The Secret Lives of Amazon's Elves 202
Posted
by
timothy
from the supply-meets-demand dept.
from the supply-meets-demand dept.
theodp writes "If Amazon is Santa, says Gizmodo's Joel Johnson, then the 400 folks living in RVs outside the Coffeyville, KS fulfillment center at Christmas time are the elves. Amazon didn't always lure in 'workcampers' from the RV community with the promise of free campgrounds and $10.50-$11 an hour seasonal jobs. 'Amazon had a bad experience busing in people from Tulsa,' explained tech nomad Chris Dunphy. 'There was a lot of theft and a lot of people who weren't really serious.' Workers from Tulsa were adding a 4-hour round-trip commute to a grueling 10-to-12 hour shift, Cherie Ve Ard added. 'They'd get there exhausted.' The work wasn't exactly what Cherie had envisioned."
eh, I'm not crying too hard (Score:5, Insightful)
They accepted terms of employment. A willing employer got a willing employee. I see absolutely nothing wrong with this, if the employees are unhappy they can always get another job, no shortages of those!
What is the point of this article? (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, wtf is the point of this article?
Re:I'm in a good place with Amazon..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm in a good place with Amazon..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Robots (Score:4, Insightful)
Robots might make sense to handle their routine volume, but the holiday rush is probably cheaper to handle with humans which don't require the large capital expense.
Re:I'm in a good place with Amazon..... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're 43 and your highest paying job ever is stuffing boxes for Amazon? Have you ever considered furthering your education?
That way he can be the best educated box stuffer at amazon. Those who believe the high paying jobs are coming back in any quantity have another thing coming... The truth is that the median income [wikipedia.org] in the US is actually much lower than people seem to realize. $13.50/Hour is the median income. There are whole swaths of the United States where $11 / hours is actually a "desirable" job as opposed to the minimum wage jobs that are otherwise available. We have become a service industry country, and have given all of the "high paying" jobs to foreign nationals because otherwise our corporate masters would have to pay for real benefits and a meaningful pension plan. Corporations have abdicated their moral responsibilities for their employees. As long as our justification is the almighty dollar, this situation is only getting worse. I am not one to advocate socialism in any form, but capitalism only works when those who benefit from the system perform their social responsibility towards their employees and treat them right. The people who reap the profits have to take a backseat to the common good of all, otherwise the system collapses and no-one gets any profit. The only viable way to ensure that every employee exercises their responsibility is through regulation. We have already seen what happens when they are allowed to operate on their own recognizance. Every industry that has been allowed to function without regulatory oversight has found a way to bubble. This situation can logically only result in an ultimate burst which threatens the stability of our entire economy. It is a publicly sanctioned pyramid scheme, where a select few early adopters make money and everyone else gets screwed. When are we going to collectively put a stop to it. Do we have to see 90% of the population below the poverty line before we will wake up and see it for what it is?
-=Geoskd
Re:I'm in a good place with Amazon..... (Score:5, Insightful)
In the middle of an argument criticizing capitalism you say:
I am not one to advocate socialism in any form
This illogical undercurrent of anti-socialism is a big reason why America is where it is.
Re:Political science in 8-bits (Score:5, Insightful)
And the argumenets against socialsm aren't about not sharing, they are about others not pulling thier own weight in society. after all why should i work hard only to have the benefits of that hardwork given to someone who works less?
Re:Robots (Score:3, Insightful)
At the end of a conveyor belt, a worker took castings, turned, and removed the sprue with a punch press.
A salesman came in and said that there were neat advantages with a robot : It would never come in late, organize the shop, chase your wife, or sue. They bought one.
What was not mentioned was that the robot was perfectly willing to have its hand in the way of the press.
Now the worker takes castings and walks around the robot.
Re:Political science in 8-bits (Score:5, Insightful)
Enslaving your fellow man is not the point of capitalism. The point of capitalism is merely to reward people investing in capital (like factories, or post-secondary education, or server farms, or hog farms, or orchards, or houses, or wheelbarrows, or telecommunications networks) by allowing them to profit from the use of that capital. When you allow this, then people invest in that capital, and you get a lot of stuff done - more so than you would from mere labor, the other component of getting things done. But anything else in excess of this isn't really about capitalism anymore: it's just selfish materialism taken to extremes. That is destructive, and abusive, and wrong.
And anyone who says that "greed is good" needs to be bonked upside the head. No, greed is not good. Greed is useful. That's different. It's useful for this: it drives people to go out and make worthwhile things happen, so that they can make money satisfy their greedy impulses. It drives people to invest in capital, in loans and and bonds and equities in companies which will ultimately pay them back and make their investment as worthwhile as possible. These companies bring new things to people, or bring old things to people better, and everybody wins. (Except when they don't, because the market is imperfect, and some people definitely win more than others, like our favorite people in the world: CEOs.... and they get away with it because of market inefficiencies, and we should probably consider how to actually effectively deal with the situation rather than just assert partisan rhetoric about the matter one way or another).
Re:What is the point of this article? (Score:3, Insightful)
How about reading it?
I did. I often read the Huff Post... it's good to keep up to date on perspectives of other people, even when it's not always in agreement with your own. People are hardly ever evil or crazy - they just don't see the world in the same way.
But when you're talking about 10 hour days, with ludicrous packing quotas, limited breaks, low pay, and grueling intensive labor, we're talking about abuse.
Oh, please. I'm afraid I'll disappoint you now and just fall back on a Libertarian yarn... if it is such a bad job, then why were people driving to it 4 hours a day? Why are people camping out in their RVs for a month to take this horrible, temporary job? They aren't abusing some captive source of local poor workers - people are actually coming in from pretty far away. These people are making several times an hour what the people who assembled your computer make in a whole day. Are there better jobs? Sure. But you can do a lot worse, and I won't agree that this one crosses some line of acceptable work conditions - especially given the temporary nature of the work.
Re:Political science in 8-bits (Score:3, Insightful)
Socialised capitalism (Various European nations, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc) has had far more positive benefit to the standard of living than the raw, unfettered capitalism of the USA, which has been stagnating for the last 50 years or more (unless you happen to be in the top 1% economically, then you're laughing). Sure, a lot of these nations don't have their middle class all living in McMansions mortgaged up until their eyeballs bleed, but the overall standard of living accross all levels of society is higher.
Re:eh, I'm not crying too hard (Score:5, Insightful)
"Personally I think it's disgusting and thought we had laws against that sort of thing (the 12+ hour days, getting fired for sick leave, overtime at normal rate, excessive quotas, etc) after the Walmart case, but don't know enough to comment fully."
But that doesn't seem to stop you from commenting anyway....
On the positive side at least you express your ignorance.
In general employers have to legally do the following:
Pay overtime for hours worked over 40 hours (non-exempt).
Pay minimum wage.
Provide a lunch period (probably at least 20 minutes) if you work over a set number of hours (probably 5 or so hours).
Provide a break of at least 10 minutes per so many hours (generally per four hours). If you have breaks in your work time that add up to this time, you do NOT have to be provided any specific break time.
A safe work place free from known hazards. No discrimination due to sex, race, etc. See basic work posters.
Various states have greater requirements. The best place to look for those requirements is on the state web page of the appropriate enforcement agency.
The following is not required:
Sick leave
Vacation
Holiday
Time off of any kind (outside of legally mandated FMLA, worker compensation, etc.) Yes, this means they can work you seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.
Insurance
Pleasant work environment
Reasonable quotas
Etc.
Except where required by law, as noted above.
All of those nice things that people THINK they are entitled to are just that, ENTITLEMENTS. They were negotiated via (union) contract and became standard in the industry or are used to attract superior talent or are done because employers WANT to.
In any case, the working conditions described at Amazon are not bad. Pay is roughly twice minimum wage. Twelve hour shifts, six days a week at peak times would not be unusual-the positions exist to ship the product for Christmas. The attendance/break policy is somewhat petty but considering the typical warehouse/temp employee, not surprising. In any case, having worked in environments like these, these policies are often rather flexible (or ignored). And people whining about heaving lifting in a warehouse, well, DUH!
Basically people are whining that they have to work their asses off for $11 an hour. Most of the crappy stuff that employers do to employees is perfectly legal (and vice versa). Welcome to the real world.
Re:Political science in 8-bits (Score:3, Insightful)
Each side of this debate (socialism vs. capitalism) really only gets half of the picture.
Higher living standards are achieved by only two methods: resource conservation and technological progress.
The way capitalism encourages higher living standards is via hoarding. Hoarding is not necessarily beneficial. Resource conservation and technological progress are beneficial. But hoarding is the means to the end. Allowing capitalists to hoard tends to encourage conservation and, in theory, technological progress. This raises the baseline living standards of the society, over time, in exchange for a large gap in living standards between the hoarders and the resourceless classes.
Socialism, on the other hand, can also result in higher living standards but via the opposite means. Instead of hoarding, socialism encourages redistribution. Besides the immediate direct raising of living standards of all citizens, by redistributing raw materials, human input (both labor and intellectual) is maximized. This encourages technological progress, at the cost of quicker resource depletion. Done correctly, redistribution can even encourage conservation.
What we have in America is called a mixed-economy. Not quite free-market capitalist, not quite commie-socialist. Capitalists are allowed to hoard, to an extent. Socialists are allowed to redistribute, to an extent. The entire thing is, of course, a complete clusterfuck. Instead of redistributing renewable raw materials, mixed-economy "socialists" redistribute finished goods and labor. Instead of hoarding limited raw materials, mixed-economy "capitalists" hoard worthless paper money. We end up with the worst of both worlds, resource depletion, forced labor, impoverished underclasses dependent upon the state, technological progress that can barely keep up with population growth, and stagnation in living standards.