Amazon has massive weekly turnover numbers so the real number of employees over that full year is likely well in excess of 5,000, putting it at least at 1.something per.
Then consider it’s almost certain a small number of employees rack up most of the notices, and I can see this happening.
I don't know how anyone could not see this as a pretty clear sign of a toxic workplace. There must be a reason they named it that way and you can deduce a lot from that. Nothing that speaks well for the company.
That would still be far better than passive-aggressively suggesting that complaints are to be uttered in a supportive way.
I you are that dishonest in making a sign, you probably don't have a good and open culture to talk about errors or improvements and "supportive feedback" just screams that fact in you face. Could as put up a warning sign: "Please mind the vanity and ego of your superiors when handing in any complains".
> Amazon told the judge in Bryson’s case that it could not meet NLRB demands in a subpoena to provide the thousands of disciplinary notices it delivered to employees that year, calling the requirement “unduly burdensome.”
For a company notorious for making sure that employees dot Is and cross the Ts I find it ironic they can't produce the same disciplinary records for the NLRB as they can for their former employees.
Unsurprising. I've been told by a relative that worked in an Amazon warehouse that the camera systems overhead (not dissimilar to the type you see in Amazon Go / Amazon Fresh retail stores) are used to issue disciplinary warnings, and it's pretty easy to get issued a warning for completely normal exception-handling behavior.
For instance, the shelved/dry goods sections of Fresh warehouses are notorious for being a trainwreck, with items sort of strewn in the general area of where the inventory/pick list says they should be, rather than being neatly arranged. If an employee on picker duty stands around browsing a shelf too long to find the item they're supposed to grab (but can't find it, because it's been shuffled several feet down the shelf)...the cameras monitoring generates an automated warning that goes to your management. Mark the item as out of stock / missing from inventory instead? Get a warning when someone else finds it and scans it later that day, or when inventory is next reconciled. It's a no-win situation.
> For instance, the shelved/dry goods sections of Fresh warehouses are notorious for being a trainwreck, with items sort of strewn in the general area of where the inventory/pick list says they should be, rather than being neatly arranged. If an employee on picker duty stands around browsing a shelf too long to find the item they're supposed to grab (but can't find it, because it's been shuffled several feet down the shelf)...the cameras monitoring generates an automated warning that goes to your management. Mark the item as out of stock / missing from inventory instead? Get a warning when someone else finds it and scans it later that day, or when inventory is next reconciled. It's a no-win situation.
I would like to see any evidence you have to support any of those issues, because having visited an Amazon fulfilment center myself, I can guarantee you that the problems with picking items you mention literally cannot happen.
It's pretty easy to imagine both of these things being true, and the one fulfillment center you visited having substantially less than 13k disciplinary notices. I worked 7 years in industrial staffing for a variety of large distribution centers (not Amazon), and the automated discipline systems in place around voice-pick efficiency were borderline draconian.
The real question is, are there any examples of companies achieving what Amazon is achieving at its scale, *without* employing these techniques? And if so what are they doing differently?
I think the closest you’ll get is Costco, but obviously their distribution model isn’t super comparable. (They do have some similarities though, especially in how they make a lot of their profit from a yearly subscription)
That’s not the the real question. The real question is “what is the maximum amount of productivity that our culture will accept beyond which it considers the burden inhumane?”
For example, in antiquity, slavery was acceptable.
Even more recently, Taylorism. I mean, yeah, it's good for robots but not for people.
When people design systems they should consider the humanity of such systems despite the issue of people knowingly and maliciously short-circuiting things.
I never said that the punishments are not possible, just that the processes in place and just the basic way Amazon FCs work prevents the picking issues from happening.
I've never worked for Amazon but have worked in a couple of warehouses, I'm trying to envision any system that involves a lot of humans working as quickly as possible while still making it impossible to have out of place items...I'd love some more detail on how this works.
There are TONS of videos and photos leaked by workers that demonstrate how much of a disaster some of the Fresh warehouses are, e.g. a particularly egregious example where there are dozens if not hundreds of products fallen from bins, smashed to bits in the aisle by picker foot traffic: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonUFF/comments/skmtto/so_disgus...
Both of your experiences are purely anecdotal but I would explain away the difference in your opinions as the difference being "someone I know who worked there" versus "I visited (a potentially curated) fulfillment center once".
To be more clear I visited an Amazon FC during the first week when I joined Amazon in one of their operations teams, in which I have then spent 4 years.
There are processes in place and physical things that are completely different from what the original commenter says and those things prevent the issues (having items on another shelf multiple feet below where they should be) from being possible.
Another ex Amazon guy here. I visited the Dunfermline FC, did picker training, and shadowed a picker for an hour. I also followed company email lists and FB groups for years. It became extremely obvious to me that what I saw in my curated experience was nothing like what I was hearing from the other FCs.
So, even though from my experience I can't see how items could be 'shuffled' out of their bin by mistake (other than falling on the floor and being chucked in an amnesty bin or onto a random shelf, but that seems like a rare case) I also wouldn't find it super surprising to find an FC which just uses a completely different way of organising stuff.
That said, I wasn't in ops. Perhaps you had a much better birds eye view of every single FC organisation scheme? More details would be greatly appreciated.
A close family member worked in an FC for 3 years. They agree that what the original commenter said happens ALL the time. Maybe you were only shown a shiny new FC, but the older ones are often much less organized. Depends a lot on local management too.
Fresh warehouses are verrrry different than the robotic one you probably visited. I’m not surprised at all that a fresh building would have those problems.
I can assure you, as someone who has both visited multiple fulfillment centers as well has worked on the inventory systems that manage them, that this literally happens thousands of times per day.
Given that, are the warnings a serious issue? If management keeps getting those and knows the workers are not at fault in this particular warehouse, the only reason to act on the warnings is political. which yes, might well be an issue, but just the number of warnings issued is meaningless without knowing how they're acted upon.
Selective enforcement is one of the principal ways that workers experience discrimination in the workplace. Remember that Amazon doesn’t fire people for unionization, or because they are black or transgendered. They fire them for disciplinary reasons that are completely “normal” and “typical” as under-performers. This kind of system of “feedback” is a weapon and it is absolutely used to that affect in every place where it is implemented to the degree that Amazon does.
Can we please stop be apologists to giant profit-driven organizations and start maybe… just maybe… empathizing with people instead?
Amazon as an organization doesn't care who you are or what demographic groups you belong to so long as the ROI of your continued employment is in the same ballpark as everyone else with your job title.
You remove the metrics and then anyone who has the authority to fire people for poor performance gains the ability to fire people for personal bias reasons while saying it's for performance reasons.
The whole point of the metrics is that it makes it harder to make decisions that are bad for the company (like firing otherwise productive people because you don't like them) under the guise of them being good for the company. Because of the metrics people with the authority to do influence hiring and firing at scale can't fire protected demographics without leaving an incriminating paper trail and getting told by legal to knock it off. Nor those people put their thumb on the scale fire non-protected demographics before some MBA sees what's going on and tells them to knock it off because they're leaving money on the table.
Literally none of the bad stuff you have described is made better by removing performance tracking and much of it is made worse. Go read about what working for BigCo was like for members of race/religious/political groups in the first half of the 20th century if you don't believe me.
Maybe think through your comment before you call everyone corporate apologists.
You probably don't realize this, but (in the USA) it's very illegal (although unevenly enforced) to actively prevent your employees from unionizing. This is because there is a huge incentive to prevent it, because as an employer you can keep wages lower that way. Because of this, to use your own clinical language "the ROI of your continued employment" is very negative if you might help start a union. But it isn't actually legal to act on this information.
So yeah, Amazon is absolutely trying to play the same game many big companies do, which is hamper union formation as much as possible without actually getting in too much trouble. Having all employees officially have bad performance warnings (which can then be acted upon if you see them unionizing) is one great tool in the toolbox of the union suppressor.
Even if Amazon gets in trouble for union busting, it may be the case that the consequences of getting caught are outweighed by the costs associated with rising wages/benefits/conditions for labor under a union.
>You probably don't realize this, but (in the USA) it's very illegal to actively prevent your employees from unionizing.
You need to do some thinking about what the phrase "ROI of your continued employment" actually means in practice.
Fines and fees are basically the same thing when they're being levied against huge sociopaths entities like BigCo. Naive "but that's illegal" appeals to emotion do not matter to these sorts of entities because responsibility is so diffuse and compartmentalized that they can't do anything but ruthlessly pursue the sum total of everyone's KPIs.
>Having all employees officially have bad performance warnings is one great tool in the toolbox...
And how is this any different than if you didn't have the metrics in the first place? If everyone has bad performance nobody does. My point isn't that Amazon isn't doing shady shit. Of course they are. All big organizations are. My point is that metric tracking is at worst a net neutral with potential to be positive. My secondary point is that both the person I initially replied to and yourself have failed to think critically about the situation. A metric that says everyone is under-performing isn't a pretext to dodge accusations of an illegal or otherwise not good pattern of firing anymore than not having the metric at all is.
I think you are committing the common engineer's fallacy of examining a situation with Vulcan like logic, reaching a conclusion, and then applying it to a social process.
> A metric that says everyone is under-performing isn't a pretext to dodge accusations of an illegal or otherwise not good pattern of firing anymore than not having the metric at all is.
Just because you (and indeed I) think that way doesn't mean the actual social and institutional actors involved will. In any given hearing for a given matter impacting a single employee the data about all the other employees won't even be available to reach the conclusion you discussed. It would take a much bigger more well funded legal action to push the argument you are making. In fact, how do you even know that US law even allows the argument you are making? It very well may or may not.
It's not a perfect tool, but as I said, it's another tool in the toolbox to muddy the waters and make it more expensive and complex to challenge a dismissal.
I think the way you mentally model socioeconomic and legal processes in the human world is not very true to life. Pure logic is not any sort of big magical trump card. Humans are not rational actors.
Having done consulting work for a company that does performance management software the thing I found funny was pro-union workers the model kept flagging as lower productivity compared to neutral or for non-union.
When I tried to look into it the model was scoring them lower because of "activities spent not increasing bottom line".
Is your corporate apology coming from personal experience in Amazon or another "BigCo" where you can cite actual instances where a massive corpus of petty infractions has protected line workers from the malicious "people with the authority"?
Otherwise the parent commenter's conjecture as to how this surveillance system functions in reality is about as good and useful and thoughtful as your own. Maybe worth keeping in mind.
That is the whole point of the parent comment: if everyone gets a plethora of warnings for normal occurrences (poorly implemented performamce metrics), then anyone can be fired for non-discriminatory reasons (backed by data!!) when the real reason for firing is something else (unionizing, protected class, workplace politics, etc.).
Selective enforcment allows for non-provable discrimination.
If everyone is under-performing nobody is. Having a metric that basically everyone fails to meet is no more useful for dodging accusations of illegally discriminatory firing than not having the metric at all is.
Seems like everyone in this comment sub-thread is assuming that the legal professionals who go after this kind of thing are idiots and wouldn't see right through that.
I empathize with people working the tough jobs! That doesn't necessarily mean I think the jobs must be made less tough, even if I'd prefer they had better options to choose from.
A claim that the produced warnings are selectively used to fire black or unionizing workers would be much more interesting, but I don't see enough evidence to make it yet. It also doesn't really connect to the big headline of 13000 notices at one facility - if that was the purpose of the system, you'd hardly need so many.
>A claim that the produced warnings are selectively used to fire black or unionizing workers would be much more interesting, but I don't see enough evidence to make it yet
That's because they've designed the system from the ground up to make collecting such evidence nearly impossible. Unless they're going to open up their books to you, how would you see such evidence?
>Selective enforcement is one of the principal ways that workers experience discrimination in the workplace.
Amazon is creating an extremely detailed paper trail of their enforcement actions. It'd be trivial to show that, as an example, on average black workers got fired for 3 errors while white ones were fired for 5.
The warnings seem mostly fair too. Counting 19 items when there we 20 in a bin during inventory as an example. I can see why some look at this as dystopian but this sort of objective measurement is pretty darn appealing. If we had a programming equivalent I think it'd make my life better by weeding out the bullshitters and those that fake productivity by creating complicated solutions.
Yeah what could go wrong when technocrats try to completely remove subjectivity from the world and optimize everyone's life and work towards some completely arbitrary measure so that my shitty things can get delivered 0.002 seconds faster.
I'm not sure if you've ever had a job where you worked to specific metrics exclusively, but it make's everyone's life worse and it makes the product/service worse.
pretty sure we've all been in school, and while it's not a great experience, you can work with it
i'm pretty sure amazon's optimizing the work more so that my shitty thing gets delivered at all, rather than 0.002 seconds faster. which is very valueable to me, as it happens
Initially, Amazon benefitted from lower cost of capital. Because of tax holiday and persuading Wall St to prefer (long term) growth over (short term) profitability.
Now, AWS prints money, fueling Amazon's entry into new markets.
You prefer getting vaguer metrics to work towards? Sucky and misaimed metrics exist with the qualatative too. Blaming quantitative efforts is misplaced. Subjectivity is not your friend.
> Selective enforcement is one of the principal ways that workers experience discrimination in the workplace.
You point is moot in this case. Staten Island is in New York State, which is an at-will employment state. Employers in such states don't need a reason to fire anyone.
Nooooooope. This is so wrong it’s funny. Being an at will state does not in any way whatsoever grant you the ability to discriminate against people of protected classes. If someone complains to the labor board or files a lawsuit alleging they were fired because they were black or trans you better have some evidence that this wasn’t the case because they might have evidence that it was and civil suits are decided on who has the strongest case not “beyond reasonable doubt.”
Which is why Evil Inc. makes sure to classify everyone as an under-performer in some capacity so that can be used as the justification for furring and you can squash individual suits or complainants because no one wronged person has enough data to prove the pattern. Then waaaaaay down the line someone will do an analysis and figure it out but it will be an administrative complaint leading to some hand wringing, a change to some policy documents, and some new diversity metrics — much cheaper.
>You point is moot in this case. Staten Island is in New York State, which is an at-will employment state. Employers in such states don't need a reason to fire anyone.
I've never read what at-will is and I've never missed it either!
I love how, once you build a dystopian hellscape where robots punish people for breathing, the only critique our society is capable of leveling is, "yeah, but they might use the shock collars more on transgendered people!"
From what I've been told, yes, they're serious. Accumulate enough warnings of a certain type, and you're automatically removed from the scheduled and queued for termination, from what I've been told. Local management isn't empowered to do anything about it, and as a warehouse employee you're basically relegated to making an appeal to an automated system.
yeah, mid management being incompetent and not noticing that the metrics are fucked up for a location i can totally believe. hopefully after some time with outlier retention issues the facility would get some attention from someone competent? ;/
Maybe I'm imagining it, but I vaguely recall reading something about Amazon workers being fired in a fully automated fashion. So there is not necessarily always a human manager reviewing all the automated warnings and pondering their validity.
we just had the news yesterday of the fairly large youtube channel that was automatically permanently closed due to false dmca claims.
it would be fascinating to see if anyone were thoroughly outraged by the automated failures in youtube’s dmca channel closure system yet defend amazon automating the firing of workers.
i’m guessing we’d find more than a few people defending one while being outraged by the other.
at the end of the day we need to consider that maybe we need to put more resources towards human intervention in certain areas where automation seems to be causing harm needlessly to quite a few people where the path to rectify the situation seems anything but clear.
You might say they are using humans as an MVP/POC test for what their robots should be like. Make the humans as robotic as possible to see what features are really needed in the robots they eventually use.
I worked part-time in an Amazon warehouse for over a year, then full-time for a couple of weeks in-between jobs.
Once, when rolling up to a bin full of non-descript boxes, I was able to choose one, flip it in hand for the six-sided box check, and scan it to determine I had the correct box, w/o having to consider any of the other boxes.
A trainer and a group of trainees nearby asked how I had done this --- it took a couple of minutes to break down the description from the scanner and compare it to all of the boxes and explain how the box I had selected was the only possibility based simply on a visual examination.
Given how many singles Amazon ships, I'm really surprised that they haven't gone to a standard of just packaging on receipt of product, then shipping the boxes by pulling them and slapping a shipping label on --- it would be far more automatable.
> Given how many singles Amazon ships, I'm really surprised that they haven't gone to a standard of just packaging on receipt of product, then shipping the boxes by pulling them and slapping a shipping label on --- it would be far more automatable.
Because physical volume matters and directly correlates to all transportation expenses.
Anecdotal but I have a friend who works at a urgent care and he says Amazon workers are the most common pattern he sees. They have to do 1 month of physical therapy at "AmCare" (their own internal urgent care...) and if they don't get better they have to get a doctors note to get put on light work duty...
5-8 people a week coming in, from ONE distribution center.
This seems like a good thing, right? At least better then Amazon requiring these people to keep working. This sounds more like minor inquiries that are being tended to appropriately.
It kinda sounds like they are pushing the limits of what their employees can handle physically. Just seems like it'd be simpler to deal with less turnover and push them a little less. But then again I don't have an MBA.
Working with an injury for a month before going to a real DR does not seem good to me.
Clear conflict of interest having your own urgent care on site IMO.
Also that 5-8 people is probably a minority of people who actually get injured, since most will go to the onsite care or quit before even making it to a month with an injury.
There's probably over a 1000 injuries a year at any given warehouse.
And yet roughly half of Amazon warehouse workers have been successfully propagandized into not supporting unionization. I can sympathize to a degree with those who aren't subjected to such conditions not understanding how this works in practice (to be fair, a lot of Americans simply don't care if others are suffering straight up) but for those subjected to this? Many of them are still temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
The American Dream.
Labor organization is the only effective tool against dehumanizing and exploitative labor practices.
Or they are afraid of retaliation and losing their jobs? Amazon hits them with anti-union propaganda from day one. We’ve seen Walmart close locations that plan to unionize.
This could be easily fixed by introducing a law forcing companies to give out half of company’s shares to the union. The only reason this doesn’t happen is political - peoples votes don’t matter, what matters is company lobbying.
Confiscating ownership of 50% of a company seems like a pretty big line to cross. I don't think it's purely about political imaging. That would have all kinds of ripple effects, both in terms of the direct results of doing it and of the indirect results of setting the precedent.
Questioning pope’s infallibility used to be a pretty big line too, and now we know it was all just bluff; there was never a proper reason not to cross it.
To put it differently: the law must keep up with times. The law we have wasn’t designed for the business models we have today, from Facebook to Uber.
This line of thinking is so out of the ordinary for me. I'm sure you could fix one side of the equation by forcefully taking from the other... but on what ethical grounds?
Ethically the company is not a human, and thus doesn’t have any inherent rights. The only rights it can have are those that were granted to benefit society - or because of corruption/lobbying.
> Isn't it possible that they're adults who carefully considered the pluses and minuses and made their own decisions?
Of course it's possible. It just seems unlikely that they are carefully considering unbiased plusses and minuses, and instead have been fed an astonishing amount of propaganda designed to massively inflate the amount of minuses.
You could argue that pro-union stuff is propaganda as well, but it doesn't come with an underlying threat of "we will try to fire you if you don't support us" that the anti-union stuff does.
> been fed an astonishing amount of propaganda designed to massively inflate the amount of minuses
Can you demonstrate that the pro-union forces are prevented from countering this propaganda, calling it "lies," etc.? In other words, maybe the workers heard the other side and didn't agree. Is that not allowed?
As for the "underlying threat" -- how is it "underlying"? Aren't the union elections by secret ballot? Are you saying they're not really secret, or what?
> Can you demonstrate that the pro-union forces are prevented from countering this propaganda, calling it "lies," etc.?
Easily. Companies do everything in their power to discourage pro unionizing talk from happening. They hire specialized union-busting PR firms whose job it is to spread anti-union rhetoric and prevent pro-union voices from being heard. The mere existence of these PR firms shows how much of an uphill battle any kind of pro union movement has.
> In other words, maybe the workers heard the other side and didn't agree. Is that not allowed?
Of course it's allowed. It's just not likely that it's actually happening this way.
> As for the "underlying threat" -- how is it "underlying"? Aren't the union elections by secret ballot? Are you saying they're not really secret, or what?
The election is only a tiny piece of the process of unionizing. What about people vocally supporting unionizing to their other coworkers? Or putting up pro-union posters on break room bulletin boards, or any other public pro union activity? You know, trying to get their voices heard and convince people to vote their way? In theory those people are protected by laws but it's easy enough for a company to fire them for "performance reasons" or whatever else.
You're coming across incredibly naive to the reality of how cutthroat corporations really are. They don't play fair, especially not when someone threatens their control by talking about unionizing.
When you've had Democratic control of the NLRB for at least 17 years since 1990, and their appointees bend over backwards to make it easy for the unions, there should have been a lot more union victories. I think you need to face up to the fact that most private sector workers nowadays see no value to it.
"You're coming across incredibly naive" - maybe I just don't agree with you. Is that not allowed?
I don't think it's a coincidence that proles are getting juiced liked lemons in a country where everyone is taught to hate anything that even resembles socialism.
> everyone is taught to hate anything that even resembles socialism
And yet polls show that the younger population has a largely positive opinion of socialism, or at least, much more positive than it used to be. So is this "teaching" ineffective, or what?
Amazon is not only complaining about its own workers, but also about their partners in other countries.
They do not (officially) have a Danish site, but sure will deliver anything you buy from their German/UK site.
I work for PostNord, the Danish postal service (possibly the largest parcel service, not sure how well GLS is doing these days), and Amazon has been complaining about our "parcel quality", because some parcels are not delivered within 24 hours. (Even though it might take 3-5 days to even get to us)
Do you want to get a union in your warehouse? Because this is how you get a union in your warehouse.
Companies that avoid unionization (most of them, these days) make at least some attempt to treat the workers as partners and human beings: pay them well and treat them well. Obviously there are other factors in play and sometimes that's just corporate BS, but it helps.
Amazon, from what I can tell from the outside, does not believe in that.
I encounter people in the Midwest who literally believe all of Portland was on fire in 2020, nevermind it was two city blocks being “terrorized” by progressives, while conservatives and cops cruised quiet neighborhoods harassing and gassing people.
The propaganda worked; two block peaceful protest was turned into “progressives creating a war”, and the part about the cops and good old boys is forgotten.
This culture is a joke of cowards who would abuse the lower castes. And it has the nerve to talk down about China or India.
Moral relativism towards you all is on the way; let the planet burn and your effort being wiped away. Who cares.
So when the workers unionize, what's gonna change? Workers will not be notified of their mistakes? They will not be fired if they make too many of those? Miscalculating the items won't longer be a mistake? They will pay the double of minimum salary?
I've never worked in a unionized place, but from what I've heard over the years:
Firing an employee becomes much harder. You have to convince the union first.
Employees can file grievances. If a disciplinary or surveillance system is considered onerous (by them), then they file a grievance, and much bureaucracy ensues.
Pay scales tend to depend on seniority and job classification, not on a supervisor's idea of your merit. This is negotiated in the union contract every few years, as a rule.
Major changes in how the warehouse operates have to be cleared with the union.
Union dues are deducted from paychecks.
The union can go on strike, and other unions generally respect their picket lines.
I'm deliberately not making this seem like Heaven on Earth. That's probably why union elections are contentious.
In case that seemed too even-handed for the employers:
With a really shitty employer like Amazon (at least at some of their warehouses), a union really might provide some protection to the workers. All those stories about workers having to pee in a bottle because they get docked for too many bathroom breaks: gone. The union would take care of it.
Getting fired for too many demerits from the overhead surveillance cameras? Gone.
Of course, when you vote Yes or No for a union, you don't really know if they'll be able to negotiate all that.
Prior to the 1930s, unions provided some on-the-job safety, and some protections against arbitrary management or pay cuts. Over time, those got written into laws or companies just refrained from really shitty practices. Most companies, anyway. Not all.
A process to respond to these notifications and mark obvious bs ones as bs and prevent them from being used as a strike on a person's record. A process to ensure validity of these notifications. A process to ensure AFTER deciding to fire someone management didn't go on a fishing expedition for JUSTIFICATION for the firing. Enforcement of consistency in firing, making sure they aren't just shotgun recording every possible thing so that they can use that later to go fishing for justification for firing someone. The manager used X to justify firing Peter? Enforced consistency in firing based on these notifications.
> it could not meet NLRB demands in a subpoena to provide the thousands of disciplinary notices it delivered to employees that year, calling the requirement “unduly burdensome.”
That must be parody on the part of the legal team... The irony.
I worked at a warehouse picking order, very similar to how Amazon works. I would get "disciplinary notices" on a regular basis when errors were found. It wasn't a big deal, just something they tracked. If you screwed up continuously, you could eventually be fired since fixing the mistake was quite costly in terms of customer service time, picking a new order, delivery costs and return costs.
Whatcha wanna bet that the deal they have with the local gov't promised they'd bring X number of jobs to the area, which is a target they can only meet by hiring some people, firing a bunch of them, and then hiring more, since every new hire counts as a job placement.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadSo over 2 notices per employee. It would be interesting to see the distribution.
Amazon has massive weekly turnover numbers so the real number of employees over that full year is likely well in excess of 5,000, putting it at least at 1.something per.
Then consider it’s almost certain a small number of employees rack up most of the notices, and I can see this happening.
It's like some cross between Kafka and newspeak.
I you are that dishonest in making a sign, you probably don't have a good and open culture to talk about errors or improvements and "supportive feedback" just screams that fact in you face. Could as put up a warning sign: "Please mind the vanity and ego of your superiors when handing in any complains".
For a company notorious for making sure that employees dot Is and cross the Ts I find it ironic they can't produce the same disciplinary records for the NLRB as they can for their former employees.
For instance, the shelved/dry goods sections of Fresh warehouses are notorious for being a trainwreck, with items sort of strewn in the general area of where the inventory/pick list says they should be, rather than being neatly arranged. If an employee on picker duty stands around browsing a shelf too long to find the item they're supposed to grab (but can't find it, because it's been shuffled several feet down the shelf)...the cameras monitoring generates an automated warning that goes to your management. Mark the item as out of stock / missing from inventory instead? Get a warning when someone else finds it and scans it later that day, or when inventory is next reconciled. It's a no-win situation.
I would like to see any evidence you have to support any of those issues, because having visited an Amazon fulfilment center myself, I can guarantee you that the problems with picking items you mention literally cannot happen.
How?
For example, in antiquity, slavery was acceptable.
When people design systems they should consider the humanity of such systems despite the issue of people knowingly and maliciously short-circuiting things.
There are processes in place and physical things that are completely different from what the original commenter says and those things prevent the issues (having items on another shelf multiple feet below where they should be) from being possible.
So, even though from my experience I can't see how items could be 'shuffled' out of their bin by mistake (other than falling on the floor and being chucked in an amnesty bin or onto a random shelf, but that seems like a rare case) I also wouldn't find it super surprising to find an FC which just uses a completely different way of organising stuff.
That said, I wasn't in ops. Perhaps you had a much better birds eye view of every single FC organisation scheme? More details would be greatly appreciated.
Congratulations. The burden of proof is now on you. Please prove your claim.
That's a very bold statement. Guarantee that something can't go wrong? Where do I put my money on this bet?
Can we please stop be apologists to giant profit-driven organizations and start maybe… just maybe… empathizing with people instead?
You remove the metrics and then anyone who has the authority to fire people for poor performance gains the ability to fire people for personal bias reasons while saying it's for performance reasons.
The whole point of the metrics is that it makes it harder to make decisions that are bad for the company (like firing otherwise productive people because you don't like them) under the guise of them being good for the company. Because of the metrics people with the authority to do influence hiring and firing at scale can't fire protected demographics without leaving an incriminating paper trail and getting told by legal to knock it off. Nor those people put their thumb on the scale fire non-protected demographics before some MBA sees what's going on and tells them to knock it off because they're leaving money on the table.
Literally none of the bad stuff you have described is made better by removing performance tracking and much of it is made worse. Go read about what working for BigCo was like for members of race/religious/political groups in the first half of the 20th century if you don't believe me.
Maybe think through your comment before you call everyone corporate apologists.
So yeah, Amazon is absolutely trying to play the same game many big companies do, which is hamper union formation as much as possible without actually getting in too much trouble. Having all employees officially have bad performance warnings (which can then be acted upon if you see them unionizing) is one great tool in the toolbox of the union suppressor.
Who gives a shit about their profit when their workers are being suppressed
You need to do some thinking about what the phrase "ROI of your continued employment" actually means in practice.
Fines and fees are basically the same thing when they're being levied against huge sociopaths entities like BigCo. Naive "but that's illegal" appeals to emotion do not matter to these sorts of entities because responsibility is so diffuse and compartmentalized that they can't do anything but ruthlessly pursue the sum total of everyone's KPIs.
>Having all employees officially have bad performance warnings is one great tool in the toolbox...
And how is this any different than if you didn't have the metrics in the first place? If everyone has bad performance nobody does. My point isn't that Amazon isn't doing shady shit. Of course they are. All big organizations are. My point is that metric tracking is at worst a net neutral with potential to be positive. My secondary point is that both the person I initially replied to and yourself have failed to think critically about the situation. A metric that says everyone is under-performing isn't a pretext to dodge accusations of an illegal or otherwise not good pattern of firing anymore than not having the metric at all is.
> A metric that says everyone is under-performing isn't a pretext to dodge accusations of an illegal or otherwise not good pattern of firing anymore than not having the metric at all is.
Just because you (and indeed I) think that way doesn't mean the actual social and institutional actors involved will. In any given hearing for a given matter impacting a single employee the data about all the other employees won't even be available to reach the conclusion you discussed. It would take a much bigger more well funded legal action to push the argument you are making. In fact, how do you even know that US law even allows the argument you are making? It very well may or may not.
It's not a perfect tool, but as I said, it's another tool in the toolbox to muddy the waters and make it more expensive and complex to challenge a dismissal.
I think the way you mentally model socioeconomic and legal processes in the human world is not very true to life. Pure logic is not any sort of big magical trump card. Humans are not rational actors.
When I tried to look into it the model was scoring them lower because of "activities spent not increasing bottom line".
Otherwise the parent commenter's conjecture as to how this surveillance system functions in reality is about as good and useful and thoughtful as your own. Maybe worth keeping in mind.
Seems like everyone in this comment sub-thread is assuming that the legal professionals who go after this kind of thing are idiots and wouldn't see right through that.
A claim that the produced warnings are selectively used to fire black or unionizing workers would be much more interesting, but I don't see enough evidence to make it yet. It also doesn't really connect to the big headline of 13000 notices at one facility - if that was the purpose of the system, you'd hardly need so many.
Humans get injuries, psychological damage, and that translates to families and society.
To make jobs insufferable just because Amazon can is horrifying. And society will pay for it even if Amazon is the only one profiting.
Sometimes it's better for people to suck it up and tough it out.
Your statement is the definition of cucked by capitalism
https://justice.tougaloo.edu/sundown-towns/using-the-sundown...
That's because they've designed the system from the ground up to make collecting such evidence nearly impossible. Unless they're going to open up their books to you, how would you see such evidence?
Amazon is creating an extremely detailed paper trail of their enforcement actions. It'd be trivial to show that, as an example, on average black workers got fired for 3 errors while white ones were fired for 5.
The warnings seem mostly fair too. Counting 19 items when there we 20 in a bin during inventory as an example. I can see why some look at this as dystopian but this sort of objective measurement is pretty darn appealing. If we had a programming equivalent I think it'd make my life better by weeding out the bullshitters and those that fake productivity by creating complicated solutions.
I'm not sure if you've ever had a job where you worked to specific metrics exclusively, but it make's everyone's life worse and it makes the product/service worse.
i'm pretty sure amazon's optimizing the work more so that my shitty thing gets delivered at all, rather than 0.002 seconds faster. which is very valueable to me, as it happens
In Europe, Amazon has plenty of competitors found in regional companies (CoolBlue in NL/BE) and they seem to deliver within a day or two just fine.
I never had trouble with Amazon
Now, AWS prints money, fueling Amazon's entry into new markets.
You point is moot in this case. Staten Island is in New York State, which is an at-will employment state. Employers in such states don't need a reason to fire anyone.
Which is why Evil Inc. makes sure to classify everyone as an under-performer in some capacity so that can be used as the justification for furring and you can squash individual suits or complainants because no one wronged person has enough data to prove the pattern. Then waaaaaay down the line someone will do an analysis and figure it out but it will be an administrative complaint leading to some hand wringing, a change to some policy documents, and some new diversity metrics — much cheaper.
I've never read what at-will is and I've never missed it either!
it would be fascinating to see if anyone were thoroughly outraged by the automated failures in youtube’s dmca channel closure system yet defend amazon automating the firing of workers.
i’m guessing we’d find more than a few people defending one while being outraged by the other.
at the end of the day we need to consider that maybe we need to put more resources towards human intervention in certain areas where automation seems to be causing harm needlessly to quite a few people where the path to rectify the situation seems anything but clear.
I worked part-time in an Amazon warehouse for over a year, then full-time for a couple of weeks in-between jobs.
Once, when rolling up to a bin full of non-descript boxes, I was able to choose one, flip it in hand for the six-sided box check, and scan it to determine I had the correct box, w/o having to consider any of the other boxes.
A trainer and a group of trainees nearby asked how I had done this --- it took a couple of minutes to break down the description from the scanner and compare it to all of the boxes and explain how the box I had selected was the only possibility based simply on a visual examination.
Given how many singles Amazon ships, I'm really surprised that they haven't gone to a standard of just packaging on receipt of product, then shipping the boxes by pulling them and slapping a shipping label on --- it would be far more automatable.
Because physical volume matters and directly correlates to all transportation expenses.
5-8 people a week coming in, from ONE distribution center.
Are you implying that the process of getting an MBA strips people of their humanity? IME, this seems to be true.
If your alternative is working to death I guess it is? Or was that a serious question?
Clear conflict of interest having your own urgent care on site IMO.
Also that 5-8 people is probably a minority of people who actually get injured, since most will go to the onsite care or quit before even making it to a month with an injury.
There's probably over a 1000 injuries a year at any given warehouse.
"Inside Tesla’s factory, a medical clinic designed to ignore injured workers"
https://revealnews.org/article/inside-teslas-factory-a-medic...
The American Dream.
Labor organization is the only effective tool against dehumanizing and exploitative labor practices.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores...
To put it differently: the law must keep up with times. The law we have wasn’t designed for the business models we have today, from Facebook to Uber.
Kind of silly to be complaining that the employees don't own enough of the company when they gave that ownership up as a bargaining position.
Isn't it possible that they're adults who carefully considered the pluses and minuses and made their own decisions?
Or are you saying a No vote could only be explained by denying any agency to the workers?
Of course it's possible. It just seems unlikely that they are carefully considering unbiased plusses and minuses, and instead have been fed an astonishing amount of propaganda designed to massively inflate the amount of minuses.
You could argue that pro-union stuff is propaganda as well, but it doesn't come with an underlying threat of "we will try to fire you if you don't support us" that the anti-union stuff does.
Can you demonstrate that the pro-union forces are prevented from countering this propaganda, calling it "lies," etc.? In other words, maybe the workers heard the other side and didn't agree. Is that not allowed?
As for the "underlying threat" -- how is it "underlying"? Aren't the union elections by secret ballot? Are you saying they're not really secret, or what?
Easily. Companies do everything in their power to discourage pro unionizing talk from happening. They hire specialized union-busting PR firms whose job it is to spread anti-union rhetoric and prevent pro-union voices from being heard. The mere existence of these PR firms shows how much of an uphill battle any kind of pro union movement has.
> In other words, maybe the workers heard the other side and didn't agree. Is that not allowed?
Of course it's allowed. It's just not likely that it's actually happening this way.
> As for the "underlying threat" -- how is it "underlying"? Aren't the union elections by secret ballot? Are you saying they're not really secret, or what?
The election is only a tiny piece of the process of unionizing. What about people vocally supporting unionizing to their other coworkers? Or putting up pro-union posters on break room bulletin boards, or any other public pro union activity? You know, trying to get their voices heard and convince people to vote their way? In theory those people are protected by laws but it's easy enough for a company to fire them for "performance reasons" or whatever else.
You're coming across incredibly naive to the reality of how cutthroat corporations really are. They don't play fair, especially not when someone threatens their control by talking about unionizing.
"You're coming across incredibly naive" - maybe I just don't agree with you. Is that not allowed?
And yet polls show that the younger population has a largely positive opinion of socialism, or at least, much more positive than it used to be. So is this "teaching" ineffective, or what?
Companies that avoid unionization (most of them, these days) make at least some attempt to treat the workers as partners and human beings: pay them well and treat them well. Obviously there are other factors in play and sometimes that's just corporate BS, but it helps.
Amazon, from what I can tell from the outside, does not believe in that.
I encounter people in the Midwest who literally believe all of Portland was on fire in 2020, nevermind it was two city blocks being “terrorized” by progressives, while conservatives and cops cruised quiet neighborhoods harassing and gassing people.
The propaganda worked; two block peaceful protest was turned into “progressives creating a war”, and the part about the cops and good old boys is forgotten.
This culture is a joke of cowards who would abuse the lower castes. And it has the nerve to talk down about China or India.
Moral relativism towards you all is on the way; let the planet burn and your effort being wiped away. Who cares.
Firing an employee becomes much harder. You have to convince the union first.
Employees can file grievances. If a disciplinary or surveillance system is considered onerous (by them), then they file a grievance, and much bureaucracy ensues.
Pay scales tend to depend on seniority and job classification, not on a supervisor's idea of your merit. This is negotiated in the union contract every few years, as a rule.
Major changes in how the warehouse operates have to be cleared with the union.
Union dues are deducted from paychecks.
The union can go on strike, and other unions generally respect their picket lines.
I'm deliberately not making this seem like Heaven on Earth. That's probably why union elections are contentious.
With a really shitty employer like Amazon (at least at some of their warehouses), a union really might provide some protection to the workers. All those stories about workers having to pee in a bottle because they get docked for too many bathroom breaks: gone. The union would take care of it.
Getting fired for too many demerits from the overhead surveillance cameras? Gone.
Of course, when you vote Yes or No for a union, you don't really know if they'll be able to negotiate all that.
Prior to the 1930s, unions provided some on-the-job safety, and some protections against arbitrary management or pay cuts. Over time, those got written into laws or companies just refrained from really shitty practices. Most companies, anyway. Not all.
> Bryson had made 22 errors, the 2018 write-up said... If Bryson erred like this six times within a year, the notice stated, he would be fired
Six is surely more than twenty two?
That must be parody on the part of the legal team... The irony.