I'll never understand why companies think directly involving themselves in the political discourse is a good idea.
It would honestly even be different if Jeff Bezos himself tweeted these things, but to see the Amazon corporate news account try to one-up Elizabeth Warren is so bizarre..
There's reports (source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/mar/29/jeff-bezo...) that Bezos got mad that the media department wasn't doing enough to combat the "outright lies" spread by the media about Amazon working conditions, which apparently spurred the latest tweets from the AmazonNews account. Seems to be a self inflicted wound from ego.
It's also literally in the Intercept article with a link to the story lol:
> According to Recode, the suspicious tweets in fact came at the behest of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who had recently conveyed disappointment to Amazon officials that the company was not pushing back against criticisms that he considered misleading.
The article mentions this. And I can understand Bezos getting upset (although the "lies" may be more truthful than he thinks) but the way they chose to respond was worse than doing nothing at all.
You could view it as Bezos or Amazon simply coming to terms with the fact that they are not subject to any rules of decorum, or at any risk from ever failing due to their public actions. That they, as the mega corp, have reached the point of being above society and have no need to be polite or conform to inconvenient social norms anymore.
If you feel that lies are being spread about you and you try to correct the record, how is that a self-inflicted wound from ego? Isn’t that what anyone would do?
If you're a person, sure. If you're a business and you have a good amount of Congress in your pocket, have near infinite wealth, and get away with a myriad of abuses against your employees, why draw the ire of the public with rude comments against sitting Congressmen and Congresswomen? Do you think these comments serve to further Amazon's goals, or have they hurt?
It's clear to me as well that Amazon's replies were outright lies - they are making their employees defecate and urinate into bottles, and they do get away with not paying / underpaying taxes. They're not even correcting the record, they're just lying more.
>why draw the ire of the public
Because that ire is powerless and asserting dominance over society is a series of shifts like this.
They're going to tell people what their version of reality is, and people will have to accept it; There will be no comeuppance, and alternate realities and truths are to be forcefully disregarded whenever that's more convenient than ignoring them.
I find it refreshing to see a company openly tweeting what they think and not issuing boring PR statement.
It is probably going to cost them a lot in backslash though
I was thinking the same, might be a good example for exercising the average persons ability to not just blindly read slanted article headlines. They can easily see for themselves.
Honestly despite my issues with amazon those tweets are refreshing. Sterile corporate communication is an outmoded boomer concept that appears to be dying with them.
I don't believe these tweets are aimed at the general public. At the time of these tweets they were in the final days of a union election. Amazon is trying to win over undecided workers from unionizing.
It's called sucking up to the boss. Whoever was responsible for the tweets evidently believed the Bezos would approve of the content. It gives him plausible deniability (after all, he didn't write it) and in many cases may improve the career prospects within the company of the person who did write it.
> I'll never understand why companies think directly involving themselves in the political discourse is a good idea.
Because the capacity to ignore politics is inversely proportionate to the danger politics poses to you.
Large incumbent corporations are deeply dependent on preserving the status quo, in order to preserve their business model. Preserving the status quo requires active politicking.
Quote:
>There’s a big difference between talk and action. @SenSanders
has been a powerful politician in Vermont for 30 years and their min wage is still $11.75. Amazon’s is $15, plus great health care from day one. Sanders would rather talk in Alabama than act in Vermont.
Hes the US senator for Vermont. He is charged with being a respresentative for the state of Vermont for the Union of the United States and is responsible for 1/2 of the votes for that state on Federal Laws.
He is no more powerful than any other Vermont citizen in regards to their own state laws such as minimum wage...Its like they gave the keys to the account to some disgruntled intern....
Somewhat off topic but this is actually pretty positive proactive approach to security in the finest spirt of due diligence. It should be ok for people to open tickets to look into curious things no matter how trivial. Tickets don’t have to become incidents. This is what triage is for. The real security incident here is how did the intercept learn of that ticket as that should really be classified.
No, it's very much in line with the way Amazon Security staff operated when I worked there.
They very much favour proactive reports, and heavily emphasised that they'd rather have a ticket and resolve it as nothing, than not be ticketed at all because you're not sure. Unusual behaviour on a twitter account are most definitely things they'd expect to have reported to them for evaluation, or expect to report themselves if they saw it.
Everyone, everywhere, favours proactive security reports, or should do so.
This however, makes it possible to make security reports for political effect - after all, if your guidelines are to report anything suspicious, nobody can fault you for doing just that.
Is it also standard policy at Amazon to leak security reports to the media, or discuss them with journalists after the fact? We both know that's not the case.
This is why I said somewhat off topic as it could be like you said or it could a valid concern. I can’t really tell the intent. Irregardless I think it’s a good call to open a ticket. The amount of times I’ve seen something come from an innocuous user report is frightening.
Actually rereading it again I would say the source is the person that opened the ticket and not a member of the security team.
Yes, I would argue that this supports my thesis - that the ticket was, at least partially created for humorous effect.
If they were taking the matter completely seriously, I would not expect them to consider publicizing it, or discussing the ticket publicly after the fact.
I find it surprising that the Intercept would be so cavalier about the source material, given that it is likely to have a highly restricted distribution list inside Amazon.
> The Intercept scrambled to publish a story on the report, ignoring the most basic security precautions. The lead reporter on the story sent a copy of the document, which contained a crease showing it had been printed out, to the N.S.A. media affairs office, all but identifying Ms. Winner as the leaker.
This ticket wasn't an encrypted ticket (and thus was not locked down). I'm looking at it right now and I have nothing to do with security nor PR. I don't find this surprising as it contains no proprietary, classified, or customer information.
There is potentially traceable information there including laptop browser extensions as well as phone camera specs. I'm not sure how doxxable it is but if the Intercept were exercising appropriate caution they wouldn't have published the photo.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to dispute your statement on the Intercept's actions. I was just pointing out that the ticket wasn't any more secret or locked down than any normal ticket and thus a large swath of the company had access (although the ticket has since been made private), not a highly restricted distribution list.
At Amazon you're encouraged (and expected) to escalate early and escalate often. Amazon security did its job very well.
>"The real security incident here is how did the intercept learn of that ticket as that should really be classified."
Looks like someone from the security or PR departments took a picture of the ticket with their cellphone and sent them to the reporter.
Security tickets are immediately encrypted and locked down. Only a few members have access typically: The person who opened the ticket, anyone with a need-to-know, and people on the IR team. Even director-level employees need to be manually added to security-related tickets to have view permissions.
Someone else in this discussion says this ticket was not locked down (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26626369). How do you know that someone from the security or PR department took a picture? It seems much more likely this is typical left leaning employee activism that is prevalent at tech companies.
1.) I never bothered to look up the ticket on the Amazon internal ticketing system. Given what the reporter alleged (i.e. that it was handled by someone from Amazon Security), I presumed it would take the standard security-related ticket handling procedures.
I obviously wouldn't look in internal ticketing systems and THEN post to my findings to a public forum like HN. For obvious reasons.
2.) > "It seems much more likely this is typical left leaning employee activism that is prevalent at tech companies."
If standard security ticket procedures were followed, it would have been locked down to the security team and the impacted team (i.e. PR/social media).
The comment that it 'seems much more likely that this is typical left leaning employee activism' implies that there aren't left-leaning or activists within the security or PR departments. Which if you believe that... lul...
This is a great point. Normalising good security behaviours is hard to do, but important. An old workplace had a great culture around checking ID of anyone you didn't recognise (necessary as they handled a lot of sensitive material), and at my current workplace we regularly run phishing simulations and encourage people to share them in Slack to keep it front of mind (as it's one of the biggest risks we've identified).
Do you have any proof of pee in a bottle? Or are you blindly believing the narrative that the New York times put out to drive clicks?
Not saying it's not true but please be more critical.
Google and Facebook on the other hand are directly destroying democracy and spying on you.
Really? I thought it was really refreshing to see a corporation not trying to kowtow to politicians. If Warren is saying stuff they find objectionable, call it out. If a business can't safely criticize a legislator on Twitter, that's pretty much giving up on free speech.
We know from internal amazon communications it's happening. It's comical for them to deny it, except for the human misery they are making by having work expectations that make it almost impossible to take bathroom breaks and meet their expectations.
The memos that say "please don't leave pee in the trucks, please don't leave poop, we can figure out who you are".
Just because something happens and there are memos about it doesn’t mean it happens because of corporate policy. I’ve worked jobs that had memos that said “please don’t pee all over the floor and seat of the bathroom” and “please don’t throw poop covered toilet paper in the trash”. In neither case was the job or corporate policy so unbearable as to not allow enough time for proper bathroom use. It just seems there are some people that don’t understand normal / acceptable human bathroom behavior.
If they’re driving an Amazon branded truck, they’re Amazon for all I care. When an ISP contractor shows up at your house and is rude, you don’t go “well, they’re a contractor, so I can’t blame Spectrum for this.” No, they have Spectrum’s branding on, so they represent Spectrum. It doesn’t matter if they’re a contractor or not.
Right, but _I_ think they're lying, and so they've lost _my_ purchases because of it.
That's the problem when you make corporate statements that are both controversial and on shaky factual ground. The shakier the factual ground the more people might decide you are not telling the truth (as they see it) and stop doing business with you.
Again, I have _zero_ problem with a company being snarky with politicians. Criticizing our electeds is the core of the first amendment and I fully support citizens right to disagree with political figures—even political figures I mostly agree with. For example, this particular tweet from @amazonnews I quite agree with: https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1375529101931520007.
> This is extraordinary and revealing. One of the most powerful politicians in the United States just said she’s going to break up an American company so that they can’t criticize her anymore.
I have no problem with companies being "powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets". I actually have a problem with the inverse: there should be no company that is not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets.
And it's within their free speech to find that level of pettiness (and straight-up lies for that matter) distasteful and move his business elsewhere...
I agree with them - this is not a good look for Amazon. I have already essentially stopped purchasing on Amazon prior to this for various reasons (endless counterfeits and worker abuses) but will likely look to disband my relationship with AWS as well if they continue.
I use Amazon almost every day, and I feel bad about it every time, but apparently not bad enough to stop.
Imagine a Walmart that was several degrees hotter or colder than you’d like your house to be, with less bathrooms and a concrete floor. Now imagine running around it all day bending over to grab things off the bottom shelf and being timed by a buzzing iPad if you’re too slow. And say you’re you’re 65 and Social Security pays half your rent.
Now imagine that you’re the part of Amazon’s supply chain that the local jurisdiction that demands you’re treated better than the other 97% of Amazon’s chosen supply chain.
Refreshing is one word for a company being honest about the fact that they are lobbying hard to make your hypothetical life 0.001% more efficient.
Regardless of whether Amazon is in the right or wrong on this particular issue, I find it far more disturbing that Warren apparently thinks she should be immune to criticism (whether that criticism is justified or not).
For the record: Amazon, you, me, or anyone else is absolutely entitled to send Elizabeth Warren snotty tweets. Or send her snotty emails. Or make snotty phone calls to her office.
She is a public servant, not a noble or a pope or whatever.
If she can't handle people being rude to her, she needs to find another line of work. The "RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH!!!" attitude is not a good look, either.
what did she say in response? I only saw her tweet and amazon's petty (and misleading) response. Who said she cannot be criticized? I think mostly people are saying that they are cringey liars...
She said it herself. See https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1375529101931520007 - in there, Warren says "And fight to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets." That's a direct threat to break up a private entity because it criticized her (a sitting Senator and representative of the federal government).
You're getting modded down for this, of course, but she clearly thinks that only the powerful are entitled to "heckle Senators", and that anyone who "heckles Senators" should be punished.
Bite me, Senator Warren. I'll "heckle" your entitled ass any time I damned well see fit to do so.
I see. Agreed that's, not great. I'm still more worried about amazon behavior and power currently tbh. Plus she is replaceable by somebody else that is willing to break up big tech, I don't care if it's her or someone else :)
Agreed. I may not have agreed with most things Amazon twitter said but IMO it was definitely refreshing to see a company answering back instead of being just a punching bag mute for the politicians to score easy wins like "hey look how tough I am, I'm saying all these things about big bad <insert the latest company punch bag>, you should vote for me because of the emotional response you get from feeling less powerless" (although the latter part is rarely spoken).
But doesn’t their post qualify as gaslighting? The tweets said peeing in bottles due to extreme performance quotas does not happen and it very very clearly happens all the time.
Amazon is a big employer: what's the percentage of Amazon's employees engage in that? What's the percentage of employees of any other large employer, that directly competes with Amazon (so same market) that engage in similar activities?
Peeing in bottles sounds good as a click bait title but it's easy to not see the forest from the trees if you just focus on one example.
This is absolutely false. Fox news is practically obsessed with her[0]. I heard various talking heads on all types of media talking about how she didn't know anything about 'business', most mocking her past job as a bartender.
I'm not a huge fan of any politician but you probably picked the worst example, she can't post a tweet without the right wing media machine raising hell. During the last election she was also primaried hard, and some of the biggest criticisms were here anti-business/amazon stances.
Amazon is adding ~2,000 jobs. That's <10% of the number that NYC would have gotten out of HQ2.
I understand the aversion to granting tax breaks to big companies, but IMO the whole debacle just looks like NYC politicians are more interested in maintaining their political bona fides, more interested in vague notions about Amazon's 'fair share' than they are in the long term well being of the local economy.
If AOC was a right-winger, you’d frame it as her protecting the free market, keeping the government from choosing winners/losers, and exercising good governance and small government.
We had a driver pour out a bottle of pee directly onto the street in front of our place from his open driver’s side van window on Saturday afternoon.
My wife got a photo and then immediately after they delivered packages and left I went and took a photo because I couldn’t believe it.
I had not heard about the controversy until then, but my wife had been following it. I read these tweets and I also didn’t believe they were real, they were far too aggressive.
It was strange because I felt like I needed to know if it was in fact pee or not, but I also was not willing to bend over and smell it. It had all of the appearances of pee, yet the disposal was so obviously careless and conspicuous it was as though the person wanted to be caught.
The up close photo I took shows two foamy sections.
We discussed ethical issues of the potential for the worker being fired over this. And whether it ever okay to pour a bottle of pee out in front of some homes on a bike way. We also consulted a USPS mail carrier friend about what he has dealt with and USPS’ procedure for bio breaks.
Gathering all that, I still chose to email the photos and ask Amazon how they intended to handle this.
Waiting on a reply.
Edit: This was a tough call, I added some additional details below.
If the driver had knocked on our door and asked to use our bathroom, I'd have absolutely invited him in. This happened with a Fedex driver once before. That person ended up leaving pee on the seat, which was pretty gross.
A bit surprised you sent the photos to Amazon. That person is likely to be fired. A bit of pee on the street is not going to harm anything or anyone (otherwise the streets around bars would be an enormous biohazard), although it's obviously gross.
It generally does not. Most human urine is fairly sterile. And even if you've got a bladder or kidney infection, it's the same bacteria that you have on your own skin already -- it infects the urinary tract when forced inside (most often by sex).
Human feces, on the other hand, is quite dangerous. Generally you have to touch it or ingest it to get sick from it, but there are lots of ways for the bacteria to spread.
So the urine isn't dangerous, but if people are urinating in public, there's a risk that they're also defecating in public. And that's more serious.
Another option was sending it to media, which I presumed would have gotten attention. I thought the person had a better chance of holding on to the job if it was handled without publicity.
I don't have a lab, so I can't determine if it was pee. And I can't imagine you'd get to hold on to a job at Target if you poured pee out in the parking lot in front of customers.
Our friend with the USPS said "[at USPS] we’re allowed to travel as far as we need to find a restroom so no need to do it."
If this is the case at Amazon, then there shouldn't be a need to pee in bottles.
However, if this is not the case at Amazon, then what was apparently Bezos' tweet [1] was not reflective of the situation on the ground. I've written him directly before, and depending on the response, I may do it in this instance because he's not seeing what I'm seeing.
Amazon's drivers are contractors if anyone is pushing them to pee in bottles, it's themselves. So there's no actual answer to this issue. Are they not being paid enough, such that they can't pee, or are they making an reasonable decision to pee in a bottle in order to save 15 minutes and make more money. Considering they keep taking the contracts one has to assume that they're profitable, at least usually.
> I can't imagine you'd get to hold on to a job at Target if you poured pee out in the parking lot in front of customers.
No, nor should anyone want you to. Even beyond any hygiene and smell issues, it's bad PR and that's not what you're paid for.
There's a rash of blaming companies for being reasonable. Including one of a CVS manager being threatened with doxxing for calling the police on a thief. This concern for the driver seems more like a larger narrative of pro-unionism.
Most people in this thread are intentionally misrepresenting the issue, using the words 'job', and 'living wage'. These are contractors and if they don't make money today they can courier for another company tomorrow. If they don't it's because they voted with their wallets.
The issue with blaming contractors in this case is that they can't afford to lose the job. It probably pays well enough but their options are 1. get fired because they couldn't meet target deadlines, 2. pee in a bottle and risk getting caught.
Given those two options, it's no surprise they pick option 2. Amazon knows this yet they continue to set unrealistic targets.
How do you know they are setting “unrealistic targets”? What if only some employees pee in bottles because they’re bad at their job/unproductive? Why would it be Amazon’s fault if a driver who’s falling behind uses this as a hack to appear productive when they really should just get a different job?
We have reports from the workers stating so. We also have a denial from Amazon saying they don't have workers peeing in bottles. Seems that denial hasn't held up too well.
We have anecdotal reports from a few workers saying so. We also have leaked documents saying that Amazon does not allow peeing in bottles as policy. If a random employee does not follow the policy and pees in a bottle, that seems like the employee's fault. If the employee is doing so to make up lost time so they can appear more productive, it seems like that's an issue of under performance that they're hiding by peeing in a bottle. Either way, it isn't clear to me that this is either widespread among Amazon's employees or the fault of the company instead of the individual.
As for the denial - I am unclear on if they're talking about employees as a separate group from their drivers (who may be contractors according to other comments here?). Either way, I think it's reasonable for a company to make such a statement if peeing in a bottle is not a standard practice that is allowed by their policy and if it is only done rarely or by very few people (not reflective of general practice). If the delivery targets are such that most drivers have to do this, I might think differently, but so far I haven't seen evidence of this.
> it seems like that's an issue of under performance that they're hiding by peeing in a bottle.
It seems equally as likely that it is an issue of over-expecting what a worker can reasonably perform. Why is under performance the more likely scenario in your mind?
>it isn't clear to me that this is either widespread
If this were the only occurrence of "Amazon Contractor" and some combination of "pee", "bottle", "no time for bathroom breaks", etc. I would be more inclined to take the route of "a few bad workers". However, these stories have consistently made news since at least 2018.
Additional factors, which not conclusive themselves, that lead me to doubt the Amazon narrative include such things like 74% of respondents to a survey conducted by Organise reporting that they avoid using the washroom for fear of missing targets[1] - indicating that perhaps at least some fault lies with Amazon for setting unrealistic and unnecessarily burdensome targets.
> It seems equally as likely that it is an issue of over-expecting what a worker can reasonably perform. Why is under performance the more likely scenario in your mind?
If other employees can meet the quota but you can't, why would you assume that the quota is wrong? Maybe it's the wrong job for you.
> I would be more inclined to take the route of "a few bad workers". However, these stories have consistently made news since at least 2018
Perhaps it has something to do with the attempts to unionize?
> like 74% of respondents to a survey conducted by Organise reporting that they avoid using the washroom for fear
Is there a cost for saying that? If this didn't rise to the level of fear, but only apprehension, would they be censured for overreaching rhetoric? If not, how trustworthy is it? And it still leaves 25% comfortably hitting quota showing that the quota itself is fine.
If you're wondering why this is getting buried, educate yourself on how Amazon "contracting" works. It's just a scheme to cut costs and shift all responsibility elsewhere.
It's getting buried because people downvote what they can't argue. Amazon isn't doing anything different than any other company, or anything that has been a problem before now.
Unionists are lying, conflating contractors and employees, and everyone here is buying it - probably because it fits an existing narrative. I'm being told, by privileged SF types, that I need to educate myself, when they've apparently never worked a day as a contractor, or perhaps never even worked a real job (ie, uncomfortable) in their life.
The pee bottle is being used as an excuse to unionize, even though it's something contractors choose to do in all driving jobs.
Also, when I say "drive for another company tomorrow", that's the ground reality. If you show up sober and well-dressed at any courier company you'll have a magnetic sign on your car and a load of packages right away. (And couriering is generally to offices with a ton of washrooms so you can weigh that in the calculation.)
People also downvote what they find stupid, boss. I made in a bottle in a car before; I wouldn’t do it again for $4 or whatever. Guess I don’t have what it takes to do contract work.
> Guess I don’t have what it takes to do contract work.
No, that's what some rich guy would say. Oh, I wouldn't do "some mildly distasteful thing" for money, I guess I have high standards, haha. No, you wouldn't last that long. I doubt you'd make it through the first early morning. If you did you'd learn that pissing in a bottle isn't a problem at all compared to hours out of your life.
The adults you're talking about, denigrating because they aren't as discerning as you, are making this decision for themselves. They'd rather make wee-wee uncomfortably and see their family again sooner. For them that $4, or $15, matters more than it does for you.
> People also downvote what they find stupid
Also, stupid people vote. So ... proposition undecided.
> boss.
Somehow I don't think you've ever non-ironically called anyone that.
> Another option was sending it to media, which I presumed would have gotten attention. I thought the person had a better chance of holding on to the job if it was handled without publicity.
Your faith in Amazon to do right is impressive - perhaps even naive. Amazon official policy is not for drivers to pee in bottles, however, it strongly incentivizes this behavior. Had the driver asked to use your bathroom, he likely would have lost precious time and have been indirectly penalized for it.
Considering all this, you took a photo that embarrasses Amazon and sent it to Amazon and asked them to "do something"? Amazon's will already assume you sent it to the press and will circle the wagons - the answer will be it was a rogue employee and he has been let go (or disciplined, if he's lucky).
Rogue contractor who has had sexual misconduct charges leveled at them for urinating in public - and let that be a lesson to all you other contractors to stay in line.
I think stay in line - at least the way I'm thinking of it, is a lot more negative than just bring an extra bottle. It's a demand for employees to skirt the rules or else they'll be punished and if they're caught skirting the rules they'll also be punished - oh and since you're a contractor you lack any rights normally afforded employees.
Basically, sit down, shut up and take it - we've got the power and if you try and object we'll can you and replace you faster than you can blink. And we might even find a way to make sure you can't qualify for unemployment.
> Had the driver asked to use your bathroom, he likely would have lost precious time and have been indirectly penalized for it.
What's the alternative? No matter how reasonable the expectations are, there will always be drivers who would rather pee in a bottle and end their shift 10 minutes early than spend 10 minutes finding a bathroom.
That's assuming that their scheduling makes it so that they could actually ever end their shift early. Given how wide-spread this issue is I think it's more fair to assume that taking a 10 minute break would be penalized by Amazon.
Um... I do not agree that there will always be drivers who prefer to pee in a bottle. I do not believe that there are office/home workers who always prefer to pee in bottles. The alternative is access to bathrooms.
There are a lot of solutions to this problem. The same type of solutions any company that employees drivers have had for years.
> I do not agree that there will always be drivers who prefer to pee in a bottle
Nonsense. I know people who would rather pee in a bottle than wait for the next gas station on the I5. I personally have pissed on the sides of roads in lots of places on long car trips.
Dumping urine in an urban environment is pretty rude. But if I could save myself 10 mins a day by pissing in a bottle rather than some creepy gas station bathroom, why not? It's just piss.
Do you work in a job where you can't stop the clock for 10 minutes to take care of bodily functions? The only choices here are between getting penalized for lateness, pissing in a bottle, or finding a new job, and they amount to the same thing - bottle or new job. Plus it's absolutely disgusting. I think if it were personal choice alone, people would be more discreet. This story implies they're so pressed for time they can't even toss the bottle in the trash because they have to refill it... I can't even begin to imagine how that becomes a normal everyday activity at a company without somebody questioning how things got this way.
You have no idea what was in the mind of the driver, but you're passing pretty strong judgement.
> Plus it's absolutely disgusting.
This is what it really comes down to - your victorian sensibilities about bodily fluids can't possibly imagine that anyone would gasp OMG pee in a bottle! unless the alternative is starvation or whippings.
There are plenty of people who don't feel this way. Hell, I'm sitting outside with a flush toilet less than 100 ft from me and I just pissed on a tree instead. It's just piss.
If I was a driver constantly on the move I'd probably pee in a bottle on occasion too. I can be lazy and I don't believe that peeing in places outside of a toilet is necessarily gross, so I could see it happening if I was working in a residential suburban area with no proper restrooms at hand. If work conditions were otherwise good I wouldn't feel dehumanized or exploited for it.
I'm not saying Amazon's practices don't incentivize this or that they shouldn't be examined, but as is common these days many people take a paternalistic and dogmatic view that will not accept under any circumstance that some people may be doing this freely.
A non-hellish non-dystopia where it would be presumed people need to urinate somewhere within their fixed 8 hour shift and maybe even more than once if they chose to work overtime?
Jeff Bezos is always saying things that are obviously not the facts on the ground. He didn't know this, Amazon couldn't have known that, meanwhile they're always caught covering something up or responding to the same complaints internally.
Another option would've been not to do anything. If a dog peed on the street would you be upset about it and report it? How about if a bird defecated on the street? Why is human urine so much worse?
It strikes me as cruel to report and make trouble for a man who is already so overworked as to need to pee in a bottle.
Umm, yeah. They dumped a bottle of piss outside a customers house.
That's bad advertising. Or, possibly, it's intended to be good union advertising.
But either way, that person has got to go.
So many dishonest people downvoting. Probably unionists. We know that this case hangs on the difference between contractors and employees, and that even if employees unionize the contractors will choose to keep peeing in bottles.
This is driver flexibility. They choose the amount of deliveries they take. The drivers do this because they want more money.
People generally courier as an in-between job, like construction laborer, and they appreciate the ability to earn more, quickly. As a laborer I used to put in 14h days with cleanup. But that kept me from losing income during a career switch so it was a choice I was happy to make.
I didn't say your comment "wasn't wrong, but disagreeable", I said your viewpoint was simply disagreeable (read, not necessarily correct and people obviously disagree with what you have stated (read, they think your incorrect)).
Nobody runs through a thread downvoting all your posts because they think you're wrong, they do it because they're mad which means they know you're right.
I 100% believe that drivers pee in containers - heck, my grandfather and I used to do the same when fishing - they make containers with handles specifically made for this.
That said, given that the firestorm has become very public, I would expect disgruntled (or any driver, they are wage slaves) drivers to be acting more conspicuous to draw more attention to the problem, which may temporarily inflate its visibility, but hopefully it also leads to change.
I'd talk about it (spread the word like here), but avoid being specific enough to affect the worker unless it looks like they were endangering someone - but that's just me.
Every acre-foot of lake is over 325K gallons or well over a million liters. A typical destination lake will have over half-trillion (0.5 x 10¹²) gallons of water in it.
Your and your 1000 friends' pint/500mL of urine isn't going to do anything meaningful to the lake.
I enjoy public lands quite a bit; people really should adhere to Leave No Trace[0] principles quite strictly - which says to urinate at least 200 feet from water sources. People always want to be a lawyer about why each rule does or doesn't apply to their specific situation. And we all suffer for it.
BTW, it depends on the climate. Somewhere like the Grand Canyon that is quite dry other than the big river flowing through it along with some streams and other tributaries, the preference is to pee in the river.
I agree that in the Northeast, the preference is to do it away from water sources.
> Urine will not harm vegetation or soil, according to Leave No Trace, however it may attract wildlife. When locating a discrete spot, follow Leave No Trace guidelines to travel on durable surfaces as well as stay 200 feet away from water sources. Dilute the urine afterwards by pouring water over it.
I gather urinating in lakes is okay even by the strictest standards.
I remember an open reservoir being emptied because surveillance video showing a person peeing in it got publicized; millions of gallons gone to waste because people are more disgusted by human urine than they are by decomposing possums.
The same reason that there's the "no alcoholic beverages" rule right above the "no pissing" rule. Once upon a time someone either did it in poor taste or complained in poor taste and now it's against the rules and there's yet another entry on the big sign by the boat launch saying so. So everyone keeps doing it but they have to hide it for plausible deniability.
It was on the Detroit river, a major shipping lane and the boat was tiny, I’d be flashing everyone and I was a kid and self conscious about pissing in front of people, still am.
Drivers break the rules all the time for various reasons. At one point I loved messing with drivers and would say 'so how many log books do you have'. My record is 6 (not sure how he kept that all straight). But usually they do whatever they can to have extra time to do other things. Lets say your trip takes 12 hours. If you push it all the way and do not stop maybe you can make it in 9. That gives you 3 hours to do 'other' things and get paid for 12 (harder to do these days with automated logs).
Amazon will tell you that it is a completely separate subsidiary and act like they have no control over it. I called them about a driver who blew through a stop sign and furthermore did a hasty 3 point turn in a driveway almost hitting my car. I had to blow the horn the truck was inches away. They too are at the mercy of whatever algorithm tells them they should deliver and are punished otherwise. Customer service could not do anything they directed me to the delivery subsidiary who stonewalled me as well.
I watched my ikea delivery driver pee on the hill across from my place right before delivering the package to me. it's probably not a solely amazon thing even though they are well known for it.
There are certain places near my house where some rideshare drivers like to idle, where the gutter always has soda bottles full of urine in it.
I don't want to disparage the people doing those jobs, but the rideshare companies have pretty clearly added quite a lot of oversupply relative to what the infrastructure can handle; cab companies have facilities and cab stands etc where drivers can relieve themselves, where rideshare drivers are left on their own to leave their fluids in litter in the street.
Not paying for proper facilities for maintenance and breaks is just what we in the biz call "disrupting". You might be able to undercut an entrenched business a bit by using fancy tech stuff - but using fancy tech stuff and ignoring the laws everyone else has to follow? That's where the money is.
Also, that isn't to say that cab companies are a great example here - that industry was ripe for a good shaking up and had a lot of really weird entrenched components, but, at the end of the day, neither side is good - we only get labour rights with laws and enforcement that actually has teeth.
To bring it back to Amazon, it's even better if you can plausibly deny breaking the rules by orchestrating your system such that the people you're heavily incentivizing to break the rules and generally behave antisocially are non-employee business associates who you very clearly told (in very fine print) not to break the rules.
You... ratted out the guy who delivers your packages to his corporate masters for doing the very human homeostatic requirement of urination? Seriously?
Perhaps he had to urinate again, and did not have an additional bottle? What then should he have done?
If you'll notice, we're now heading down the path of playing out ever-more-elaborate strategies for individual delivery drivers to maintain homeostasis without offending the delicate sensibilities of the people they serve, instead of questioning why this is a problem in the first place.
The solution to this problem is not "dump a bottle of piss out on someone's lawn," it's "expand labor laws to cover this very obvious human rights issue and then hammer Amazon with it until they shape up."
Workers need bathrooms, and employers have to pay for them.
"And in the mean time, report all violators to Amazon" is the implicitly unsaid thing that people here are disagreeing with, not the obvious statement that labor laws should be expanded and enforced.
I don't know if it's employers that have to pay for them. Society needs available bathrooms; they don't need to be gated behind employment or being a customer
I used to do apartment maintenance and I considered asking someone to use their bathroom completely unprofessional. I peed in bottles and never thought it a big deal.
A simple question, do you always offer water and a restroom to blue collar workers who enter your home? If so, you are in the 1%.
Oh, I agree. Everybody deserves regular breaks during the workday. People have to eat, drink, pee, etc. Lack of such breaks doesn't, IMO, excuse peeing in my yard.
Well, this is where we are. Delivery drivers are being crunched to make deliveries. Having someone pee in your yard just comes with the territory. Don't try to get them fired if they do that. I assure you many dogs pee in your yard any given day.
You're underestimating the determination of willful ignorance - also, they can always claim this incident was just some weirdo that they then fired for acting inappropriately and then point to some BS statistics about driver job satisfaction.
That all assumes this person's report isn't just blackholed by front-line communication folks at Amazon, which they could always ascribe to another "out of SOP action" or just wait a news cycle or two for people to forget if a stink was raised.
It is enervating hearing anecdotes like these from wealthy people who seemingly believe the same necessary excretions they have aren't a privilege lower classes deserve
it's especially shit because the whole goddamned economy runs on whiz-in-bottles. It's not an amazon problem (to be clear: I hate amazon for perpetuating it); it's the whole goddamned ball of wax. If no one whizzed in bottles, parked in the bike lane, double parked in a one lane road, then the economy would grind to a goddamned halt. So we have to admit that we want the rules and norms of good taste flouted when it's to our benefit, or we have to admit that we've built an unjust world.
What were the biggest factors in reporting them? The average delivery driver works way harder and probably commits way fewer immoral actions then the average HN user for a fraction of the salary.
And what do you expect them to do with their piss? Drink it? How jaded to human suffering must one be to report something as minor as this to a company known for having awful labor practices…
If they take a detour maybe they'll end up with a demerit for deviating from the optimal driving route and be docked pay - if they come back to distribution with a bottle of pee the company may also dock them for something like... I dunno "storing human waste in a vehicle used for transporting food stuffs" then dock their pay or fire them. Amazon is strongly motivated to discourage drivers from coming back to their shipping centers with bottles full of pee since either labour organizers or reporters might jump on that to use against the corporation.
All this could just be communicated through pretty innocuous sounding employee guidelines (maybe, "there can be no open bottles of liquid of any kind when a vehicle is in motion") or just word of mouth. A manager mentions to a senior driver that there will be some bonuses if nobody gets caught with a bottle of pee and that causes the initiative to disseminate through all the drivers.
There may be far fewer choices here than it appears and the best choice is probably to get OSHA involved and maybe get some new worker safety and rights legislation through congress.
That driver was a contractor, deciding to pee in his own bottle. He chose to take more packages than he could deliver and is rushing to cut corners.
As well as conspicuously dumping piss outside customer houses he probably speeds through school zones.
Contractors don't get a wage, that's key to this whole discussion. And if contractors don't make a profit they shouldn't take the contract. This kerfuffle is in the middle of big cities, not some tiny company town in the outback. They have all the same options anyone else does, it's not like they're forced to drive for Amazon.
What if that level of "too many packages" is the only way the driver could avoid getting a demerit for under performance?
What if a livable wage is only possible if you quote more packages than is reasonable due to the intense pressure amazon has on the contract delivery market?
What if 80% of drivers don’t do this? Maybe the other 20% need to just get a different job if they aren’t able to avoid under performance without resorting to time saving tricks.
I think the percentages need work since if 20% of the tens of thousands of drivers you employ/contract do a thing then clearly your hiring policies are pretty terrible. If you worked as a dev and 20% of your co-workers end up committing corporate espionage then the place you work is almost certainly Los Alamos.
But I get your point - the issue, I think, is that under-performance in a job role should be a rarity. You should be hiring people that are likely going to comfortably exceed your minimum expectations and compensate them appropriately. If someone isn't a fit for a position it's most optimal for the company to never hire them (to avoid the cost of training and any capital costs associated with the new employee) but, barring that, it's optimal for both parties to break off the arrangement ASAP since the employer isn't getting the value they expect for their cost and the employee is going to be getting a whole lot of stress.
If it's the case where a significant portion of drivers are marked as underperforming then you're either 1) being dishonest about the job expectations in an effort to penalize decently efficient employees wrongfully or 2) presenting the position in a misleading or confused manner and not properly screening employees - either way it's on the employer, not the employee, if the issue is widespread.
It really seems like the issue with strict performance requirements in warehouses and with drivers is pretty widespread so I'd first look to attribute this to amazon rather than the folks they are hiring and, with assistance from inference along with lots of personal biases, I'm pretty certain Amazon is using artificially inflated performance targets as a way to minimize paid compensation while cycling through the glut of available labour knowing that, in a lot of states, being accepted to a position after submitting an offer and refusing it will result in a discontinuation of unemployment and a constant stream of applications is required to maintain unemployment checks.
A business can essentially hold you hostage with the US unemployment system by under-selling the actual job expectations and then using the threat of being fired with cause for performance reasons to complicate your chances of getting back on insurance.
> A business can essentially hold you hostage with the US unemployment system
Thankfully we're talking about contractors and none of that is the case.
> I think the percentages need work since if 20% of the tens of thousands of drivers you employ/contract do a thing then clearly your hiring policies are pretty terrible.
Not employees, they weren't hired. And the contractors aren't promised anything, they're given a chance to prove themselves.
Contractors are employed persons. They're distinct under the law in the US for some fully BS reasons but in every meaningful manner these drivers are employees - they aren't independent courier services that happen to work part-time for Amazon, they're drivers that only run Amazon deliveries but are forced to operate as an independent company for Amazon's benefit.
There are cases where the contractor style of employment is valid and advantageous for the worker. But when it comes to the gig economy contractors are CINO (contractors in name only) - they're employees that companies like treating differently to get out of paying insurance for and that's it.
I agree about the legal dodgery here. The way healthcare is available via employers means that contractors and part-time workers are hurt unreasonably. The solution to that is letting people keep their plan when quitting a job, reupping a plan that expired, and mandating set rates where health-insurance costs the same regardless if you're a company or an individual. This stuff is broken.
But contractor vs employee is a useful distinction for everyone and trying to fix all the other issues by neutering what contractor means goes the wrong way.
Contractors, INO or otherwise, have freedom to pick their shift and their employer on almost a daily basis, if not more frequently. Drivers have Uber and Lyft apps open, etc. Amazon drivers can give Bezos the finger and drive for a courier firm with no notice and no black-mark on their employment history.
> in every meaningful manner these drivers are employees - they aren't independent courier services that happen to work part-time for Amazon, they're drivers that only run Amazon deliveries but are forced to operate as an independent company for Amazon's benefit
There's no force involved. Even economic. The drivers drive for them despite having the same job options that non-drivers do, and they choose this.
> There's no force involved. Even economic. The drivers drive for them despite having the same job options that non-drivers do, and they choose this.
Yea - I think this is the core portion of what makes this more difficult to stomach during a pandemic - the other options are few and far between and the job market is highly distorted right now.
Most folks on HN still have cushy jobs (I work in a healthcare adjacent market so our market segment is actually doing quite fine) but a lot of folks that were either jobless going into covid or were laid off/furloughed due to it are in a hard place. Unemployment laws are such that folks can be forced to take contract gigs if they're available or else fail to qualify for unemployment and that can put folks in a really awkward position financially.
There is some serious exploitation here due to the lack of options. Something like UBI and national healthcare like we've got up here in Canada would seriously improve lives for folks that find themselves unable to cover expenses without working themselves to the bone and I think that everyone should have a right to a pleasant life. It's quite a tough situation.
> Unemployment laws are such that folks can be forced to take contract gigs
Suitable work definitions can never require you to lose money by working. And that's without the peeing-in-a-bottle type tricks to be more profitable. You're also allowed to include all of your costs (gas, depreciation, etc) in the calculation. If you had a Hummer you'd be paying more for gas than if you had a smart car so the value of the contract changes.
> UBI and national healthcare like we've got up here in Canada would seriously improve lives for folks that find themselves unable to cover expenses without working themselves to the bone
National healthcare is helpful because it covers 'acts of god'. UBI seems like it would be harmful to the economy by inflating itself into irrelevance while destroying wages.
> I think that everyone should have a right to a pleasant life
I think that everyone has the right to pursue that, and must not have unreasonable obstacles placed in their way.
But saying that someone deserves a thing implies that someone else is required to provide it. Your rights can't place a burden on me so that can't be a right.
> But saying that someone deserves a thing implies that someone else is required to provide it. Your rights can't place a burden on me so that can't be a right.
That's correct - maybe it's more accurate to say that I don't believe anyone else has the right to deprive others of a pleasant life. It goes with my general philosophy to strive to ensure that people I interact with in life find that interaction either neutral or pleasant and don't suffer from my existence.
Off topic, but I'm curious. Say a human empties a pee bottle on a public sewer drain and a dog pees on that same drain. I don't see much difference except one of them urinated in public. Chemically they're the same, but I'm more repulsed by the human waste, why is that?
Probably because we hold humans to a higher standard than animals - we've all been raised to hold it until it's appropriate which is when we're inside and on a toilet. Some animals can be potty trained, it's a bit weird but good for them - most animals are just trained to not wee on the couch and outdoors is left wide open for them as they need. It's pretty socially acceptable for dogs to pee in public and, if you found it offensive, I am afraid I have some bad news for you about the miniature public outhouses they build for squirrels.
> If the driver had knocked on our door and asked to use our bathroom, I'd have absolutely invited him in. This happened with a Fedex driver once before.
They don't have time to use a proper restroom. That's why they're peeing in bottles.
> If the driver had knocked on our door and asked to use our bathroom, I'd have absolutely invited him in. This happened with a Fedex driver once before. That person ended up leaving pee on the seat, which was pretty gross.
What with all the sorts of people in the world, how many folks would've invited them in vs. thinking the driver was weird and potentially reporting the action?
Asking to use your restroom (during pandemic times) seems pretty likely to trigger a customer complaint possibly even one as pleasant as "They were courteous and didn't leave a mess, but why are they being forced to use residential bathrooms, don't they have time off to pee?" - that's a complaint that doesn't reflect poorly on the driver at all but may still end up getting the driver fired if it causes a PR stink.
Without stronger labour laws and without a union drivers are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Can you please not snitch on people like that and instead talk to them? There are dogs that piss on the street and nothing bad happens. If this becomes regular then yes, talk to them and if they don't stop report them. But seeing 1 indiscretion and pulling the trigger on the guy is not ok.
Blows me away that he/she would even consider trying to get the driver fired over this. That individual works for a poverty wage and clearly isn’t given time to use the restroom by their employer. And your first instinct is to get them fired. Disgusting.
> If the driver had knocked on our door and asked to use our bathroom, I'd have absolutely invited him in. This happened with a Fedex driver once before. That person ended up leaving pee on the seat, which was pretty gross.
Not sure where you live but where I'm from, letting a stranger into your home is the same as giving them permission to rob you
> According to Recode, the suspicious tweets in fact came at the behest of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who had recently conveyed disappointment to Amazon officials that the company was not pushing back against criticisms that he considered misleading.
> But company personnel think Amazon’s aggressive actions on Twitter are “embarrassing.”
It's not surprising. The biggest danger of having tremendous wealth and/or power seems to be that you can no longer accept and integrate valid criticism from others.
There is so much criticism-- especially towards anything/anyone high profile-- including outright invalid criticism that there is potentially a selection effect: Everyone who listens to criticism gives up and we're left with people who are substantially immune to it.
Which seems to apply to some of our politicians too. Like the reply from Elizabeth Warren saying that maybe Amazon should be split up because then maybe they wouldn't have time to criticize elected officials. Or otherwise "stop criticizing me or I'll make you hurt". Not very nice coming from a political figure in a democracy.
I did find Amazon's responses to be tone deaf at best (mostly just disagreeing with them) but her reply to be much worse.
You’re clearly not being charitable to her if you read her tweet and thought she meant Amazon has to be broken up because their tweets are snarky towards her. She’s saying that Big Tech in general is so powerful—they can do whatever they want—and then snap back at politicians in snarky tweets without a care.
You’re completely missing the point I was making. It’s not about the snarky tweets. It’s about how big and powerful corporations have become.
I don’t know why I’m surprised; HN has shown me more and more that otherwise intelligent people are more than happy to support corporate friendly narratives and anti-progressive ones.
there's a big difference between "hey guys Amazon isn't pushing back against criticism enough" and "lets start tweeting snarky shit at US Senators from Amazon official accounts". have a little cynicism; Recode doesn't have proof it came from Bezos or it would show it.
I am sympathetic to labor issues at amazon and other places, but a lot of tech criticism seems out of place and undue. Amazon warehouses don't seem fun (i've never done that job) but they do pay fairly well above min wage, which they deserve some credit for. If anything it validates the Senators' pushes for better wages proving it won't bankrupt businesses.
It seems obvious that amazon would want this to be the focus, instead of bottles of pee. They could be a great ally to democrat politicians pursuing changes - amazon shows they can be a trillion dollar biz with change X, amazon isn't chastised in WashingtonDC. Win-Win.
They denied it, though, instead of posting more truthfully that this is not an exceptional working condition for delivery drivers. My friend works at UPS, is a teamsters member, and said: "Every single male delivery driver ever has peed in a bottle at some point". Which makes this particular criticism of Amazon lose its sting. Instead of simply telling the truth, they decided to lie?
Someone needs to do lexical style analysis against this Dave Clark’s tweets. It seems evident (same exact wordings and Bernie Sanders whataboutisms) and hilarious that he is responding to criticism of his personal account’s tweets from amazonnews
Not sure why this is buried. Dave Clark comes directly from the warehouse business and has himself used the "people wouldn't work here if this were true" angle. Really tries to portray the warehouses as something they should be proud of, reality notwithstanding.
My read on this was that it was a snarky report done in protest. Ken Klippenstein is a troll who does things with a straight face, and likely so are people who leak to him. I don't think anyone really believed it was hacked, but rather it was a way to criticize it with plausible deniability.
Seems like a lot of detail (e.g. going back through the past 2 months of tweets to check the source label) for just a "hey this sucks!" protest. Also, seems risky to send a screenshot of your own ticket while logged into the ticket system, though maybe all the login template info is just outside of the cropped screenshot?
"There have been several news articles... [links]" seems like a clever way to get in negative articles about it into the system, while acting innocent.
Unless you think this person actually believed nobody noticed these articles or the tweets? They were trending on Twitter long before this was posted, and I knew about them. Of course Amazon PR did.
I am of the opinion that all truckers (or people in the delivery profession) pee in bottles to save time, not just Amazon drivers. Why is Amazon being singled out here? I suppose the argument is that it is caused by their aggressive delivery metrics and policies, but would t this be true of any shipping company? If drivers are incentivized to by the number of packages they deliver to meet bonuses or certain payouts, isn’t it logical they would do anything to save time? How would you even change the compensation or penalty structure to account for this?
Amazon lied about it very publicly. They lied and said they didn't even know about it, and then an avalanche of evidence showing they knew about it was released.
Did they? The tweet I saw was specifically talking about Amazon employees, and last I checked, none of the people driving delivery trucks are in any way employed by Amazon.
My understanding was that someone had made the accusation that this was happening in fulfillment centers, which are employees, and Amazon was officially denying it.
Amazon DSP drivers are hired and managed completely by third party companies.
Because Amazon is a brand upper middle class white collar types interact with. Swift and Schneider are not. Everyone thought they were at least a couple intermediaries removed from the trucker jugs.
Just wait until they discover what construction site porta-johns are like.
The incentives leads to dangerous driving, careless handling of packages and unsanitary work conditions that highly likely contribute to higher employee turnover.
Amazon does not pay for the externalities of more dangerous driving in your neighbourhood, other than their subcontractors might increase their prices if their insurance starts getting more expensive. They do not pay [edit: you] for the time and effort when they have to redeliver a broken package.
You change the compensation by setting goals that are actually reachable, and then having the workers iterate together with the employer to find and fix inefficiencies. The antagonism of unreachable goals is bound to lead to public relations issues. This of course assume that you see this article or articles like it as a public relations issue, so if that view is negligible then Amazon will see no harm.
If a manager, or set of metrics, prevented bathroom breaks, that's a major contract violation and would be arbitrated successfully by a competent union steward.
Indeed. I live close to an interstate in a rural area and the neighbors to a trash pickup every year. We're actually picking up trash on the "frontage road" rather than the interstate, but the two are only 100' apart. I can tell you that truck drivers peeing in bottles then throwing said bottles out the window is very common.
I am so confused by the set of responses based on the idea "Well, lots of other people have awful working conditions, why are we picking on this particular billion dollar corporation?"
It's not whataboutism at all. I am genuinely curious, why now and why Amazon? People did not just decide to start peeing in bottles when working for Amazon, it has been happening long before.
People did complain about other companies. A decade ago it was Walmart that was the company everyone was talking about how poorly they treated their employees (which they still do in comparison to competitors like Costco). I think the reason why Amazon is getting the focus now is because Bezos went from being merely a very wealthy man to (depending on the stock market) being literally the wealthiest man in the world. So you'd think he could afford a bit of generosity towards his warehouse workers.
Because the discussion is only focused on Amazon. If instead all such articles and complains would be "Amazon, among many other companies, give workers incentives to pee in bottles" then I would pay a lot more attention to it.
Because when you say "<insert-bad-company-of-the-day> does <insert-bad-thing-of-the-day>" which is obviously to me not unique to that company then your message sounds like meant to provoke a certain feeling against a certain company, my "manipulation" alarms start ringing and, as a protection mechanism, I stop believing everything you say. By making at least an effort to make such reporting balanced, fair and accurate you have much higher chance to get me to care.
I've done it before on a long drive under urgent non-work-related time constraints, and while recovering from a broken leg. It's not the worst thing in the world, although finding a tree or a public toilet is preferable, and it's probably not safe while driving.
> I am of the opinion that all truckers (or people in the delivery profession) pee in bottles to save time, not just Amazon drivers.
What is your opinion based on? A hunch? Random number generator? Your star sign? Maybe your horoscope?
> Why is Amazon being singled out here?
That's a strawman, nobody is singling out this company. Everyone is talking about Amazon because they publicly denied this ever happens from an official account.
> How would you even change the compensation or penalty structure to account for this?
Oh I don't know, maybe... and I realize this idea is so far out there so please bear with me for a second, maybe institute mandatory 15 minute breaks every 2-3 hours into the delivery schedule? Crazy, I know.
My opinion is based on this generally being a thing that delivery drivers choose to do. It has been true of long-haul truckers for quite some time (many of them would even take Meth just so they could drive longer and log more miles).
My father did local delivery for UPS for 30 years. According to him, this is not something he or anyone he knew did, ever (including the long haulers). UPS is unionized, so maybe that has something to do with it. My uncle worked for USPS for 35 years and he has reported the same. So I don't think you can hold up examples of drivers peeing in bottles and taking meth as the status quo when both UPS and USPS don't drive under these conditions. Fedex I'm not sure about because they are all contractors, so they may be under the same pressures as Amazon. But that's all the more reason for Amazon drivers to unionize. I'm sure your could find some horror stories, but this is a pressure the union works explicitly against and it seems effective.
I’ve heard about it while living my life? I don’t know what you want me to say. It’s just something I have been aware of happening long before now. And honestly, I’m not really interested in trying to convince anyone else. If you don’t believe me, that’s cool, but I know what I know. And since you’re too contrarian to even bother looking it up yourself, here is the literal first google result:
Oh, and here is a literal company that sells a product meant to alleviate the need to urinate in bottles. They speak about such bottle urination near the bottom of the page:
"Amazon forces warehouse workers to pee in bottles" was a thing two years ago. I haven't heard of this being a common thing outside anecdotal accounts, and looking at the amazon employees subreddits it sounded like it was overblown. Amazon responded forcefully to that claim in their tweet, and was subsequently hit with a 'gotcha!' when the drivers were reported to be doing it.
From what I've read, Amazon's warehouses aren't a fun place to work, but not overall different from any other warehouse job. Along the same lines, their delivery jobs aren't remarkably different from other delivery jobs and the drivers peeing in bottles is a thing that happens across the board in the industry.
Thank you, that is exactly my point. The claim that had been going around was warehouse workers doing it, but now we see that it is delivery drivers. My point is that all manner of long-haul delivery drivers choose to do this, not just those that work for Amazon.
I think Amazon needs to ask itself how this barrage of reputational damage is going to affect tech recruiting. Its been very slow to get on the remote work as the future train, its anti-worker crush the little guy cred is through the roof, and the hypocrisy of the LPs in light of recent company actions is blaring. Each of these is particularly off putting to a sizable portion of the typically left leaning US dev set Amazon tries to recruit. I guess Amazon has recourse as they can double down on hiring H1B's to sidestep negative perceptions in the US.
Threads that are union-related always seem very foreign to me on HN, but one of the greatest advantages of living somewhere there is trust between employees, unions, employer organisations and the government is that the basic facts can be agreed upon.
So you can have things like technical committees that analyse the basic facts of inflation adjustments of wages, wage changes in competing industries or economies and real wage increases. As well the unions in export-driven sectors negotiating first, and government and services employees falling in line, in order to continue to compete in the global economy.
I believe this trust also builds productivity, but looks like Jeff Bezos has a different opinion.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadIt would honestly even be different if Jeff Bezos himself tweeted these things, but to see the Amazon corporate news account try to one-up Elizabeth Warren is so bizarre..
Edit: Source requested
[citation needed]
> According to Recode, the suspicious tweets in fact came at the behest of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who had recently conveyed disappointment to Amazon officials that the company was not pushing back against criticisms that he considered misleading.
imagine getting that mad as like the richest person in the goddamned world.
It's clear to me as well that Amazon's replies were outright lies - they are making their employees defecate and urinate into bottles, and they do get away with not paying / underpaying taxes. They're not even correcting the record, they're just lying more.
They're going to tell people what their version of reality is, and people will have to accept it; There will be no comeuppance, and alternate realities and truths are to be forcefully disregarded whenever that's more convenient than ignoring them.
Because the capacity to ignore politics is inversely proportionate to the danger politics poses to you.
Large incumbent corporations are deeply dependent on preserving the status quo, in order to preserve their business model. Preserving the status quo requires active politicking.
Example:
https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1375509172549132289?s=...
Quote: >There’s a big difference between talk and action. @SenSanders has been a powerful politician in Vermont for 30 years and their min wage is still $11.75. Amazon’s is $15, plus great health care from day one. Sanders would rather talk in Alabama than act in Vermont.
Hes the US senator for Vermont. He is charged with being a respresentative for the state of Vermont for the Union of the United States and is responsible for 1/2 of the votes for that state on Federal Laws.
He is no more powerful than any other Vermont citizen in regards to their own state laws such as minimum wage...Its like they gave the keys to the account to some disgruntled intern....
It strikes me as a sarcastic joke by burnt out security staff. Which would explain why we are hearing about it.
They very much favour proactive reports, and heavily emphasised that they'd rather have a ticket and resolve it as nothing, than not be ticketed at all because you're not sure. Unusual behaviour on a twitter account are most definitely things they'd expect to have reported to them for evaluation, or expect to report themselves if they saw it.
This however, makes it possible to make security reports for political effect - after all, if your guidelines are to report anything suspicious, nobody can fault you for doing just that.
Is it also standard policy at Amazon to leak security reports to the media, or discuss them with journalists after the fact? We both know that's not the case.
Actually rereading it again I would say the source is the person that opened the ticket and not a member of the security team.
If they were taking the matter completely seriously, I would not expect them to consider publicizing it, or discussing the ticket publicly after the fact.
Reminds me of this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/business/media/the-interc...
> The Intercept scrambled to publish a story on the report, ignoring the most basic security precautions. The lead reporter on the story sent a copy of the document, which contained a crease showing it had been printed out, to the N.S.A. media affairs office, all but identifying Ms. Winner as the leaker.
>"The real security incident here is how did the intercept learn of that ticket as that should really be classified."
Looks like someone from the security or PR departments took a picture of the ticket with their cellphone and sent them to the reporter.
Security tickets are immediately encrypted and locked down. Only a few members have access typically: The person who opened the ticket, anyone with a need-to-know, and people on the IR team. Even director-level employees need to be manually added to security-related tickets to have view permissions.
Out of those two groups, Occam's razor implicates the one with a vested interest in currying favor with reporters.
I obviously wouldn't look in internal ticketing systems and THEN post to my findings to a public forum like HN. For obvious reasons.
2.) > "It seems much more likely this is typical left leaning employee activism that is prevalent at tech companies."
If standard security ticket procedures were followed, it would have been locked down to the security team and the impacted team (i.e. PR/social media).
The comment that it 'seems much more likely that this is typical left leaning employee activism' implies that there aren't left-leaning or activists within the security or PR departments. Which if you believe that... lul...
One of the many reasons I’d never want to work there
Google and Facebook on the other hand are directly destroying democracy and spying on you.
I'm also stopping purchases from amazon.com based on this, but I'm not yet ready or able to cut out AWS
Sure, I sympathize with this. But one person's lies are another person's truth in this day and age, unfortunately.
The memos that say "please don't leave pee in the trucks, please don't leave poop, we can figure out who you are".
This is just the same old Amazon - they optimize everything to the point that humans can't keep pace with their metrics without cutting corners.
Contractors can choose to pee where they want. But employees can sue so easily over this sort of thing. It's a specific OSHA violation.
This story depends on confusing the issue about who is and isn't a contractor, doing this to themselves.
The contractor should be let go. As the response notes, they represent the company and represent it badly.
It’s a giant hassle to do otherwise and peeing in a bottle ain’t that bad.
That's the problem when you make corporate statements that are both controversial and on shaky factual ground. The shakier the factual ground the more people might decide you are not telling the truth (as they see it) and stop doing business with you.
Again, I have _zero_ problem with a company being snarky with politicians. Criticizing our electeds is the core of the first amendment and I fully support citizens right to disagree with political figures—even political figures I mostly agree with. For example, this particular tweet from @amazonnews I quite agree with: https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1375529101931520007.
> This is extraordinary and revealing. One of the most powerful politicians in the United States just said she’s going to break up an American company so that they can’t criticize her anymore.
I have no problem with companies being "powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets". I actually have a problem with the inverse: there should be no company that is not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets.
I agree with them - this is not a good look for Amazon. I have already essentially stopped purchasing on Amazon prior to this for various reasons (endless counterfeits and worker abuses) but will likely look to disband my relationship with AWS as well if they continue.
Imagine a Walmart that was several degrees hotter or colder than you’d like your house to be, with less bathrooms and a concrete floor. Now imagine running around it all day bending over to grab things off the bottom shelf and being timed by a buzzing iPad if you’re too slow. And say you’re you’re 65 and Social Security pays half your rent.
Now imagine that you’re the part of Amazon’s supply chain that the local jurisdiction that demands you’re treated better than the other 97% of Amazon’s chosen supply chain.
Refreshing is one word for a company being honest about the fact that they are lobbying hard to make your hypothetical life 0.001% more efficient.
For the record: Amazon, you, me, or anyone else is absolutely entitled to send Elizabeth Warren snotty tweets. Or send her snotty emails. Or make snotty phone calls to her office.
She is a public servant, not a noble or a pope or whatever.
If she can't handle people being rude to her, she needs to find another line of work. The "RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH!!!" attitude is not a good look, either.
Bite me, Senator Warren. I'll "heckle" your entitled ass any time I damned well see fit to do so.
Peeing in bottles sounds good as a click bait title but it's easy to not see the forest from the trees if you just focus on one example.
I wouldn’t roll over for a politician using tweets to garner favor.
AOC cost NY tons of money and jobs because no one pushed back on her rhetoric.
This is absolutely false. Fox news is practically obsessed with her[0]. I heard various talking heads on all types of media talking about how she didn't know anything about 'business', most mocking her past job as a bartender.
I'm not a huge fan of any politician but you probably picked the worst example, she can't post a tweet without the right wing media machine raising hell. During the last election she was also primaried hard, and some of the biggest criticisms were here anti-business/amazon stances.
[0]https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2019/04/14/study-fox-...
I understand the aversion to granting tax breaks to big companies, but IMO the whole debacle just looks like NYC politicians are more interested in maintaining their political bona fides, more interested in vague notions about Amazon's 'fair share' than they are in the long term well being of the local economy.
> The new tech and corporate jobs add to Amazon's announcement in December that it would hire 1,500 more New York workers
Let’s see how many workers they’ve added in NYC a few years from now. I bet it ends up close to that 25k number anyway.
https://twitter.com/amazon_policy/status/1374739879570116610
My wife got a photo and then immediately after they delivered packages and left I went and took a photo because I couldn’t believe it.
I had not heard about the controversy until then, but my wife had been following it. I read these tweets and I also didn’t believe they were real, they were far too aggressive.
It was strange because I felt like I needed to know if it was in fact pee or not, but I also was not willing to bend over and smell it. It had all of the appearances of pee, yet the disposal was so obviously careless and conspicuous it was as though the person wanted to be caught.
The up close photo I took shows two foamy sections.
We discussed ethical issues of the potential for the worker being fired over this. And whether it ever okay to pour a bottle of pee out in front of some homes on a bike way. We also consulted a USPS mail carrier friend about what he has dealt with and USPS’ procedure for bio breaks.
Gathering all that, I still chose to email the photos and ask Amazon how they intended to handle this.
Waiting on a reply.
Edit: This was a tough call, I added some additional details below.
If the driver had knocked on our door and asked to use our bathroom, I'd have absolutely invited him in. This happened with a Fedex driver once before. That person ended up leaving pee on the seat, which was pretty gross.
Human feces, on the other hand, is quite dangerous. Generally you have to touch it or ingest it to get sick from it, but there are lots of ways for the bacteria to spread.
So the urine isn't dangerous, but if people are urinating in public, there's a risk that they're also defecating in public. And that's more serious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urine
I don't have a lab, so I can't determine if it was pee. And I can't imagine you'd get to hold on to a job at Target if you poured pee out in the parking lot in front of customers.
Our friend with the USPS said "[at USPS] we’re allowed to travel as far as we need to find a restroom so no need to do it."
If this is the case at Amazon, then there shouldn't be a need to pee in bottles.
However, if this is not the case at Amazon, then what was apparently Bezos' tweet [1] was not reflective of the situation on the ground. I've written him directly before, and depending on the response, I may do it in this instance because he's not seeing what I'm seeing.
[1] https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1374911222361956359
> I can't imagine you'd get to hold on to a job at Target if you poured pee out in the parking lot in front of customers.
No, nor should anyone want you to. Even beyond any hygiene and smell issues, it's bad PR and that's not what you're paid for.
There's a rash of blaming companies for being reasonable. Including one of a CVS manager being threatened with doxxing for calling the police on a thief. This concern for the driver seems more like a larger narrative of pro-unionism.
Most people in this thread are intentionally misrepresenting the issue, using the words 'job', and 'living wage'. These are contractors and if they don't make money today they can courier for another company tomorrow. If they don't it's because they voted with their wallets.
Given those two options, it's no surprise they pick option 2. Amazon knows this yet they continue to set unrealistic targets.
As for the denial - I am unclear on if they're talking about employees as a separate group from their drivers (who may be contractors according to other comments here?). Either way, I think it's reasonable for a company to make such a statement if peeing in a bottle is not a standard practice that is allowed by their policy and if it is only done rarely or by very few people (not reflective of general practice). If the delivery targets are such that most drivers have to do this, I might think differently, but so far I haven't seen evidence of this.
It seems equally as likely that it is an issue of over-expecting what a worker can reasonably perform. Why is under performance the more likely scenario in your mind?
>it isn't clear to me that this is either widespread
If this were the only occurrence of "Amazon Contractor" and some combination of "pee", "bottle", "no time for bathroom breaks", etc. I would be more inclined to take the route of "a few bad workers". However, these stories have consistently made news since at least 2018.
Additional factors, which not conclusive themselves, that lead me to doubt the Amazon narrative include such things like 74% of respondents to a survey conducted by Organise reporting that they avoid using the washroom for fear of missing targets[1] - indicating that perhaps at least some fault lies with Amazon for setting unrealistic and unnecessarily burdensome targets.
[1]https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a3af3e22aeba594ad56d...
If other employees can meet the quota but you can't, why would you assume that the quota is wrong? Maybe it's the wrong job for you.
> I would be more inclined to take the route of "a few bad workers". However, these stories have consistently made news since at least 2018
Perhaps it has something to do with the attempts to unionize?
> like 74% of respondents to a survey conducted by Organise reporting that they avoid using the washroom for fear
Is there a cost for saying that? If this didn't rise to the level of fear, but only apprehension, would they be censured for overreaching rhetoric? If not, how trustworthy is it? And it still leaves 25% comfortably hitting quota showing that the quota itself is fine.
Spoken like someone who has lived a full and blessed life.
Unionists are lying, conflating contractors and employees, and everyone here is buying it - probably because it fits an existing narrative. I'm being told, by privileged SF types, that I need to educate myself, when they've apparently never worked a day as a contractor, or perhaps never even worked a real job (ie, uncomfortable) in their life.
The pee bottle is being used as an excuse to unionize, even though it's something contractors choose to do in all driving jobs.
Also, when I say "drive for another company tomorrow", that's the ground reality. If you show up sober and well-dressed at any courier company you'll have a magnetic sign on your car and a load of packages right away. (And couriering is generally to offices with a ton of washrooms so you can weigh that in the calculation.)
No, that's what some rich guy would say. Oh, I wouldn't do "some mildly distasteful thing" for money, I guess I have high standards, haha. No, you wouldn't last that long. I doubt you'd make it through the first early morning. If you did you'd learn that pissing in a bottle isn't a problem at all compared to hours out of your life.
The adults you're talking about, denigrating because they aren't as discerning as you, are making this decision for themselves. They'd rather make wee-wee uncomfortably and see their family again sooner. For them that $4, or $15, matters more than it does for you.
> People also downvote what they find stupid
Also, stupid people vote. So ... proposition undecided.
> boss.
Somehow I don't think you've ever non-ironically called anyone that.
Your faith in Amazon to do right is impressive - perhaps even naive. Amazon official policy is not for drivers to pee in bottles, however, it strongly incentivizes this behavior. Had the driver asked to use your bathroom, he likely would have lost precious time and have been indirectly penalized for it.
Considering all this, you took a photo that embarrasses Amazon and sent it to Amazon and asked them to "do something"? Amazon's will already assume you sent it to the press and will circle the wagons - the answer will be it was a rogue employee and he has been let go (or disciplined, if he's lucky).
Rogue contractor.
Hooray dystopias.
Basically, sit down, shut up and take it - we've got the power and if you try and object we'll can you and replace you faster than you can blink. And we might even find a way to make sure you can't qualify for unemployment.
What's the alternative? No matter how reasonable the expectations are, there will always be drivers who would rather pee in a bottle and end their shift 10 minutes early than spend 10 minutes finding a bathroom.
There are a lot of solutions to this problem. The same type of solutions any company that employees drivers have had for years.
Nonsense. I know people who would rather pee in a bottle than wait for the next gas station on the I5. I personally have pissed on the sides of roads in lots of places on long car trips.
Dumping urine in an urban environment is pretty rude. But if I could save myself 10 mins a day by pissing in a bottle rather than some creepy gas station bathroom, why not? It's just piss.
> Plus it's absolutely disgusting.
This is what it really comes down to - your victorian sensibilities about bodily fluids can't possibly imagine that anyone would gasp OMG pee in a bottle! unless the alternative is starvation or whippings.
There are plenty of people who don't feel this way. Hell, I'm sitting outside with a flush toilet less than 100 ft from me and I just pissed on a tree instead. It's just piss.
I'm not saying Amazon's practices don't incentivize this or that they shouldn't be examined, but as is common these days many people take a paternalistic and dogmatic view that will not accept under any circumstance that some people may be doing this freely.
It strikes me as cruel to report and make trouble for a man who is already so overworked as to need to pee in a bottle.
Well, that basically describes the gig economy across the board, I guess.
Umm, yeah. They dumped a bottle of piss outside a customers house.
That's bad advertising. Or, possibly, it's intended to be good union advertising.
But either way, that person has got to go.
So many dishonest people downvoting. Probably unionists. We know that this case hangs on the difference between contractors and employees, and that even if employees unionize the contractors will choose to keep peeing in bottles.
People generally courier as an in-between job, like construction laborer, and they appreciate the ability to earn more, quickly. As a laborer I used to put in 14h days with cleanup. But that kept me from losing income during a career switch so it was a choice I was happy to make.
And no, causation seems to run the other way, apparently being a unionist makes you dishonest.
Nobody runs through a thread downvoting all your posts because they think you're wrong, they do it because they're mad which means they know you're right.
That said, given that the firestorm has become very public, I would expect disgruntled (or any driver, they are wage slaves) drivers to be acting more conspicuous to draw more attention to the problem, which may temporarily inflate its visibility, but hopefully it also leads to change.
I'd talk about it (spread the word like here), but avoid being specific enough to affect the worker unless it looks like they were endangering someone - but that's just me.
Your and your 1000 friends' pint/500mL of urine isn't going to do anything meaningful to the lake.
[0] https://www.outdoors.org/articles/amc-outdoors/leave-no-trac...
I agree that in the Northeast, the preference is to do it away from water sources.
I gather urinating in lakes is okay even by the strictest standards.
A tin can / bottle works in more situations. You just pour it out over the side after then rinse it in the lake.
-- W.C. Fields
I don't want to disparage the people doing those jobs, but the rideshare companies have pretty clearly added quite a lot of oversupply relative to what the infrastructure can handle; cab companies have facilities and cab stands etc where drivers can relieve themselves, where rideshare drivers are left on their own to leave their fluids in litter in the street.
Also, that isn't to say that cab companies are a great example here - that industry was ripe for a good shaking up and had a lot of really weird entrenched components, but, at the end of the day, neither side is good - we only get labour rights with laws and enforcement that actually has teeth.
The driver should have emptied the bottle into a toilet on his next break (or after his shift). Or, failing that, dump it in the woods out of the way.
If you'll notice, we're now heading down the path of playing out ever-more-elaborate strategies for individual delivery drivers to maintain homeostasis without offending the delicate sensibilities of the people they serve, instead of questioning why this is a problem in the first place.
Workers need bathrooms, and employers have to pay for them.
A simple question, do you always offer water and a restroom to blue collar workers who enter your home? If so, you are in the 1%.
I mean, if that were even a remote possibility he wouldn't have filled a bottle, would he now?
I could probably snap a few photos and call the employer based on their backpacks too.
That all assumes this person's report isn't just blackholed by front-line communication folks at Amazon, which they could always ascribe to another "out of SOP action" or just wait a news cycle or two for people to forget if a stink was raised.
Really, really not cool and really out of touch.
Wow. This seems loaded, unmeasurable, and very unrelated to anyones job.
All this could just be communicated through pretty innocuous sounding employee guidelines (maybe, "there can be no open bottles of liquid of any kind when a vehicle is in motion") or just word of mouth. A manager mentions to a senior driver that there will be some bonuses if nobody gets caught with a bottle of pee and that causes the initiative to disseminate through all the drivers.
There may be far fewer choices here than it appears and the best choice is probably to get OSHA involved and maybe get some new worker safety and rights legislation through congress.
As well as conspicuously dumping piss outside customer houses he probably speeds through school zones.
Contractors don't get a wage, that's key to this whole discussion. And if contractors don't make a profit they shouldn't take the contract. This kerfuffle is in the middle of big cities, not some tiny company town in the outback. They have all the same options anyone else does, it's not like they're forced to drive for Amazon.
What if a livable wage is only possible if you quote more packages than is reasonable due to the intense pressure amazon has on the contract delivery market?
But I get your point - the issue, I think, is that under-performance in a job role should be a rarity. You should be hiring people that are likely going to comfortably exceed your minimum expectations and compensate them appropriately. If someone isn't a fit for a position it's most optimal for the company to never hire them (to avoid the cost of training and any capital costs associated with the new employee) but, barring that, it's optimal for both parties to break off the arrangement ASAP since the employer isn't getting the value they expect for their cost and the employee is going to be getting a whole lot of stress.
If it's the case where a significant portion of drivers are marked as underperforming then you're either 1) being dishonest about the job expectations in an effort to penalize decently efficient employees wrongfully or 2) presenting the position in a misleading or confused manner and not properly screening employees - either way it's on the employer, not the employee, if the issue is widespread.
It really seems like the issue with strict performance requirements in warehouses and with drivers is pretty widespread so I'd first look to attribute this to amazon rather than the folks they are hiring and, with assistance from inference along with lots of personal biases, I'm pretty certain Amazon is using artificially inflated performance targets as a way to minimize paid compensation while cycling through the glut of available labour knowing that, in a lot of states, being accepted to a position after submitting an offer and refusing it will result in a discontinuation of unemployment and a constant stream of applications is required to maintain unemployment checks.
A business can essentially hold you hostage with the US unemployment system by under-selling the actual job expectations and then using the threat of being fired with cause for performance reasons to complicate your chances of getting back on insurance.
Thankfully we're talking about contractors and none of that is the case.
> I think the percentages need work since if 20% of the tens of thousands of drivers you employ/contract do a thing then clearly your hiring policies are pretty terrible.
Not employees, they weren't hired. And the contractors aren't promised anything, they're given a chance to prove themselves.
There are cases where the contractor style of employment is valid and advantageous for the worker. But when it comes to the gig economy contractors are CINO (contractors in name only) - they're employees that companies like treating differently to get out of paying insurance for and that's it.
But contractor vs employee is a useful distinction for everyone and trying to fix all the other issues by neutering what contractor means goes the wrong way.
Contractors, INO or otherwise, have freedom to pick their shift and their employer on almost a daily basis, if not more frequently. Drivers have Uber and Lyft apps open, etc. Amazon drivers can give Bezos the finger and drive for a courier firm with no notice and no black-mark on their employment history.
> in every meaningful manner these drivers are employees - they aren't independent courier services that happen to work part-time for Amazon, they're drivers that only run Amazon deliveries but are forced to operate as an independent company for Amazon's benefit
There's no force involved. Even economic. The drivers drive for them despite having the same job options that non-drivers do, and they choose this.
Yea - I think this is the core portion of what makes this more difficult to stomach during a pandemic - the other options are few and far between and the job market is highly distorted right now.
Most folks on HN still have cushy jobs (I work in a healthcare adjacent market so our market segment is actually doing quite fine) but a lot of folks that were either jobless going into covid or were laid off/furloughed due to it are in a hard place. Unemployment laws are such that folks can be forced to take contract gigs if they're available or else fail to qualify for unemployment and that can put folks in a really awkward position financially.
There is some serious exploitation here due to the lack of options. Something like UBI and national healthcare like we've got up here in Canada would seriously improve lives for folks that find themselves unable to cover expenses without working themselves to the bone and I think that everyone should have a right to a pleasant life. It's quite a tough situation.
Suitable work definitions can never require you to lose money by working. And that's without the peeing-in-a-bottle type tricks to be more profitable. You're also allowed to include all of your costs (gas, depreciation, etc) in the calculation. If you had a Hummer you'd be paying more for gas than if you had a smart car so the value of the contract changes.
> UBI and national healthcare like we've got up here in Canada would seriously improve lives for folks that find themselves unable to cover expenses without working themselves to the bone
National healthcare is helpful because it covers 'acts of god'. UBI seems like it would be harmful to the economy by inflating itself into irrelevance while destroying wages.
> I think that everyone should have a right to a pleasant life
I think that everyone has the right to pursue that, and must not have unreasonable obstacles placed in their way.
But saying that someone deserves a thing implies that someone else is required to provide it. Your rights can't place a burden on me so that can't be a right.
That's correct - maybe it's more accurate to say that I don't believe anyone else has the right to deprive others of a pleasant life. It goes with my general philosophy to strive to ensure that people I interact with in life find that interaction either neutral or pleasant and don't suffer from my existence.
Similarly, why do humans sometimes need to pay for urinating (I'm looking at you German SaniUnfair), but animals don't?
They don't have time to use a proper restroom. That's why they're peeing in bottles.
What with all the sorts of people in the world, how many folks would've invited them in vs. thinking the driver was weird and potentially reporting the action?
Asking to use your restroom (during pandemic times) seems pretty likely to trigger a customer complaint possibly even one as pleasant as "They were courteous and didn't leave a mess, but why are they being forced to use residential bathrooms, don't they have time off to pee?" - that's a complaint that doesn't reflect poorly on the driver at all but may still end up getting the driver fired if it causes a PR stink.
Without stronger labour laws and without a union drivers are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Especially with covid, where are you supposed to pee if you're spending all day driving around doing deliveries or as a taxi driver?
Dude...
Not sure where you live but where I'm from, letting a stranger into your home is the same as giving them permission to rob you
> But company personnel think Amazon’s aggressive actions on Twitter are “embarrassing.”
It's amazing how tone-deaf Bezos sounds.
I did find Amazon's responses to be tone deaf at best (mostly just disagreeing with them) but her reply to be much worse.
The fact that small companies do not, out of fear of retribution by politicians is the actual problem and speaks volumes.
I don’t know why I’m surprised; HN has shown me more and more that otherwise intelligent people are more than happy to support corporate friendly narratives and anti-progressive ones.
It seems obvious that amazon would want this to be the focus, instead of bottles of pee. They could be a great ally to democrat politicians pursuing changes - amazon shows they can be a trillion dollar biz with change X, amazon isn't chastised in WashingtonDC. Win-Win.
https://twitter.com/davehclark/status/1375045409542823939?s=...
https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1375509172549132289?s=...
I could see, along with everything else, that being enough to at least make the question worth raising.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20532639/amazon-t...
Seems like a lot of detail (e.g. going back through the past 2 months of tweets to check the source label) for just a "hey this sucks!" protest. Also, seems risky to send a screenshot of your own ticket while logged into the ticket system, though maybe all the login template info is just outside of the cropped screenshot?
FWIW, this is how much detail i'd put in for the plausible deniability "this sucks" protest if that were me.
Unless you think this person actually believed nobody noticed these articles or the tweets? They were trending on Twitter long before this was posted, and I knew about them. Of course Amazon PR did.
My understanding was that someone had made the accusation that this was happening in fulfillment centers, which are employees, and Amazon was officially denying it.
Amazon DSP drivers are hired and managed completely by third party companies.
https://logistics.amazon.com/marketing/faq
Because Amazon is a brand upper middle class white collar types interact with. Swift and Schneider are not. Everyone thought they were at least a couple intermediaries removed from the trucker jugs.
Just wait until they discover what construction site porta-johns are like.
Amazon does not pay for the externalities of more dangerous driving in your neighbourhood, other than their subcontractors might increase their prices if their insurance starts getting more expensive. They do not pay [edit: you] for the time and effort when they have to redeliver a broken package.
You change the compensation by setting goals that are actually reachable, and then having the workers iterate together with the employer to find and fix inefficiencies. The antagonism of unreachable goals is bound to lead to public relations issues. This of course assume that you see this article or articles like it as a public relations issue, so if that view is negligible then Amazon will see no harm.
Amazon's response to dangerous driving: [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/amazon-plans-ai-powe... [2] https://vimeo.com/504570835/e80ee265bc
If a manager, or set of metrics, prevented bathroom breaks, that's a major contract violation and would be arbitrated successfully by a competent union steward.
I try to follow Hanlon's Razor, so I'll go with the best case and just assume these people are unempathtic contrarians, instead of corporate shills.
Because when you say "<insert-bad-company-of-the-day> does <insert-bad-thing-of-the-day>" which is obviously to me not unique to that company then your message sounds like meant to provoke a certain feeling against a certain company, my "manipulation" alarms start ringing and, as a protection mechanism, I stop believing everything you say. By making at least an effort to make such reporting balanced, fair and accurate you have much higher chance to get me to care.
YMMV, maybe it works for other people tho.
Someone said "it's what the middle class interacts with" but it's also about Amazon's aggressive blocking of reform or real worker rights.
What is your opinion based on? A hunch? Random number generator? Your star sign? Maybe your horoscope?
> Why is Amazon being singled out here?
That's a strawman, nobody is singling out this company. Everyone is talking about Amazon because they publicly denied this ever happens from an official account.
> How would you even change the compensation or penalty structure to account for this?
Oh I don't know, maybe... and I realize this idea is so far out there so please bear with me for a second, maybe institute mandatory 15 minute breaks every 2-3 hours into the delivery schedule? Crazy, I know.
This sentence says nothing. How do you know this is something that people choose to do?
https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/47231
Oh, and here is a literal company that sells a product meant to alleviate the need to urinate in bottles. They speak about such bottle urination near the bottom of the page:
https://www.roadreliefsystem.com/
"Amazon forces warehouse workers to pee in bottles" was a thing two years ago. I haven't heard of this being a common thing outside anecdotal accounts, and looking at the amazon employees subreddits it sounded like it was overblown. Amazon responded forcefully to that claim in their tweet, and was subsequently hit with a 'gotcha!' when the drivers were reported to be doing it.
From what I've read, Amazon's warehouses aren't a fun place to work, but not overall different from any other warehouse job. Along the same lines, their delivery jobs aren't remarkably different from other delivery jobs and the drivers peeing in bottles is a thing that happens across the board in the industry.
So you can have things like technical committees that analyse the basic facts of inflation adjustments of wages, wage changes in competing industries or economies and real wage increases. As well the unions in export-driven sectors negotiating first, and government and services employees falling in line, in order to continue to compete in the global economy.
I believe this trust also builds productivity, but looks like Jeff Bezos has a different opinion.
Its a million times better than the usual corporate nothing platitudes.