon's load.
Correct. We know this to be true because UPS lacked the capacity to deliver for Amazon a few years ago around the holidays, which is what prompted Amazon to start their own service.
I don’t think you understood grandparent. He pointed out the consumers needing products would be driving themselves and not having Amazon do it for them.
You don’t think it’s even possible that the ability to have practically any itch immediately scratched makes it more likely people would pull the trigger on impulse purchases?
That’s practically the entire story of the consumer economy over the last 50 years.
And more demand is often a bad thing. More demand for meat is straining our natural resources, e.g.
That tally is most likely a fraction of the accidents that have occurred: Many people don’t sue, and those who do can’t always tell when Amazon is involved, court records, police reports and news accounts show.
Tangent: Did you make up the term "character piece"? I've not heard that before but I don't have a name for these kind of articles that include stories of specific people.
This article is mixing together car accidents and wage disputes to create the impression people aren’t getting compensated for accidents, by, e.g., car insurance companies.
> people aren’t getting compensated for accidents, by, e.g., car insurance companies
Car insurance doesn't cover 100% of costs. There's the deductible and, for many low-income drivers, the cost of lawsuits. A fully-loaded insurance plan is pretty expensive, and the unit economics likely doesn't work for a lot of these people unless they're insured with the bare minimum.
That idea does fit into the low-wage argument, because you're creating a race-to-the-bottom market among your delivery drivers such that the ones who want proper insurance aren't able to compete on price with the ones who are willing to take risks.
Anecdotally when I lived in London Amazon delivery drivers always seemed super stressed. Like they had way too many deliveries to make in too little time.
It confuses me because it doesn't feel like deliveries would be that much more expensive if they were given say 20-30% more buffer.
Delivery drivers don't get paid much, and last mile doesn't make up all of the delivery cost anyway.
It almost feels as if a piecework pay model would work better because it would give the individuals the ability to decide that making $N an hour and taking their time is better than $N*1.2 and playing race car driver, running up stairs, getting signatures in 0.1 seconds etc.
Whilst a target based model is basically 'rush fast or get sacked'.
It isn't so simple. As a manager, it is easy to incentivize "deliver as many packages as you can" (e.g., pay per package). It is not so easy to incentivize "deliver 83%[=1/1.2] as many packages as you can."
Furthermore, people always optimize what can be measured, and measuring safe driving, on a day-to-day basis, is harder than measuring number of deliveries (not impossible, maybe, but much harder---also less transparent, easier to game, more intrusive).
> An investigation by ProPublica identified more than 60 accidents since June 2015 involving Amazon delivery contractors that resulted in serious injuries, including 10 deaths.
Is that supposed to sound like a lot? Amazon delivers a staggering number of packages.
I fail to see why Amazon should be held liable in the cited accidents. A truck driver plowing into the back of a jeep killing a 9 month old in a car seat? That's 100% on the driver. Article refers to the truck driver with "he was running late and failed to spot the Jeep in time to avoid the crash".
I can see liability with things like Domino's back in the day, guaranteeing delivery in 30 min or less or something. They had to stop because their drivers were getting into wrecks left and right. But those drivers were employed by Domino's sent out for delivery from a Domino's store. These are third-party logistics companies. Why wouldn't they be held liable?
and FedEx/UPS have insurance that can deal with these situations. Here Amazon is pushing the liability down to smaller companies who could easily fold if their insurance premiums starts to go up. Amazon will then just move on to the next contracting company that tries to push it's way in on tight margins.
I’m not hooked. In fact, I think it’s kind of obnoxious how much effort they put into getting me stuff so fast. If there was a “slow ship” button for Prime, I’d do it almost every time. I also don’t need notifications of it being “almost here! Watch it on a map!” Completely useless information for most of my orders.
I've been hooked on No-Rush Shipping for a while now. The $1 digital item credit has helped me slowly build out my Kindle library, and it has the side effect of teaching me to wean off the instant gratification culture we have today.
In my region, not only is there a slow ship option, there is also a delivery day option.
With delivery day, you can bundle up all of your orders for the week and have them delivered in a single large shipment on a pre-specified day, Monday through Saturday.
You pick your day, and you have the option to make it the default on all future orders, and then you get one big box.
I don't know if it varies by region but with my account they are prominently displayed radio buttons on the "Review items and shipping" part of the checkout page.
This "contractor" thing has to be shut down. If someone gets all their work from amazon and is told by amazon when, how, and where to deliver packages, they're not contractors. It's just a completely transparent attempt to externalize costs and liabilities.
Are you going to legislate away all contractor work? Because every medium to large company and even government agencies utilize contractors.
You can't build and develop subject matter expertise on everything. And besides that, contractors are often used to scale when you have demand that you can't necessarily meet with your current capabilities.
I guess I don't understand how your "solution" to this problem scales to the regulatory world outside of Amazon.
That's not even nearly what I said. I said that if someone is consistently told how, when, where, and what to do, or what to wear, then they're an employee.
If, on the other hand, they're asked to do something and have the freedom to set the price for the task, to accept or reject the task as they see fit, and perform it at a time, place, and manner of their choosing, and they perform this task for several different clients, then it's perfectly reasonable to consider them a contractor. Which pretty much is what the IRS says, as well, as linked by jcranmer above.
> I said that if someone is consistently told how, when, where, and what to do, or what to wear, then they're an employee.
I'm sorry this is simply not true. I work for one of the largest Health and Hospital Corporations in the States (They own 25 hospitals and have 60,000 employees) and sub-contractors Are Always told "how, when, where, and what to do, or what to wear,". Always and Without Execption.
I contracted for 8 years in the energy industry. How, when, where, and what were standard requirements defined by the company I worked at. The main difference day to day was I didn’t attend some company town halls or have access to the wellness facilities.
Are you proposing a massive overhaul to the legal framework around contractors or just wanting to target Amazon?
> If someone gets all their work from amazon and is told by amazon when, how, and where to deliver packages, they're not contractors.
Legally speaking, they're probably not contractors in that scenario. In the US, a primary determining factor is whether or not the employer has the ability to dictate what and how the contractor does work. See for example https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
At least in the UK they are not directly working for Amazon, but an agency, who only handles Amazon deliveries. Many other industries work in a similar way, where the employee/contractor effectively works for one company, but is paid by another company, for example retail and commercial cleaning and maintenance staff.
You can't say they need to get rid of all "contractors", because temp staff are obviously beneficial around the holidays for these companies. What could work is to have a limit on how long the employee can be on a temporary contract, but such rulings would have ramifications on other industries (Julie is taking 1 1/2 years off for maternity leave and you need someone to replace her for that time). Plus I'm sure whatever new legislation is introduced, Amazon will find a way to work around (You get the benefits of a permenant employee after working for 6 weeks? Ok, after 5 weeks we don't need you anymore).
Yeah the company-to-company situation is a bit different. But I believe that in the case of temp agencies, the workers are actually employees of the temp agency, right?
Pretty sure this same argument was made against 30 minute pizza delivery in the past. And I think most pizza companies made changes due to accidents (or risk thereof). Something tells me a 16 year old pizza delivery person was much more dangerous than an amazon delivery driver. Purely based on how my friends and I drove when we were 16.
A bit off track but here in India I see, all sorts of negligence shown by delivery guys of almost all delivery companies - Swiggy, Zomato, Uber Eats, etc. Even cab drivers of Ola, Uber are reckless. It is high time these companies start taking accountability.
I worked with routing in a logistics company in India. The whole last mile delivery had so many special cases that we stopped trying to model them all. Drivers would take routes to avoid cops, or go toward a cop they knew (they had paid off in the past). Drivers would not go into each others' territories (so 2 drivers working for the same company would not deliver if their areas overlapped). For delivery people on 2-wheelers, all road rules were optional. They would go down wrong way on one-way roads etc. (we could track them, we called them 'dirty routes'). Drivers would prefer their own routes even when we gave better routes. Sometimes better was vaguely defined, since we might think this route save 10% time so is better, and he might think my favorite paan shop is on that route, so the other route is better.
58 comments
[ 225 ms ] story [ 1527 ms ] thread> An investigation by ProPublica identified more than 60 accidents since June 2015 involving Amazon delivery contractors that resulted in serious injuries, including 10 deaths
A better investigation would count the number of miles traveled and compare the rate to the general population. Driving is the most dangerous thing most people do: 37k people died on the road in 2017.
I'd like to see actual numbers here--driving is an inherently dangerous activity, and therefore needs to be looked at through statistics, not character pieces (like this article does).
> citing agreements that require them, as one puts it, to “defend, indemnify and hold harmless Amazon.”
This sounds pretty standard. However, if this is the case, then
> often Amazon directs, through an app, the order of the deliveries and the route to each destination
seems like it may be a problem. Either the contractors have the autonomy to do things like they need to to stay safe, or Amazon should take that liability themselves.
The alternative to Amazon's delivery contractors is not civilian drivers, so that comparison wouldn't be interesting.
The comparison should be against small-to-medium delivery trucks, as used by UPS, FedEx, and USPS.
I live an hour from Costco and Wal-Mart. I've gotten over the "guilt" of having Jermey, the UPS guy, bring packages to my door. In the weeks where I don't have something delivered he is driving right past my house - and I'm kinda in the middle of nowhere. It isn't uncommon for him to hit at least 2 houses out of the dozen or so that are past me.
If I (and everyone in the area) decided to drive an hour to get to a "real" city with stores, there would be so many more cars on the road. Why not let the big brown truck bring them to our area?
The article and controversy are explicitly about how Amazon has been replacing the big brown truck with dozens of private vehicles, most of them the size of cargo vans or smaller.
People were not accusing Amazon of causing congestion before, when they were exclusively using UPS, USPS, and FedEx.
Even if you are typical, your comment isn't relevant to the original topic.
The point is that Amazon created enormous demand for fast delivery, and then it replaced large delivery operations with Uber-like individual "contractors" that aren't professionals, are crunched for time, and are causing problems for urban areas.
Maybe all of that would be fine if Amazon (or there customers) were paying the price, but they're not.
What's worse is that, in some cases, "the price" is someone's life.
1. how many of the things you bought on amazon were things you would have bought at the store otherwise, and how many are things you bought because it was effortless to buy?
2. how many of the things you bought did you need next day delivered? If there were delivered slowly, by a USPS or UPS/fedex driver on a regular route, that would not have been an extra car on the road.
The "drive it home" point of this article is a picture of a grieving mother flipping through a scrapbook looking at pictures of her dead kid. One of ten dead people caused by Amazon's drivers since 2015. 27 people per year are killed by lightning.
Every death is a tragedy, but I'm not that concerned about something that is an order of magnitude less deadly that lightening. Driving a car is three orders of magnitude more deadly than lightening, but it doesn't scare me enough to prevent me from from hopping into my car 2-5 times per day.
Spare me the pearls, show me the numbers.
The qualitative case the article is making is this:
1. Amazon enforces brutal delivery speeds, giving drivers huge incentives to behave recklessly (and, in fact, rewarding the most reckless drivers).
2. Amazon profits from this.
3. People are harmed (sometimes in mild ways, like getting stuck in traffic, but sometimes by dying).
4. Amazon aggressively refuses financial, legal, or moral responsibility for the harm that's caused, sometimes suing to get away from it.
Even if it's "just" one person and lightning is more dangerous, the point is that Amazon is creating danger that would not otherwise exist, profiting from it, and refusing to be pay the costs.
It seems like almost no one commenting on this article read it.
“Only Amazon has them” is an interesting way to shed yourself of any responsibility to actually defend your claims.
I think it’s fairly uncontroversial that Amazon doesn’t publish data about its delivery contractors.
These types of articles were triggered by individuals being hurt or killed by Amazon contractors, trying to get Amazon to accept responsibility, and failing.
For some fun with with large numbers, Amazon currently employees more people than the state of Wyoming has residents(647,000 to 577,000). Over the course of four years Amazon has killed 10, (or hell, lets make it 50 to compensate for under-reporting) people by traffic accident; the population of Wyoming managed to achieve that rate of death themselves in about the span of a month (or six months for the larger figure) [https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D76/D65F000].
I think those are just direct employees too, if they are fanning out onto contractors I wouldn't be surprised if they are ultimately controlling Walmart levels of employees (2.2 million).
If Amazon wanted, they could expand their use of existing infrastructure, namely USPS (which is legally obligated to service homes and businesses) rather than create redundant, poorly maintained secondary infrastructure.
Amazon's FBA program is entirely focused on paying as little as possible to get parcels delivered. There are no living wages, or properly maintained delivery vehicles to be had for the workers that carry Amazon's parcels.
That’s practically the entire story of the consumer economy over the last 50 years.
And more demand is often a bad thing. More demand for meat is straining our natural resources, e.g.
Is there something wrong?
That tally is most likely a fraction of the accidents that have occurred: Many people don’t sue, and those who do can’t always tell when Amazon is involved, court records, police reports and news accounts show.
In America alone 100 people a day are killed--give or take. Worldwide 1.25 Million a year are killed.
Car insurance doesn't cover 100% of costs. There's the deductible and, for many low-income drivers, the cost of lawsuits. A fully-loaded insurance plan is pretty expensive, and the unit economics likely doesn't work for a lot of these people unless they're insured with the bare minimum.
That idea does fit into the low-wage argument, because you're creating a race-to-the-bottom market among your delivery drivers such that the ones who want proper insurance aren't able to compete on price with the ones who are willing to take risks.
It confuses me because it doesn't feel like deliveries would be that much more expensive if they were given say 20-30% more buffer.
Delivery drivers don't get paid much, and last mile doesn't make up all of the delivery cost anyway.
It almost feels as if a piecework pay model would work better because it would give the individuals the ability to decide that making $N an hour and taking their time is better than $N*1.2 and playing race car driver, running up stairs, getting signatures in 0.1 seconds etc.
Whilst a target based model is basically 'rush fast or get sacked'.
Furthermore, people always optimize what can be measured, and measuring safe driving, on a day-to-day basis, is harder than measuring number of deliveries (not impossible, maybe, but much harder---also less transparent, easier to game, more intrusive).
Is that supposed to sound like a lot? Amazon delivers a staggering number of packages.
I can see liability with things like Domino's back in the day, guaranteeing delivery in 30 min or less or something. They had to stop because their drivers were getting into wrecks left and right. But those drivers were employed by Domino's sent out for delivery from a Domino's store. These are third-party logistics companies. Why wouldn't they be held liable?
Though I suspect they just wait a while and then ship it fast anyway.
I think they slow it down by packing it up with other orders along the way which is more efficient yet slower to deliver.
With delivery day, you can bundle up all of your orders for the week and have them delivered in a single large shipment on a pre-specified day, Monday through Saturday.
You pick your day, and you have the option to make it the default on all future orders, and then you get one big box.
I don't know if it varies by region but with my account they are prominently displayed radio buttons on the "Review items and shipping" part of the checkout page.
Amazon is really the world’s largest retailer? I thought that was Walmart.
Turns out they surpassed Walmart a couple months ago.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurendebter/2019/05/15/worlds-...
https://stores.org/stores-top-retailers-2019/
You can't build and develop subject matter expertise on everything. And besides that, contractors are often used to scale when you have demand that you can't necessarily meet with your current capabilities.
I guess I don't understand how your "solution" to this problem scales to the regulatory world outside of Amazon.
Contractors that are all but employees in name (ie, their routes picked, hours required) are not.
If, on the other hand, they're asked to do something and have the freedom to set the price for the task, to accept or reject the task as they see fit, and perform it at a time, place, and manner of their choosing, and they perform this task for several different clients, then it's perfectly reasonable to consider them a contractor. Which pretty much is what the IRS says, as well, as linked by jcranmer above.
I'm sorry this is simply not true. I work for one of the largest Health and Hospital Corporations in the States (They own 25 hospitals and have 60,000 employees) and sub-contractors Are Always told "how, when, where, and what to do, or what to wear,". Always and Without Execption.
Are you proposing a massive overhaul to the legal framework around contractors or just wanting to target Amazon?
Legally speaking, they're probably not contractors in that scenario. In the US, a primary determining factor is whether or not the employer has the ability to dictate what and how the contractor does work. See for example https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
You can't say they need to get rid of all "contractors", because temp staff are obviously beneficial around the holidays for these companies. What could work is to have a limit on how long the employee can be on a temporary contract, but such rulings would have ramifications on other industries (Julie is taking 1 1/2 years off for maternity leave and you need someone to replace her for that time). Plus I'm sure whatever new legislation is introduced, Amazon will find a way to work around (You get the benefits of a permenant employee after working for 6 weeks? Ok, after 5 weeks we don't need you anymore).