Ha, I had a completely opposite connotation to the headline and was briefly confused when I read the body. In the couple of large factories I know of operators, mechanics, and others generally are thrilled with overtime, so I thought this was supposed to be a good thing. But the article body spun it very negatively. I wonder what the sentiment is in the factories there. Maybe it's different in the UK.
Had the same reaction. Its forced overtime so maybe they'll complain? But with the virus hitting, if correct safety precautions are taken the extra cash seems like a good thing? We'd need to actually talk to Amazon workers for their opinions. Also important how Amazon responds if a worker doesn't want the overtime.
As it currently stands the UK still has the EU 48hr working week so you can opt out of working more than 48hrs and in theory not be punished for it, in practice enforcing that has been hit and miss over the years with punitive measures been hard to prove at times.
Voluntary overtime in a well unionized job that pays adequately for the extra effort seems a long way to me from being forced to work more at an exploitative amazon warehouse.
I highly encourage you to talk to people who have worked in unions for 20, 30 years. The unions set a lot of rules, those rules can be confusing, and unions tend to take hours from newer people so that older people can have them. Unions can also force people into overtime (as much as any other employer). That's not to say that all unions are bad, but unions are not wholesale good nor evil, they're simply a different mechanism.
Amazon likewise is it's own mechanism, and it seems to vary heavily depending on the warehouse. From the workers I've talked with in our local warehouses, they typically like it - but our warehouses are also open for tours so they probably get treated a bit better than others.
I would like to see some kind of survey of Amazon workers to find out what they're thinking. All we ever get are news articles reporting a simple fact (good I guess) and surrounding it with either positive or negative language choices (not as useful).
If your state has expanded unemployment to cover COVID-19, and your unemployment would be more than what Amazon would pay (or even the same or less, if you don't want to subject yourself to Amazon Fulfillment working conditions), it makes more sense to collect the unemployment for as long as the government will provide it (state unemployment coffers are somewhat solid at the moment, and the federal government is going to backstop them similar to the 2008 GFC if Congress can get the emergency bill passed).
I don't have a comprehensive list at the moment, but I do know Washington state, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Maryland, and California have expanded benefits. If you or someone you know is impacted, check with your local state's governor's office and the Dept of Unemployment and file as soon as you're eligible, including food stamps and Medicaid if also eligible for those programs.
> I suggest applying for airline roles first you qualify for (if you prefer unemployment to working a suboptimal job at Amazon), at least until they're nationalized in the next 8 weeks.
Did I miss a news article about this? Or are you just speculating?
Moreover, airline roles are going to be the last to open up. It's going to take a long time for airlines to return to their former capacity, and their employees who were furloughed or laid off are going to be recalled first.
Some states are waiving the need to seek work, temporarily. In some cases, this is blanket, and in others, it's situational (i.e. if you believe you may be sick), or if you're laid off but your employer has given you a return date - even if only tentative.
I am worried about this: Long hours means stress and stress means susceptibility to illness. And besides the first-order problem of these workers getting sick, I really don't think we want to take down an increasingly important part of the supply chain for tons of people.
How about we celebrate them as the heroes they are and get our government to help out where needed?
Ditto, frankly, for gig economy saviors running around delivering for GrubHub et. al. There's no reason these need to be subsistence level trash jobs. If we really care, now is the time to fix that at the regulatory level.
Think of all the people that are worried about getting food and other necessities? My family is in quarantine and we couldn't get Peapod to come for a week so we ordered some emergency food on Amazon and then were able to get Whole Foods delivery (after a lot of trying) to come say day. Now I can sleep better at night until we start running out again. It's all a balancing act, but I am very thankful that Amazon is still out there delivering to the masses. I think it would be a much worse situation without them.
Here in Sweden we have food delivery from most stores since a long time. Mostly meant for older people but becoming mainstream lately. But now private people started announcing free help with shopping on Facebook and similar. Just came home from helping a neighbour with shopping. We can manage just fine without amazon if we just help each other now and then.
We ordered Peapod but the first availability was one week out. We were able to get Amazon to deliver Whole Foods within a few hours. Yes, we can substitute any retailer for Amazon, but people like to pick on Amazon much more than other retailers, so I felt the need to back them because they continue to execute at a high level even now.
I was responding to the other guy, who seemed to be bragging about being able to avoid Amazon, through the power of using other retailers who also need workers, as if this was some grand accomplishment.
Nothing to do with amazon. We've had supermarket delivery in the UK for nearly 2 decades (Ocado started in April 2000), and all supermarkets deliver to almost the entire country.
Amazon is a key part of the general system of logistics of getting stuff to people now.
So yeah it would make sense that OT is going to be a thing.
The article is sort of wishy washy on exactly what is going on though, it talks about voluntary and "condition of employment" OT.
I've worked in industries where OT was celebrated by employees and a lack of it was actually seen as a huge problem. I'm not 100% sure everyone's response to OT will be identical.
Most who celebrate overtime get paid more. If you're not eligible for overtime (I'd say most who frequent this site), it's not in your interest to work overtime because there's little incentive to do so. If you're salaried and exempt, it's typically in your best interests to work the least amount you can.
Most people who celebrate how much of a "hard worker" and wear 50-60 regular work weeks like badges of honor that aren't being compensated extra drank the corporate culture koolaid their HR/HR management offered them, from my experience.
It's an entirely different story if you're working more and being compensated more for that work. In that case you're not being taken advantage of (hopefully) and I say, let that person decide what amount of work is appropriate for them.
Businesses aren't paying you any more than they can get away with so don't do them any favors either.
>Most people who celebrate how much of a "hard worker" and wear 50-60 regular work weeks like badges of honor that aren't being compensated extra drank the corporate culture koolaid their HR/HR management offered them, from my experience.
That completely contradicts my experience. I work in biotech and we proudly put in long hours when required because we believe in the products we're working on and their benefit to society.
At this point Amazon's logistical performance is a matter of national security. The degree to which Amazon hiccups is the degree to which the nation is unnerved.
Amazon engineer here. Many of us (engineers, data analysts, fulfillment center associates) are working more hours to cope with extremely high demand coupled with border closures and extra delays in the road system. This is, I think, good for humanity. If your local store is out of stuff, maybe Amazon can bring it to you, and in any case you don't have to leave your house.
When I interviewed there (approx. 2012), I asked every person I met with about how many hours, on average, they worked per week.
Every single one of them gave me a non-answer; most simply answered a different question I didnt ask.
If there isn't an expectation of a consistent 40 hour work week, then it is highly unlikely that there will be any bonus for working extra during this time period.
I worked there as a Software Development Engineer (SDE) from 2007 to 2013.
At that time, SDEs were paid on a salary basis with additional compensation in restricted stock units (RSUs) that vested in the future based on how long you stayed with the company a.k.a "golden handcuffs".
SDEs worked about 50 to 60 hours during most of the year, 70 to 90 hours during an oncall / pager duty week, and 70 to 100 hours during Q4, the holiday season leading up to Christmas.
The pay was really good, the people I worked with were brilliant and amazing, and it was exciting to build awesome systems and see them make a difference in the company's operations and capabilities. At the same time, it starts to wear on you and your family after a few years. I am glad I did it, but it's not the type of job most people can do for more than a few years due to how much it requires and impacts your life.
AWS here. This varies wildly by team and doesn't match my experience at all. I've been on 3 teams over 6 years in 3 locations (though none in US so maybe this is why? #AmericaNo) on aws and retail.
I don't know anyone that works 60 hours regularly. 50, maybe - you know including lunch.
Oncall for the vast majority of teams isn't extra hours, just strange hours. But if you get paged at night people cover for you the next day.
I didn't work on a Q4 peak team but your math is psychotic. 100 hours is 14 hours a day 7 days a week? If you went through that I'm sorry, I suspected our Ops org is psychotic, but that is too much. Still, i really have to wonder if you are exaggerating since the other 2 numbers were dramatically. Or you got an Outlier team.
My org crunches for reinvent, sure, but what company wouldn't with a massive yearly conference where/when most of the products are launched.
It was common on the team I was on to work about 10 hours a day in office and then go home and have meetings with our sister team in India and some follow-up work with them. The sister team was working on standing up an automation service to reduce some of our "manual" work and help reduce the oncall burden, but it took nearly a year and a half for that to happen.
>> if you get paged at night people cover for you the next day.
That would have been nice. We initially had to provide 24-7 coverage for a week during our oncall rotation. After the sister team in India stood up, it turned into 12 hours a day and a hand off to an oncall engineer in India who would cover the next 12 hours. Both "tag team" engineers would cover a week together for the oncall rotation.
>> I didn't work on a Q4 peak team but your math is psychotic. 100 hours is 14 hours a day 7 days a week?
Our service directly supported order fulfillment. Therefore it HAD to stay up at all costs, especially during Q4.
Granted 100 hours did not happen often, it was usually closer to 70 and mainly consisted of getting everything ready for Q4 and load testing it all to make sure that it was solid for the tremendous holiday volume. Remember, this was BEFORE the retail website had fully transitioned to elastic scaling. All the supporting layers and configuration were pre-scaled manually based on the previous year's peaks plus the expected increase.
OMG, that's really horrible! 90-100 hours a week equates to 7 days a week, 13-14 hours a day with commute not included during entire (or bigger part of) Q4.
Please don't defend in name of humanity.
"Imposing its demands on workers without any regard for their safety"
If local store is out of stuff amazon can bring it at u but they should not be forced to bring without regard for their safety.
We're starting to see the mass layoffs begin. I wonder how much effort it would be for a company like Amazon to employ them as Temps. There is going to be a massive increase in availability of skilled workers looking for something to fill the gap.
While that's good in the short term, I feel like when things reset we'll find that people never stop being temps - the status quo, once set, is hard to change. A lot of the jobs that disappear now may never reappear as companies realize they don't really need that extra staff.
Many companies do, but many companies are going to realize they run even leaner now that they are forced too, and why would they rehire if things are running ok as they are.
Kind of unrelated, but:
> As the owner of a small company that has a hard time finding good help
> My company doesn't wait for economic downturns to shed the staff that it didn't really need.
I hope that you're not saying you shed the good help when you don't need them.
> Amazon is looking to hire 100,000 new warehouse and delivery workers to meet increased demands for shipments as a result of the novel coronavirus pandemic, the company announced on Monday. It will also increase the hourly pay of workers employed in these positions by an additional $2 in the United States through April.
I think working more hours as a software developer is way less taxing on your health than overtime on the warehouse floor, and physical exhaustion brings additional risks for those infected.
Overtime should be optional, so that people can decide if they're capable or willing to push themselves during this period.
As a software developer and someone who worked at Home Depot doing stuff like loading lumber for a few years I really think warehouse workers have it worse off. Especially since it seems like Depot was a cake walk compared to what Amazon puts their lower paid workers through...
I think it's valuable to note it's good for the bits of humanity that live in the first-world parts of America, et al. Not so much the people who will get ground into dust getting Prime delivery times down while exposing themselves to disease all so I can get some book about teaching my kid in 2 days or less and then put it on a shelf.
> I think it's valuable to note it's good for the bits of humanity that live in the first-world parts of America, et al. Not so much the people who will get ground into dust getting Prime delivery times down while exposing themselves to disease all so I can get some book about teaching my kid in 2 days or less and then put it on a shelf.
Eh, this is the same as poor people eating fast food and rich people eating healthy organic foods. It is also the same as how rich people can afford to live close to work and poor people cannot so they spend more time commuting.
This theme isn't unique to Amazon or one facet of the world, its everywhere if you open your eyes. Financially affluent people have benefits that lower class people don't and that is how our world currently works.
I don't think Amazon ships many essentials that it would justify the overtime in a situation like this to be honest. Of course people forced to stay at home might order more stuff, but...
Hm, maybe there are regional differences, but I can only find some Fiji water for ~40$/0.1 gallons. There is actually some toilet paper which isn't too expensive. I guess you could also use the packaging for your derrière which would reduce the massive footprint of personally shipped toilet paper.
I agree, I will and am gladly working overtime for which I will not get compensation in the hope of preventing layoffs at the company I work for. We all have to do our part to keep what economic activity we can going in the face of this crisis.
Border Force staff are being (asked/forced) to work overtime specified in their contracts. Why are we so quick to hate on Amazon, who actually deliver things that we're going to need?
> Why are we so quick to hate on Amazon, who actually deliver things that we're going to need?
Because Amazon is using desperate people to sign abusive contracts and then make them work risking their lives and loved ones to increase an already huge profit.
> who actually deliver things that we're going to need?
This post is full of this propaganda from Amazon. Who said that they are delivering first necessity items? Who said that it is better to have one person touching thousands of packages and sending to people's homes is a good idea?
Amazon is nos just being a bad player in the job market but also it is damaging the much needed rational on-line debate.
Please, keep yourself safe and help society by staying home when asked by the authorities. It is not just about you, but also others.
Amazon warehouse employment is at will. There is no "abusive contract" that "desperate people" are being forced to "sign".
I've noticed that the stories on the dark satanic mills of Amazon's warehouses never bother to show us how wonderful the conditions are in Barnes & Noble warehouses by comparison.
Should we keep doctors out of their places of work too? Or is their life worth risking? What about the police? What about people who keep electricity/water/communication services running? What about food and goods manufacturers? What about people who deliver that food and those goods? Want to talk rational? People are going to need things. How can you just expect _the_ most significant supply chain actor in the world to _stop_ functioning when supply is going to become vastly important?
It's so, so trendy to hate Amazon these days.
And I do keep myself and society safe. I am staying home, before the authorities even asked.
But if I was part of an essential supply chain, I'd be going to work. Because supply chains are important, especially when there's a virus going round, putting pressure on supply. I've even volunteered to deliver groceries at unsociable hours for an online grocery store, just to make sure that people get things like food in these difficult times.
Apparently telling people to stay home is the new social bandwagon of (dis)approval.
> Workers at Amazon's UK warehouses are being told to work overtime to tackle huge demand due to the coronavirus pandemic, despite government calls to restrict social contact.
Amazon should be held responsible for all the damage that they do to their employees.
> She pointed out that under Working Time Regulations in the UK, overtime is limited to a maximum of 48 hours per week, averaged over a 17-week period. Workers can "opt out" of the maximum weekly limit, however, and some are required to do so as a condition of employment.
Any right that you can opt-out it is not a right at all.
This is why the survival rate for the poor and the right is going to be different. In our modern society we have the resources for taking care of everybody, it is just greed and malice that allow for this situations.
> Amazon should be held responsible for all the damage that they do to their employees.
I'm confused, Amazon ships all kinds of things, and people still need to be able to buy stuff. How is this different from logistical workers in any other industry? To enable people to still buy groceries, there's all kinds of workers in that chain.
Companies who force people to sign away any rights should be severely punished. Of course that would impact the likelihood of getting hired in practice, but it is exactly this behavior why we must force all other people to adhere to the rules without giving them the choice. Absolutely detrimental to society and it should be checked if companies behaving that way should face existential fines.
The faster the automation of these types of jobs can happen the better. This crisis is showing us that.
People worry about the loss of jobs due to automation but humanity has to evolve to create new professional lines with new types of employment that don't involve things like someone packing boxes or transporting goods.
82 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadAmazon likewise is it's own mechanism, and it seems to vary heavily depending on the warehouse. From the workers I've talked with in our local warehouses, they typically like it - but our warehouses are also open for tours so they probably get treated a bit better than others.
Last I checked, employment and OT was voluntary.
This is all good stuff.
I don't have a comprehensive list at the moment, but I do know Washington state, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Maryland, and California have expanded benefits. If you or someone you know is impacted, check with your local state's governor's office and the Dept of Unemployment and file as soon as you're eligible, including food stamps and Medicaid if also eligible for those programs.
Unemployment requires that you're actively seeking work. You're no longer eligible for unemployment if you turn down an offer.
Did I miss a news article about this? Or are you just speculating?
Moreover, airline roles are going to be the last to open up. It's going to take a long time for airlines to return to their former capacity, and their employees who were furloughed or laid off are going to be recalled first.
We need logistics infrastructure to stay up, and we need the general populace to trust it.
Ditto, frankly, for gig economy saviors running around delivering for GrubHub et. al. There's no reason these need to be subsistence level trash jobs. If we really care, now is the time to fix that at the regulatory level.
I mean, okay? You know groceries and other goods at other shops also require workers to work, right?
You could replace "Amazon" with any other grocery delivery company, works the same.
Is this a 0.1% chance or a 90% chance? One matters, the other doesn't :)
So yeah it would make sense that OT is going to be a thing.
The article is sort of wishy washy on exactly what is going on though, it talks about voluntary and "condition of employment" OT.
I've worked in industries where OT was celebrated by employees and a lack of it was actually seen as a huge problem. I'm not 100% sure everyone's response to OT will be identical.
The only way this makes sense to me is if employees are directly or indirectly compensated for working overtime.
If they're not, then that kind of attitude is pathological.
Most people who celebrate how much of a "hard worker" and wear 50-60 regular work weeks like badges of honor that aren't being compensated extra drank the corporate culture koolaid their HR/HR management offered them, from my experience.
It's an entirely different story if you're working more and being compensated more for that work. In that case you're not being taken advantage of (hopefully) and I say, let that person decide what amount of work is appropriate for them.
Businesses aren't paying you any more than they can get away with so don't do them any favors either.
That completely contradicts my experience. I work in biotech and we proudly put in long hours when required because we believe in the products we're working on and their benefit to society.
Every single one of them gave me a non-answer; most simply answered a different question I didnt ask.
If there isn't an expectation of a consistent 40 hour work week, then it is highly unlikely that there will be any bonus for working extra during this time period.
At that time, SDEs were paid on a salary basis with additional compensation in restricted stock units (RSUs) that vested in the future based on how long you stayed with the company a.k.a "golden handcuffs".
SDEs worked about 50 to 60 hours during most of the year, 70 to 90 hours during an oncall / pager duty week, and 70 to 100 hours during Q4, the holiday season leading up to Christmas.
The pay was really good, the people I worked with were brilliant and amazing, and it was exciting to build awesome systems and see them make a difference in the company's operations and capabilities. At the same time, it starts to wear on you and your family after a few years. I am glad I did it, but it's not the type of job most people can do for more than a few years due to how much it requires and impacts your life.
I don't know anyone that works 60 hours regularly. 50, maybe - you know including lunch.
Oncall for the vast majority of teams isn't extra hours, just strange hours. But if you get paged at night people cover for you the next day.
I didn't work on a Q4 peak team but your math is psychotic. 100 hours is 14 hours a day 7 days a week? If you went through that I'm sorry, I suspected our Ops org is psychotic, but that is too much. Still, i really have to wonder if you are exaggerating since the other 2 numbers were dramatically. Or you got an Outlier team.
My org crunches for reinvent, sure, but what company wouldn't with a massive yearly conference where/when most of the products are launched.
It was common on the team I was on to work about 10 hours a day in office and then go home and have meetings with our sister team in India and some follow-up work with them. The sister team was working on standing up an automation service to reduce some of our "manual" work and help reduce the oncall burden, but it took nearly a year and a half for that to happen.
>> if you get paged at night people cover for you the next day.
That would have been nice. We initially had to provide 24-7 coverage for a week during our oncall rotation. After the sister team in India stood up, it turned into 12 hours a day and a hand off to an oncall engineer in India who would cover the next 12 hours. Both "tag team" engineers would cover a week together for the oncall rotation.
>> I didn't work on a Q4 peak team but your math is psychotic. 100 hours is 14 hours a day 7 days a week?
Our service directly supported order fulfillment. Therefore it HAD to stay up at all costs, especially during Q4.
Granted 100 hours did not happen often, it was usually closer to 70 and mainly consisted of getting everything ready for Q4 and load testing it all to make sure that it was solid for the tremendous holiday volume. Remember, this was BEFORE the retail website had fully transitioned to elastic scaling. All the supporting layers and configuration were pre-scaled manually based on the previous year's peaks plus the expected increase.
My company doesn't wait for economic downturns to shed the staff that it didn't really need.
Kind of unrelated, but:
> As the owner of a small company that has a hard time finding good help > My company doesn't wait for economic downturns to shed the staff that it didn't really need.
I hope that you're not saying you shed the good help when you don't need them.
> Amazon is looking to hire 100,000 new warehouse and delivery workers to meet increased demands for shipments as a result of the novel coronavirus pandemic, the company announced on Monday. It will also increase the hourly pay of workers employed in these positions by an additional $2 in the United States through April.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/16/21182411/amazon-hires-emp...
Overtime should be optional, so that people can decide if they're capable or willing to push themselves during this period.
>This is, I think, good for humanity.
I think it's valuable to note it's good for the bits of humanity that live in the first-world parts of America, et al. Not so much the people who will get ground into dust getting Prime delivery times down while exposing themselves to disease all so I can get some book about teaching my kid in 2 days or less and then put it on a shelf.
Eh, this is the same as poor people eating fast food and rich people eating healthy organic foods. It is also the same as how rich people can afford to live close to work and poor people cannot so they spend more time commuting.
This theme isn't unique to Amazon or one facet of the world, its everywhere if you open your eyes. Financially affluent people have benefits that lower class people don't and that is how our world currently works.
What essentials? Toilet paper? Water? These can be bought from Amazon, no?
I agree, I will and am gladly working overtime for which I will not get compensation in the hope of preventing layoffs at the company I work for. We all have to do our part to keep what economic activity we can going in the face of this crisis.
Because Amazon is using desperate people to sign abusive contracts and then make them work risking their lives and loved ones to increase an already huge profit.
> who actually deliver things that we're going to need?
This post is full of this propaganda from Amazon. Who said that they are delivering first necessity items? Who said that it is better to have one person touching thousands of packages and sending to people's homes is a good idea?
Amazon is nos just being a bad player in the job market but also it is damaging the much needed rational on-line debate.
Please, keep yourself safe and help society by staying home when asked by the authorities. It is not just about you, but also others.
A small number of interacting people + most people hiding at home, is WAY better than having everyone still going out there.
I've noticed that the stories on the dark satanic mills of Amazon's warehouses never bother to show us how wonderful the conditions are in Barnes & Noble warehouses by comparison.
Why is that?
It's so, so trendy to hate Amazon these days.
And I do keep myself and society safe. I am staying home, before the authorities even asked.
But if I was part of an essential supply chain, I'd be going to work. Because supply chains are important, especially when there's a virus going round, putting pressure on supply. I've even volunteered to deliver groceries at unsociable hours for an online grocery store, just to make sure that people get things like food in these difficult times.
Apparently telling people to stay home is the new social bandwagon of (dis)approval.
If they were cutting hours, the spin would be "Amazon throws helpless workers on the street".
Amazon should be held responsible for all the damage that they do to their employees.
> She pointed out that under Working Time Regulations in the UK, overtime is limited to a maximum of 48 hours per week, averaged over a 17-week period. Workers can "opt out" of the maximum weekly limit, however, and some are required to do so as a condition of employment.
Any right that you can opt-out it is not a right at all.
This is why the survival rate for the poor and the right is going to be different. In our modern society we have the resources for taking care of everybody, it is just greed and malice that allow for this situations.
I'm confused, Amazon ships all kinds of things, and people still need to be able to buy stuff. How is this different from logistical workers in any other industry? To enable people to still buy groceries, there's all kinds of workers in that chain.
People worry about the loss of jobs due to automation but humanity has to evolve to create new professional lines with new types of employment that don't involve things like someone packing boxes or transporting goods.