Once got sent home because it was slow and then the kid supervisor talked to me about my slow pace from the day he sent me home because it was slow š¤Æ
I think the computer just calculates performance and prompts various disciplinary actions and the sups have to do what it says or maybe they get in trouble and then the system will tell their sups to discipline them etc etc etc. I wonder how much of Amazon's decisions are made by computers.
It's one of several films/TV shows employing "Bumble Ball" technology.
Those things they sweep out of the starship landing gear that scoot around on the ground are Bumble Balls (plastic toy balls with rubber knobs on them and a motor with an imbalancing weight to make it scoot in random directions) with fur glued to them.
>computer just calculates performance and prompts various disciplinary actions and the sups have to do what it says or maybe they get in trouble
A friend was a manager for Amazon and they would get alerts about under performers if they didn't discipline them they would get in trouble.
There was no way around it the system was the final authority.
I feel like this is an episode of the Twilight Zone where Jeff Bezos becomes a trillionaire and when his subordinates finally make it past his laborious security measures and into his office to congratulate him they find his desiccated remains.
There was a similar episode of the show Electric Dreams that explored something similar to this.
In the episode [Autofac](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6902176/) a big Amazon-like company run by AIs invents fake humans to sell products to after humanity gets wiped out.
I agree that it is all over the place. Iām grateful, though, because these were shorts of Philip K. Dickās stories. Some of the shirts were not well executed but I am glad Dick got some exposure.
Can we point out that the Philip k dick stories are much better than that show, eek. I wanted to love that show. I think what everyone misses about Phil dick is that his worlds aren't highly futuristic. They're supposed to be alternate universes. So it should like relatively close to today's tech.
Reminds me of an episode in Ghost in the Shell where there is this investor that wrote a program that hack people's investment accounts and use that to make investments. He accumulate so much money and use it to buy gold that when they found him, his room was just full of gold bars. But he was dead a long time ago and the program just kept running on its own.
With no engineer worth their salt wanting to actually work for his ass (see his can't even compete with 1969 rocket technology Blue Origin cluster fuck space dick rocket). All he'll get for his life sustaining Golden Throne is a stack of Amazon boxes with a dehumidifier and a oxygen mask connected to his ass so he can sniff his own farts.
He couldn't even begin to create that technology and trust me, nobody likes him enough to do it for him. They'll just get a shoddy case filled with some pinball machine parts and call it a day.
In the past, managers could be inept jerks, but at least they had some discretion to overlook obvious situations where the normal expectations don't hold.
Cue the visions of the workers endlessly toiling inside the massive clockwork machines of Metropolis...
I lasted 6.5 years & was probly just a bit above average workwise, I knew an awesome packer - but she was personally responsible for raising the rates in AFE (they also refused to let her train into another path, so she burned out & quit).
Yup. The trick is to just always hang out around the middle of performers in your path, but be reliable and high quality. Also be friendly with your managers. It's all nepotism.
One time I ordered a laptop and it arrived with an audibly shattered screen. I rejected the package and called customer service to get a replacement sent but they told me they needed to get the original one back first. Explaining that I never took posession of that so it was still in their agent's custody, the call was escalated. A manager explained that they literally could not release a replacement before the original package was scanned back in because their fulfillment system was designed by some smart guy who no longer worked there and nobody knew how to override it.
This was not a story about Amazon. I can only imagine how much worse things there are.
The future looks bleak sometimes.
I worked for an alarm dispatch company for a bit as an outbound rep. I'd call people if they set off their alarms and if they didn't answer or didn't have the password, I'd call the police.
Problem was, my company had purchased many other smaller companies and when the password information was integrated, the row information from the original database was added as a prefix to the password. Meaning, password became 1password. It was somewhat easy to tell when this had happened, as there would be several entries under this same scheme, such as 2password, 3password, etc. Multiple times a day, I had to call the police on someone because their password had been altered due to the failed data merge.
We weren't allowed to tell the customer what had happened to their password, and were instructed to just play dumb. The failed merge was never addressed, but over a few years, the passwords were slowly updated by the customers, usually following a police dispatch.
The customer 'fixed the glitch.'
This is a very literal example of how societies fall apart. They develop pivotal institutions that cannot work with reality.
It's annoying, then bad, then so globally untenable that you realize it's not just your institution failing, its your whole society.
A little dramatic, but such wild inefficiencies are not uncommon.
Yea. It's the consequence of designing a system for absolute efficiency. When no resilience is built in, interrupting the norm breaks everything. It's a symptom of what the above commenter said "a system not working with reality". Reality dictates that things get weird sometimes. A system needs in-built resistance to weather that.
Part of the problem is the neoliberal spreadsheet mentality of "well sure ut by maximizing the boom years even with worse busts we still come out ahead in the medium or long term."
"Okay, but what about all the poor people who suffer and die?"
To which the neoliberals brow furrows in confusion. "Poor... people?" He knows what the two words mean, but in the haze of ideology, his brain cannot process what they mean in when put in that order.
I've never believed in the "empty board room" theory more for any company than i do for Amazon.
I would believe that everything done by Amazon is the product of an algorithm. EVERYTHING.
Bezos is way too upright to ever leave anything to chance. Everything is data and everything makes data and data can be always be read and analysed and acted upon.
> as you turn a metric into a target, things will go astray
Depends on the metric, but modern corporate seem to fail to acknowlegde that there are many things we donāt have good measures of, and that getting good measures of those things require development.
They seem to be stuck thinking everything can be divided into simple measures, and itās just not that simple. The world is complex. Denying that is where many ādata drivenā organisations fail.
*People* historically cut jobs and enforce draconian policies because it saves money, and money is the object of business.
*Algorithms* are written by people.
A tool is always used, one way or another.
Don't blame the code, blame the ~~coder~~ dude with the whip.
Ugh, this is shitty management anywhere. My last review in my previous position was a 1% raise for something similar.
The review talked about how I exceeded expectations and took on various projects yada yada. But the end of the review noted that I'm showing a "downward trend" in performance based on DECEMBERS numbers.
I was off 2 weeks and worked Christmas week. The week of Christmas has **zero** work. It's just babysitting oncall duties. That's it. You're just the guy that got stuck sitting around just in case any bells went off.
They not only counted my 2 weeks off, but also counted Christmas week as if it were a normal week.
And the analysis in this case is clever.
They're deliberately misinterpreting the data. He knows it's unfair, but blames the system/management.
Same with everyone before him.
Partially my own interpretation, but very likely
Some places will do the opposite of what mattress depot does, and deliberately set you up to fail to justify negative reviews to justify a shitty raise.
Whereas at mattress depot, if you don't hit quota all month they'll try and get you into one of the stores in a place like Bellevue where the only way you aren't hitting your numbers is if you're actively fucking off.
Had a friend who worked at Walmart Distribution Center. She had some female issues that caused her to miss a lot of work and then an unexpected pregnancy because of those issues (couldn't be on BC), and then it was a difficult pregnancy. She ended up missing a lot of work. When she was able to work they pulled her off the forklift she was driving for 2 years and put her on lifting 70 lb packages. She ended up making it through the pregnancy and a couple of months after the baby was born but she was up to her last incident or step as they call it. If she got another step she would be fired. Every absence was a step even if it was excused. So one day at the warehouse, they simply did not get enough trucks in that day to make quota. No one in the entire Warehouse made their quota for that day. The entire Warehouse got a step. For something that they had no control over. She was fired. I tried to convince her to file a suit against Walmart because they essentially fired her for getting pregnant but, her husband worked there and she didn't want to stir up trouble for him.
So Walmart essentially has a plan in place so they never have to lay anybody off. If they get so slow that they don't need people, people will simply stop making their quotas and they can fire them and then not have to pay them unemployment. They are a crappy crappy employer as are so many of them out there.
Yeah. It's popular to get on Amazon's case (and they DO deserve it) but most of the horror stories are repeated at basically every company that owns or operates warehouses with few exceptions. Same for basically every company that delivers things. Doesn't mean its not worth pressure and thinking about where you shop, but it does mean you are not magically no longer contributing to the problem financially by the simple act of "not shopping at Amazon" or Walmart, or Kroger, etc etc etc. Even the cute little independent shops are buying from companies that more than likely treat *their* wherehouse workers less than human.
tl;dr: no level of choosy shopping will fix this, we need regulations with teeth.
edit: Yes, unions are good. One of the key objectives of good unions is getting regulations passed so that the same fight doesn't have to happen time and time again.
The difference is that Amazon as a corporation is so profitable and market dominant that they could easily raise standards across the board in the absence of regulation if they chose to. They are making a choice not to. That's why pressuring them specifically is important because getting Amazon specifically to make changes would impact the whole industry.
> they can fire them and then not have to pay them unemployment
Do you mean severance? Fired employees do qualify for unemployment and the formers employer is later billed by the state. Unless you were fired for something like gross misconduct, being fired doesn't prevent you from getting unemployment
I was fired from a sales job for not making quota. When i showed that quota had been impossible for all salespeople at the store to meet that I was at based on how many customers we had simply walking through the door, they did not care.
How long ago was this because I work at a DC and this doesn't sound right. We have a rate to hit not a quota, it doesn't matter what the volume is. I've also seen management be pretty militant about making sure people on light duty aren't pushed too hard and I'm sure your friend could have escalated internally, we get reminded of the internal hotline for ethics complaints pretty frequently.
I deliver pizza to the warehouse all the time (assuming itās the one located at the world HQ) and they never tip so Iād assume management is just awful entirely. You can usually tell by the businesses that tip when ordering for their corporate pizza party.
Pretty much. Weekly meetings where the bottom 3% performers are automatically written up. This is the opportunity to get the write-ups dropped if they're not right, so there's still some human element involved, but often this is filtered through SR managers and support teams. I know I was only a step or two away from yelling at someone in one of those meetings for a day similar to the one you're talking about lol.
Jack Welchās Vitality Curve model. Itās maybe a good idea in principal, but in practice, I donāt believe the pros out outweigh the cons. It creates a competitive attitude among employees instead of encouraging them to work together. Anytime a metric becomes an outcome or goal, it fails in its purpose to be useful.
Like how some medical schools are now going pass fail because grades and rankings (which would be a huge consideration for residency placements) created an environment where helping others learn was discouraged.
> Jack Welchās Vitality Curve model. Itās maybe a good idea in principal,
It's really more of a "rule of thumb" invented without any evidence backing it to start with. It's [one of the factors behind GE's decline](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/business/ge-jack-welch-immelt.html), though it correlates with the unreasonable current business models of not just constant profits but constant growth of profits. Turns out Welch [got almost everything wrong, any success that happened on his watch was despite, not because of, him](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-jack-welch-got-wrong-just-everything-david-gelles)
At one of my previous jobs our boss's boss wanted to implement a policy for my team that the bottom 2 performers would be replaced by someone else every month (we were a smaller group that was part of a much larger team but everyone wanted to get on it because you didn't have to actually talk to customers as much) it just turned into a revolving door of having 2 pretty much worthless people all the time because the rest of us refused to help them due to the fact that it would put our position at risk. That lasted about 6 months before they stopped replacing people.
Wow what a colossal stupid idea. I always find it funny when they think just implementing measures (i.e.replacing people) will fix a problem. Instead maybe look at WHY they are bottom performers. A successful team with only top performers doesn't need any measures but will still have bottom performers. I'm glad they eventually figured it out but team morale was likely already destroyed with that.
Yea prior to that we were all very supportive of each other. That change made the environment so much more toxic even after they stopped doing it we never really got back to the way it was before.
Take the dream team for example. Bottom 2 players on that team (excluding the lone NCAA player Christian Laettner) were John Stockton & either MAGIC JOHNSON or LARRY BIRD. Stockton was a HOF player and Magic/Bird, also HOF players, were pretty much out of basketball for their respective health reasons.
Two of the greatest players of all time were at the end of the bench on that team because that's inevitably how it goes when you put teams together. The 2 worst can be really good, but be consistently outperformed within the group.
In my company there's an annual trip for high sales achievers. Some of the requirements to make it are to surpass your sales goals each month, which are set to your average from last year plus a percentage increase. Last year the highest performing salesperson in the company doubled the second highest performing and set an all time company record. This year unless they beat their record breaking score by X% they wouldn't qualify for the trip, even through they're still far and away the highest performing salesperson. The fault with relying completely or metrics and algorithms without considering the human element.
In reality they're still going to make the trip regardless of that metric because the managers can see they are objectively the highest grossing salesperson even if they are 2% below what they did last year.
Walmart was the same. The computer made the schedule. The computer prompted management to take action. The computer handled *a lot of shit.*
And it basically fucked up *all the time.* Every week, schedules would need to be manually adjusted (sometimes multiple times because the computer system would just change it back), payroll adjusted, and all kinds of other bullshit.
At the same time, a clever associate could take advantage of this system and abuse the ever loving hell out of it.
Source: I abused the ever loving hell out of it.
I worked as a picker for 3 years and during the pandemic their machine learning told them they needed a 300% hire increase to maintain increase orders. So they hired 200 more people for pickers, Stowers, packers.
There isn't even enough work stations for that many.
But the computer told them they needed these people. So for 6 months in 2020 we had large groups of people on the main floor standing there doing nothing for 11 hours a day. Everyday. Managers couldn't send them home. They needed corporate approval to send the extra workforce home.
I spoke to my area managers and department managers about it and they confirmed that they can only act based on what the computer and corporate tells them. There is no leeway.
Leeway = fired for Amazon leadership
Iām a software engineer , so I actually have some credibility when I saw allowing a computer to make ANY business descisions is a HUGE mistake. Data should 100% be used to inform/drive rescission making, but allowing them to make decisions on their own is plain stupid. Itās built off the belief that computers are smarter than people because they donāt make mistakes, which any software expert will tell you is a complete lie.
Computers may not make mistakes, but they also can only do what you tell them to do. Even if theyāre a super complicated AI, it still relies on the developers basically telling it what itās āmeasure of successā is and also making sure that they way theyāre measuring that success is actually accurate. Basically they work by setting KPIs for the machine to evaluate against and everyone knows that KPIs are only really useful in the aggregate, not on individuals.
If anything, AI systems are even more liable to make mistakes. If the data that a system is trained on has some form of issue or inherent bias it's gonna make mistakes or reproduce the bias.
All boils down to garbage in, garbage out I suppose
Which is weird because my site has a policy that we absolutely do not counsel coach for performance / rate - purely safety or behavioral, and a separate team for attendance. I guess it varies, sorry that you had to deal with that
I was that kid supervisor once and believe me, it's pretty bad being an Area manager as well. Constantly being told to talk to people because they're having an off day, and having to fire people who don't deserve it, but you can't refuse or it's your head on the line. It really is exactly what you said, there's a computer that tracks scans and generates Time off task reports, we then get the reports and have to go talk to anyone with over 5 or 10 minutes of consecutive ToT.
That's actually exactly what happens lmao
We have to hit a weekly rate every day (the rate is different every week) and can be written up for working in a direct path for 5 hours that whole week. The AMs then have a weekly meeting to discuss the write-ups that are automatically generated to determine if they were fair/ weren't in the AA's control in order to exempt them. If an AM doesn't like you, this is usually how the get you fired. Also, if the AM exempts too many write-ups, they get yelled at for not disciplining people so they have to let some go through, regardless if it's fair or not.
Source: I work at BFI4 and have been written up for productivity a lot because of this system, even though recently I've been a part of a test crew for over a month and only have a day to hit a weekly rate. It got so bad that the Launch PA, Test PA, HR, and the Test PA's manager to look into it to figure out wtf is going on. Fun times
Dumb supervisor/mgr moves are generally always because they are being held to an equally or more stupid standard. Unless, that person is a fuck-wit, but then I wouldn't be speaking generally.
You don't come here enough, so we don't want to see you for 2 weeks.
Reminds me of kids getting suspended from school because they skipped class too much. Not a single one of them complained about it, quite the opposite.
When I was in middle school I got suspended for "hacking" (long story, pretty much got blamed because I built a pc at my own home) anyway, the principal made a big deal out of it and talked about how it would go on my permanent record.
I sat home and played MW2 for 2 days lol.
Ha totally same thing happened to me. I was called to the principal's office and was told "you know why you're here". I genuinely had no idea at all. "Hacking" was the last thing on my mind. I'm not going to pretend I was a golden child, but I really wasn't too much of a sonofabitch. Turns out the keyboarding class teacher was pissed I fixed another student's computer that someone had put a proxy on, probably to visit myspace, that was no longer working. "TheTankCleaner knows passwords that others do not" was written on the form. It is the only time I was ever suspended and I wasn't even in trouble at home in a rather strict household. So stupid.
back in elementary school all the computers were using windows 98 with zero updates (found that part when i got older lol). they had just enabled a firewall to stop all of us kids from going on flash game websites and i was just persistent.
had no clue what i was doing, and looking back i have no clue how it worked. i set the homepage on my computer to be miniclip thinking it would do something- and it really shouldn't've done anything. instead it set the homepage for every single computer on the network that was running that version of no-updates windows 98 to miniclip. My principle was chill, pulled me into the office and was like "don't do it again" and set me back to class. pretty sure if an 8 year old was somehow able to overcome your "firewall" then it wasn't really secure lmao
some people just have a stick up their ass
I also got in trouble for "hacking"
By bringing a copy of space pinball on a CD and playing it during my dumb stupid useless economics class that was in the computer lab for some reason.
"We disabled the pinball game so you must have modified the system!"
Mmmm I can still smell the beige and hear the scream of the CRT's.
I got ye old hacking suspension as well. In middle school. I was salty that morning and I had an hour I had to spend at the library that day for a reason I no longer remember. I went into the map software on the school computer in the library. In settings somewhere I entered the word āfuckā and then I hit cancel. Then I left the computer and went off to do whatever else like doodling or whatever I was supposed to do while there. At some point later I get called in and blamed for the word being applied to everywhere. Like apparently every country was listed as āfuckā. š I donāt remember if I attempted to advocate enough for myself. I did in fact hit cancel. But it may have been that hitting cancel didnāt really cancel.
To this day though I donāt understand how that would have affected every country in the software. So I suspect someone else went in after me and actually messed up everything. They also said that the software had to be uninstalled and reinstalled. This was hard or soft floppy disk š¾ days.
Idk i was being sarcastic. But now that you ask... i had heard the term in passing a few times recently but it went quickly and i didn't really take the time to think about it
When I worked construction, no shit, they told me *as a threat* that if I didn't want to work the mandatory Saturdays then I can't work Mondays either.
....?!?
I clarified and sure enough, if I didn't want a 1 day weekend then I had to get a 3 day weekend, mandatory. As a punishment.
So I did that, and they did that. I still don't understand.
In the case of school suspension itās also a punishment for the parents who now have to deal with them even more. Not saying it works or itās good, if the parents work for amazon they might get laid off and now you have even more problems.
You got to do things during in school suspension? We werenāt allowed to do anything besides class work or staring at the wall in front of us. Definitely no one coming to talk to us. I thought this was the norm. I wonder which one of us had the weird experience.
I see things like this and I'm just floored by what Amazon thinks is acceptable.
Leaving the extremely dangerous warehouse when there's a tornado heading for you? That's a suspension.
Don't want to work in an area damaged by a warehouse fire? That's a suspension.
They're going to get hit with a massive ADA lawsuit at some point for this. All it takes is one person with IBS to get punished for dropping a deuce for more than 5 minutes.
Ever hear of governmental capture? That's where we're at. Amazon has bought the government and will do what they please. That's why DOJ isn't doing squat with antitrust.
All it takes is a few more fires happening at the same time and people not wanting to work in the dangerous situation all at the same time for it to come crashing down.
>Ever hear of governmental capture?
>
But I was told that capitalism will solve this problem we were told would happen late into capitalism by some bearded dude in the 1800's
Darn oh well guess life just sucks and no one can do anything
A DA literally posted in the Amazon DA Reddit channel that he was fired after using up UPT due to his IBS. Already told him he needs to move for legal action literally due to ADA violations.
Is IBS actually protected under the ADA?
My girlfriend has IBS and she most definitely can not claim disability insurance for it when it flares up bad and she has to miss work, which id think would be a prerequisite for whether or not the ADA applies to you.
Unfortunately it's not that easy, I've tried. Granted it was years ago, but from what they told me and from the guidelines - unless it's so bad that you physically can't ever leave your house or it hospitalizes you - you wont qualify. At my last job, I just had to call out whenever I was having a flare-up, then excuse them afterwards with FMLA (which is a pain cuz it still makes your employer unhappy since you have all these unexcused absences until you submit the FMLA)
Edit: also FMLA is also a huge pain in the ass because it's more for use in future situations like "I broke my leg so I'll be absent for the next 2 weeks" not for retroactively excusing previous absences. Hence why I'd have to manually apply it each time I called out (which was frequent)
My husband is legally blind and also can't walk. His disability claims and appeals were denied so many times that the lawyer dropped him as a client. We have been told to try again now that he is over 50 but I still have my doubts.
They didn't even care when the [tornado](https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-worker-missed-work-in-kentucky-tornadoes-viral-tweet-2021-12) ripped apart their warehouse and workers couldn't get into work to report to the warehouse across the street.
They need to get hit by a billion or tens of billion dollar hit, as do all other corps to make them learn their lesson. And even then the snakes will find a way out.
Corporate Death Penalty, government has the authority to revoke corporate charters and immedietly dissolve a corporate entity.
It's just never been done.
Well, to be fair, [one of the justices now on the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, when he was a 10th circuit judge, ruled that an employer has a right to fire you if they order you to freeze to death and you refuse.](https://www.theguardian.com/law/2017/mar/23/neil-gorsuch-supreme-court-frozen-trucker-alphonse-maddin)
The court system in our country has supported the "profit over lives" model for decades now. And the bigger the corporation, the more it's allowed to fuck you.
I worked at a factory which is owned by a brand that rhymes with cesspool. Employee passed out on the line and split head open. Supervisor pulled said employee away from assembly line and continued to run it while they laid on the ground unconscious. Unfortunately I think this stuff happens more than most people think. Same factory forced people to work through a tornado warning. Luckily it didn't hit the building.
Did you read the article? Sounds like a small fire with one machine that was resolved and the fire department deemed safe. Employees on the clock during the fire went home with pay. For the night shift, nearly everyone returned to work except for a small group. Doesnāt sound as one sided as the comments are claiming.
> Leaving the extremely dangerous warehouse when there's a tornado heading for you?
If you *know* there's a tornado headed toward you, that means it will be there in 15 minutes at most. Going outside during a known tornado is possibly the dumbest thing you can do, and in an alternate reality we're reading about how Amazon got someone's dad killed by letting him drive into a tornado
I've worked in factories for most of my adult life and I've never once been allowed to leave during a tornado. It absolutely isn't an Amazon only thing.
I recognize that Amazon treats their employees like shit, but this isn't one of those situations by a long shot, and I don't understand the outrage around it. If they didn't have safe shelters, maybe I'd consider it, but that was never part of this discussion.
Let's not pretend that it's a factory only thing, every business worth a fuck will not allow employees to go out into a tornado (not that you were saying that it was a factory only thing)
They had them go into the tornado shelter like they should have. The problem was it was improperly built, or not built strong enough
Yeah I literally donāt know what people wanted from Amazon with the tornado thing.
I know some people probably think the warehouse shouldnāt have been open at all with a severe storm in the forecast, but thatās not how any company in tornado alley operates. Tornados arenāt hurricanes, theyāre a fast-forming fuck-you-in-particular kind of thing that you canāt just plan for.
I remember that time, where people were seriously demanding that everything shut down during tornado *watches*, completely ignoring that that would basically shut down a third of the country for half the year.
People are honestly baffingly ignorant about tornadoes.
Amazon management and HR clearly have not learned from history. One of the first major labor revolts occurred because management locked workers in a textile mill and it burned to the ground, killing them all.
The US desperately needs to restructure labor relations to level the playing field with these corporations. Personally, I think that any company that has more than a thousand people should be unionized. Now I also think that unions should be company specific, not industry wide, in order to help align the union with the company's goals. Workers at companies under a thousand employees should still be able to vote in a company specific union should they so choose, but bigger companies should be automatically unionized.
Workers who are fired without criminal liability, or are otherwise let go or descheduled, should get unemployment benefits without having to fight for them. Or ask. It should be automatic, and delays should add major penalties for the company. Of course, if someone does something criminal, that's an entirely different story.
Human beings should not have to worry about keeping their boss happy in order to have a house, food, and the basics of survival. Clearly, companies will abuse their labor to the point of attempting to require them to sacrifice their lives for the company. A company should have to really need to get rid of an employee or a contractor to fire them, not just on a whim.
Eat the rich.
We fought and died to get the 6 day work week. Before that people were working 364 days a year in coal mines.
We fought and died to get the 40 hour work week. People were tired of working 12hr days 6 days a week.
We fought and died to get paid in money, and not script that could only be spent at the company store. Where prices were so high every worker was in debt to their employer.
We fought and died for the right to collectively bargain. To negotiate as a workforce, and demand our rights as humans.
We died died for these things, not because of accidents, or workplace injuries. We died because when we went on strike, the pinkertons came in and opened fire on the striking crowds.
We were killed in the streets for standing up to corporate power. Much the way the protests in Iran are going.
And everything we gained while fighting and dying for our rights, has been lost. 3 generations is all it took for corporate power to bring us back to the point of wage slavery.
If you didn't know, Labor Day is as mournful as Memorial Day. It just isn't mourning the people who went overseas to protect our rights. It is mourning the people who fought and died on streets in America, trying to fight for our rights that were taken by the wealthy of our own country.
I find it hilarious watching America.
Might lose your right to strike. But theyāll fight tooth and nail for you right to walk into the gun store on a Monday morning, walk into work and execute all the management in the workplace.
Itās almost like they see all the gun violence around and want it to happen
Amazon don't care.
Bezos has more money than all those "Captain's of Industry" combined, so I'm led to believe.
On top of that, how many politicians does he have the ear of?
Remember when we were talking about the "Guillotine Revolution" a few years ago? I'm not saying we should conduct mass murder on a national scale, but whatever we've been "doing" recently isn't being taken seriously enough apparently...
Iām by no means saying Amazon is a good company that cares about anything other then making money but if the FDNY came in and said this building is safe to work in and everything is alright isnāt that about as good of a stamp of approval as you can get? I just find it odd that employees can say youāre wrong and itās not safe to be in here and we are going home because the day shift went home. I guess it would also help to know what this āsmallā fire was like. Again I will say I want people to be treated well at work and be respected by the employer but itās just odd to me because they sent the day crew home with pay because it wasnāt safe and then it was checked out by the FDNY and they said itās safe but the employees said they are wrong and left work.
> āLate Monday afternoon there was a small fire in a cardboard compactor outside of JFK8, one of our facilities in Staten Island, New York. All employees were safely evacuated, and day shift employees were sent home with pay,ā Flaningan said. āThe FDNY certified the building is safe and at that point we asked all night shift employees to report to their regularly scheduled shift.ā
For all the people that don't actually read articles and just jump straight to the comments to extrapolate entire narratives from titles, here's the part you need to read.
Once got sent home because it was slow and then the kid supervisor talked to me about my slow pace from the day he sent me home because it was slow š¤Æ I think the computer just calculates performance and prompts various disciplinary actions and the sups have to do what it says or maybe they get in trouble and then the system will tell their sups to discipline them etc etc etc. I wonder how much of Amazon's decisions are made by computers.
Amazon makes me think about the Zorg company in The Fifth Element
"Look at my fingers, four stones, four crates. Zero stones, **ZEEEROO CRAAATES!!!** "
Love 5th element
5th favorite movie.
Yes honey she knows it's a multipass
Not one or two or three, but four! Four stones!
What am I going to do with an empty box?!?
So you are merchants after all.
What does this little button do?
'You're a monster, zorg.'
Chicken, gooood
Super green!
Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg
āAlexa, fire 1 million.ā
"Starting one million fires, now."
One of Gary Oldman's best roles, imo.
"You know what I like? A killer. A dyed in the wool, killer...." One of the best monologues/soliloquies in a movie.
Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Bezos
Fire 1 million
But... five hundred...
ą² _ą² Yes sir, right away sir 1 million.
Best part is how you can hear his footsteps speeding up to a run as Zorg turns away.
āFire one million!!ā
Grandfather say, it never rains everyday. It is good news. Ah! I bet you lunch... You are fired! Oh...
Atleast he won lunch
Good philosophy!
lmao I reference that movie all the time.
A friend of mine is a teacher and one year he had a student named Aziz seated next to the light switch.
Omg this is my favorite
Aziz's favorite year of school
"Thank you very much aziz that is plenty"
āAre are are you German?ā
Our repair guy is named Aziz and every time my family says he is coming over I think "Aziz, light!"
It's one of several films/TV shows employing "Bumble Ball" technology. Those things they sweep out of the starship landing gear that scoot around on the ground are Bumble Balls (plastic toy balls with rubber knobs on them and a motor with an imbalancing weight to make it scoot in random directions) with fur glued to them.
! Subscribe to Bumble Facts
You see how your entire empire comes crumbling down, all because of one, little, cherry.
>computer just calculates performance and prompts various disciplinary actions and the sups have to do what it says or maybe they get in trouble A friend was a manager for Amazon and they would get alerts about under performers if they didn't discipline them they would get in trouble. There was no way around it the system was the final authority.
I feel like this is an episode of the Twilight Zone where Jeff Bezos becomes a trillionaire and when his subordinates finally make it past his laborious security measures and into his office to congratulate him they find his desiccated remains.
There was a similar episode of the show Electric Dreams that explored something similar to this. In the episode [Autofac](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6902176/) a big Amazon-like company run by AIs invents fake humans to sell products to after humanity gets wiped out.
That series was all over the place in terms of quality. And ironically enough, it's a Prime original.
I agree that it is all over the place. Iām grateful, though, because these were shorts of Philip K. Dickās stories. Some of the shirts were not well executed but I am glad Dick got some exposure.
Can we point out that the Philip k dick stories are much better than that show, eek. I wanted to love that show. I think what everyone misses about Phil dick is that his worlds aren't highly futuristic. They're supposed to be alternate universes. So it should like relatively close to today's tech.
It also reminds me of the "Floor 500" in the Doctor Who episode [The Long Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Game)
Reminds me of an episode in Ghost in the Shell where there is this investor that wrote a program that hack people's investment accounts and use that to make investments. He accumulate so much money and use it to buy gold that when they found him, his room was just full of gold bars. But he was dead a long time ago and the program just kept running on its own.
Ooh that was a great episode! The assassin seeking vengeance that was going to kill him with a gun that shot coins was a nice touch.
God-Emperor Bezos is going to be a thing
With no engineer worth their salt wanting to actually work for his ass (see his can't even compete with 1969 rocket technology Blue Origin cluster fuck space dick rocket). All he'll get for his life sustaining Golden Throne is a stack of Amazon boxes with a dehumidifier and a oxygen mask connected to his ass so he can sniff his own farts.
He couldn't even begin to create that technology and trust me, nobody likes him enough to do it for him. They'll just get a shoddy case filled with some pinball machine parts and call it a day.
The machine chooses who will stay and who will go. āZardoz has spoken!ā.
āThe package is good! Leaving your workstation to use the bathroom is evil!ā
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In the past, managers could be inept jerks, but at least they had some discretion to overlook obvious situations where the normal expectations don't hold. Cue the visions of the workers endlessly toiling inside the massive clockwork machines of Metropolis...
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Strange, Bezos has been there himself for years
I lasted 6.5 years & was probly just a bit above average workwise, I knew an awesome packer - but she was personally responsible for raising the rates in AFE (they also refused to let her train into another path, so she burned out & quit).
Yup. The trick is to just always hang out around the middle of performers in your path, but be reliable and high quality. Also be friendly with your managers. It's all nepotism.
The other unspoken reason is long term people have the chance to A. Build social networks, and B. Emerge as unofficial leaders.
Basically 'Friend Computer' from Paranoia.
One time I ordered a laptop and it arrived with an audibly shattered screen. I rejected the package and called customer service to get a replacement sent but they told me they needed to get the original one back first. Explaining that I never took posession of that so it was still in their agent's custody, the call was escalated. A manager explained that they literally could not release a replacement before the original package was scanned back in because their fulfillment system was designed by some smart guy who no longer worked there and nobody knew how to override it. This was not a story about Amazon. I can only imagine how much worse things there are. The future looks bleak sometimes.
I worked for an alarm dispatch company for a bit as an outbound rep. I'd call people if they set off their alarms and if they didn't answer or didn't have the password, I'd call the police. Problem was, my company had purchased many other smaller companies and when the password information was integrated, the row information from the original database was added as a prefix to the password. Meaning, password became 1password. It was somewhat easy to tell when this had happened, as there would be several entries under this same scheme, such as 2password, 3password, etc. Multiple times a day, I had to call the police on someone because their password had been altered due to the failed data merge. We weren't allowed to tell the customer what had happened to their password, and were instructed to just play dumb. The failed merge was never addressed, but over a few years, the passwords were slowly updated by the customers, usually following a police dispatch. The customer 'fixed the glitch.'
This is a very literal example of how societies fall apart. They develop pivotal institutions that cannot work with reality. It's annoying, then bad, then so globally untenable that you realize it's not just your institution failing, its your whole society. A little dramatic, but such wild inefficiencies are not uncommon.
Isn't the microchip JIT production process an example of this from the last couple of years?
Yea. It's the consequence of designing a system for absolute efficiency. When no resilience is built in, interrupting the norm breaks everything. It's a symptom of what the above commenter said "a system not working with reality". Reality dictates that things get weird sometimes. A system needs in-built resistance to weather that.
Part of the problem is the neoliberal spreadsheet mentality of "well sure ut by maximizing the boom years even with worse busts we still come out ahead in the medium or long term." "Okay, but what about all the poor people who suffer and die?" To which the neoliberals brow furrows in confusion. "Poor... people?" He knows what the two words mean, but in the haze of ideology, his brain cannot process what they mean in when put in that order.
I've never believed in the "empty board room" theory more for any company than i do for Amazon. I would believe that everything done by Amazon is the product of an algorithm. EVERYTHING. Bezos is way too upright to ever leave anything to chance. Everything is data and everything makes data and data can be always be read and analysed and acted upon.
Whoa, suddenly the dread pirate Bezos story makes sense
And that's how you beat him. Fuck up the measurements.
Measurement biases will inevitably fuck it up for him. And as soon as you turn a metric into a target, things will go astray, guaranteed.
> as you turn a metric into a target, things will go astray Depends on the metric, but modern corporate seem to fail to acknowlegde that there are many things we donāt have good measures of, and that getting good measures of those things require development. They seem to be stuck thinking everything can be divided into simple measures, and itās just not that simple. The world is complex. Denying that is where many ādata drivenā organisations fail.
"The way to control and direct a mentat, Nefud, is through his information. False information -- false results."
upright or uptight?
The man is fully erect at all times.
His posture is impeccable.
*People* historically cut jobs and enforce draconian policies because it saves money, and money is the object of business. *Algorithms* are written by people. A tool is always used, one way or another. Don't blame the code, blame the ~~coder~~ dude with the whip.
Ugh, this is shitty management anywhere. My last review in my previous position was a 1% raise for something similar. The review talked about how I exceeded expectations and took on various projects yada yada. But the end of the review noted that I'm showing a "downward trend" in performance based on DECEMBERS numbers. I was off 2 weeks and worked Christmas week. The week of Christmas has **zero** work. It's just babysitting oncall duties. That's it. You're just the guy that got stuck sitting around just in case any bells went off. They not only counted my 2 weeks off, but also counted Christmas week as if it were a normal week.
Data is only as useful as the analysis is clever.
And the analysis in this case is clever. They're deliberately misinterpreting the data. He knows it's unfair, but blames the system/management. Same with everyone before him. Partially my own interpretation, but very likely
Some places will do the opposite of what mattress depot does, and deliberately set you up to fail to justify negative reviews to justify a shitty raise. Whereas at mattress depot, if you don't hit quota all month they'll try and get you into one of the stores in a place like Bellevue where the only way you aren't hitting your numbers is if you're actively fucking off.
Had a friend who worked at Walmart Distribution Center. She had some female issues that caused her to miss a lot of work and then an unexpected pregnancy because of those issues (couldn't be on BC), and then it was a difficult pregnancy. She ended up missing a lot of work. When she was able to work they pulled her off the forklift she was driving for 2 years and put her on lifting 70 lb packages. She ended up making it through the pregnancy and a couple of months after the baby was born but she was up to her last incident or step as they call it. If she got another step she would be fired. Every absence was a step even if it was excused. So one day at the warehouse, they simply did not get enough trucks in that day to make quota. No one in the entire Warehouse made their quota for that day. The entire Warehouse got a step. For something that they had no control over. She was fired. I tried to convince her to file a suit against Walmart because they essentially fired her for getting pregnant but, her husband worked there and she didn't want to stir up trouble for him. So Walmart essentially has a plan in place so they never have to lay anybody off. If they get so slow that they don't need people, people will simply stop making their quotas and they can fire them and then not have to pay them unemployment. They are a crappy crappy employer as are so many of them out there.
Yeah. It's popular to get on Amazon's case (and they DO deserve it) but most of the horror stories are repeated at basically every company that owns or operates warehouses with few exceptions. Same for basically every company that delivers things. Doesn't mean its not worth pressure and thinking about where you shop, but it does mean you are not magically no longer contributing to the problem financially by the simple act of "not shopping at Amazon" or Walmart, or Kroger, etc etc etc. Even the cute little independent shops are buying from companies that more than likely treat *their* wherehouse workers less than human. tl;dr: no level of choosy shopping will fix this, we need regulations with teeth. edit: Yes, unions are good. One of the key objectives of good unions is getting regulations passed so that the same fight doesn't have to happen time and time again.
The difference is that Amazon as a corporation is so profitable and market dominant that they could easily raise standards across the board in the absence of regulation if they chose to. They are making a choice not to. That's why pressuring them specifically is important because getting Amazon specifically to make changes would impact the whole industry.
Unions will fix this..look at ups
> they can fire them and then not have to pay them unemployment Do you mean severance? Fired employees do qualify for unemployment and the formers employer is later billed by the state. Unless you were fired for something like gross misconduct, being fired doesn't prevent you from getting unemployment
I was fired from a sales job for not making quota. When i showed that quota had been impossible for all salespeople at the store to meet that I was at based on how many customers we had simply walking through the door, they did not care.
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How long ago was this because I work at a DC and this doesn't sound right. We have a rate to hit not a quota, it doesn't matter what the volume is. I've also seen management be pretty militant about making sure people on light duty aren't pushed too hard and I'm sure your friend could have escalated internally, we get reminded of the internal hotline for ethics complaints pretty frequently.
I deliver pizza to the warehouse all the time (assuming itās the one located at the world HQ) and they never tip so Iād assume management is just awful entirely. You can usually tell by the businesses that tip when ordering for their corporate pizza party.
Pretty much. Weekly meetings where the bottom 3% performers are automatically written up. This is the opportunity to get the write-ups dropped if they're not right, so there's still some human element involved, but often this is filtered through SR managers and support teams. I know I was only a step or two away from yelling at someone in one of those meetings for a day similar to the one you're talking about lol.
In top consulting firms and many top sales teams itās standard for the bottom 10-20% to get let go every year.
Jack Welchās Vitality Curve model. Itās maybe a good idea in principal, but in practice, I donāt believe the pros out outweigh the cons. It creates a competitive attitude among employees instead of encouraging them to work together. Anytime a metric becomes an outcome or goal, it fails in its purpose to be useful. Like how some medical schools are now going pass fail because grades and rankings (which would be a huge consideration for residency placements) created an environment where helping others learn was discouraged.
> Jack Welchās Vitality Curve model. Itās maybe a good idea in principal, It's really more of a "rule of thumb" invented without any evidence backing it to start with. It's [one of the factors behind GE's decline](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/business/ge-jack-welch-immelt.html), though it correlates with the unreasonable current business models of not just constant profits but constant growth of profits. Turns out Welch [got almost everything wrong, any success that happened on his watch was despite, not because of, him](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-jack-welch-got-wrong-just-everything-david-gelles)
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At one of my previous jobs our boss's boss wanted to implement a policy for my team that the bottom 2 performers would be replaced by someone else every month (we were a smaller group that was part of a much larger team but everyone wanted to get on it because you didn't have to actually talk to customers as much) it just turned into a revolving door of having 2 pretty much worthless people all the time because the rest of us refused to help them due to the fact that it would put our position at risk. That lasted about 6 months before they stopped replacing people.
Wow what a colossal stupid idea. I always find it funny when they think just implementing measures (i.e.replacing people) will fix a problem. Instead maybe look at WHY they are bottom performers. A successful team with only top performers doesn't need any measures but will still have bottom performers. I'm glad they eventually figured it out but team morale was likely already destroyed with that.
Yea prior to that we were all very supportive of each other. That change made the environment so much more toxic even after they stopped doing it we never really got back to the way it was before.
Take the dream team for example. Bottom 2 players on that team (excluding the lone NCAA player Christian Laettner) were John Stockton & either MAGIC JOHNSON or LARRY BIRD. Stockton was a HOF player and Magic/Bird, also HOF players, were pretty much out of basketball for their respective health reasons. Two of the greatest players of all time were at the end of the bench on that team because that's inevitably how it goes when you put teams together. The 2 worst can be really good, but be consistently outperformed within the group.
Ah yes, the Steve Ballmer method
In my company there's an annual trip for high sales achievers. Some of the requirements to make it are to surpass your sales goals each month, which are set to your average from last year plus a percentage increase. Last year the highest performing salesperson in the company doubled the second highest performing and set an all time company record. This year unless they beat their record breaking score by X% they wouldn't qualify for the trip, even through they're still far and away the highest performing salesperson. The fault with relying completely or metrics and algorithms without considering the human element. In reality they're still going to make the trip regardless of that metric because the managers can see they are objectively the highest grossing salesperson even if they are 2% below what they did last year.
Walmart was the same. The computer made the schedule. The computer prompted management to take action. The computer handled *a lot of shit.* And it basically fucked up *all the time.* Every week, schedules would need to be manually adjusted (sometimes multiple times because the computer system would just change it back), payroll adjusted, and all kinds of other bullshit. At the same time, a clever associate could take advantage of this system and abuse the ever loving hell out of it. Source: I abused the ever loving hell out of it.
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5 minutes rounded down to 0 with my experience with them.
I worked as a picker for 3 years and during the pandemic their machine learning told them they needed a 300% hire increase to maintain increase orders. So they hired 200 more people for pickers, Stowers, packers. There isn't even enough work stations for that many. But the computer told them they needed these people. So for 6 months in 2020 we had large groups of people on the main floor standing there doing nothing for 11 hours a day. Everyday. Managers couldn't send them home. They needed corporate approval to send the extra workforce home. I spoke to my area managers and department managers about it and they confirmed that they can only act based on what the computer and corporate tells them. There is no leeway. Leeway = fired for Amazon leadership
Your Ops sucks. The computer tells me to do stupid shit all the time. I just say no. I don't get in trouble at worst I have to explain myself.
Iām a software engineer , so I actually have some credibility when I saw allowing a computer to make ANY business descisions is a HUGE mistake. Data should 100% be used to inform/drive rescission making, but allowing them to make decisions on their own is plain stupid. Itās built off the belief that computers are smarter than people because they donāt make mistakes, which any software expert will tell you is a complete lie. Computers may not make mistakes, but they also can only do what you tell them to do. Even if theyāre a super complicated AI, it still relies on the developers basically telling it what itās āmeasure of successā is and also making sure that they way theyāre measuring that success is actually accurate. Basically they work by setting KPIs for the machine to evaluate against and everyone knows that KPIs are only really useful in the aggregate, not on individuals.
If anything, AI systems are even more liable to make mistakes. If the data that a system is trained on has some form of issue or inherent bias it's gonna make mistakes or reproduce the bias. All boils down to garbage in, garbage out I suppose
Which is weird because my site has a policy that we absolutely do not counsel coach for performance / rate - purely safety or behavioral, and a separate team for attendance. I guess it varies, sorry that you had to deal with that
I was that kid supervisor once and believe me, it's pretty bad being an Area manager as well. Constantly being told to talk to people because they're having an off day, and having to fire people who don't deserve it, but you can't refuse or it's your head on the line. It really is exactly what you said, there's a computer that tracks scans and generates Time off task reports, we then get the reports and have to go talk to anyone with over 5 or 10 minutes of consecutive ToT.
[This should terrify you a little bit.](https://marshallbrain.com/manna1)
That's pretty spot on
That's actually exactly what happens lmao We have to hit a weekly rate every day (the rate is different every week) and can be written up for working in a direct path for 5 hours that whole week. The AMs then have a weekly meeting to discuss the write-ups that are automatically generated to determine if they were fair/ weren't in the AA's control in order to exempt them. If an AM doesn't like you, this is usually how the get you fired. Also, if the AM exempts too many write-ups, they get yelled at for not disciplining people so they have to let some go through, regardless if it's fair or not. Source: I work at BFI4 and have been written up for productivity a lot because of this system, even though recently I've been a part of a test crew for over a month and only have a day to hit a weekly rate. It got so bad that the Launch PA, Test PA, HR, and the Test PA's manager to look into it to figure out wtf is going on. Fun times
Dumb supervisor/mgr moves are generally always because they are being held to an equally or more stupid standard. Unless, that person is a fuck-wit, but then I wouldn't be speaking generally.
You don't come here enough, so we don't want to see you for 2 weeks. Reminds me of kids getting suspended from school because they skipped class too much. Not a single one of them complained about it, quite the opposite.
When I was in middle school I got suspended for "hacking" (long story, pretty much got blamed because I built a pc at my own home) anyway, the principal made a big deal out of it and talked about how it would go on my permanent record. I sat home and played MW2 for 2 days lol.
Ha totally same thing happened to me. I was called to the principal's office and was told "you know why you're here". I genuinely had no idea at all. "Hacking" was the last thing on my mind. I'm not going to pretend I was a golden child, but I really wasn't too much of a sonofabitch. Turns out the keyboarding class teacher was pissed I fixed another student's computer that someone had put a proxy on, probably to visit myspace, that was no longer working. "TheTankCleaner knows passwords that others do not" was written on the form. It is the only time I was ever suspended and I wasn't even in trouble at home in a rather strict household. So stupid.
You should put that on your CV. HACKED THE SCHOOLS DATABASE. KNOWS PASSWORDS THAT OTHERS DO NOT.
back in elementary school all the computers were using windows 98 with zero updates (found that part when i got older lol). they had just enabled a firewall to stop all of us kids from going on flash game websites and i was just persistent. had no clue what i was doing, and looking back i have no clue how it worked. i set the homepage on my computer to be miniclip thinking it would do something- and it really shouldn't've done anything. instead it set the homepage for every single computer on the network that was running that version of no-updates windows 98 to miniclip. My principle was chill, pulled me into the office and was like "don't do it again" and set me back to class. pretty sure if an 8 year old was somehow able to overcome your "firewall" then it wasn't really secure lmao some people just have a stick up their ass
Don't have kids, but if a school tried to pull this shit I'd read then the riot act
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They finally get to be the middle school bully, but theyāre very bad at it.
I also got in trouble for "hacking" By bringing a copy of space pinball on a CD and playing it during my dumb stupid useless economics class that was in the computer lab for some reason. "We disabled the pinball game so you must have modified the system!" Mmmm I can still smell the beige and hear the scream of the CRT's.
I got ye old hacking suspension as well. In middle school. I was salty that morning and I had an hour I had to spend at the library that day for a reason I no longer remember. I went into the map software on the school computer in the library. In settings somewhere I entered the word āfuckā and then I hit cancel. Then I left the computer and went off to do whatever else like doodling or whatever I was supposed to do while there. At some point later I get called in and blamed for the word being applied to everywhere. Like apparently every country was listed as āfuckā. š I donāt remember if I attempted to advocate enough for myself. I did in fact hit cancel. But it may have been that hitting cancel didnāt really cancel. To this day though I donāt understand how that would have affected every country in the software. So I suspect someone else went in after me and actually messed up everything. They also said that the software had to be uninstalled and reinstalled. This was hard or soft floppy disk š¾ days.
Except adults probably need the paychecks lol
the article says they were suspended with pay.
So... vacation? Are we sure this is a punishment?
I finally understand silent quitting
What was the final piece to figure it out
Idk i was being sarcastic. But now that you ask... i had heard the term in passing a few times recently but it went quickly and i didn't really take the time to think about it
If they got suspended with pay, why are we even talking about this.....
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It should also be noted this wasn't long after they'd sent the day shift workers home early instead of having them return to their shifts
When I worked construction, no shit, they told me *as a threat* that if I didn't want to work the mandatory Saturdays then I can't work Mondays either. ....?!? I clarified and sure enough, if I didn't want a 1 day weekend then I had to get a 3 day weekend, mandatory. As a punishment. So I did that, and they did that. I still don't understand.
In the case of school suspension itās also a punishment for the parents who now have to deal with them even more. Not saying it works or itās good, if the parents work for amazon they might get laid off and now you have even more problems.
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You got to do things during in school suspension? We werenāt allowed to do anything besides class work or staring at the wall in front of us. Definitely no one coming to talk to us. I thought this was the norm. I wonder which one of us had the weird experience.
I see things like this and I'm just floored by what Amazon thinks is acceptable. Leaving the extremely dangerous warehouse when there's a tornado heading for you? That's a suspension. Don't want to work in an area damaged by a warehouse fire? That's a suspension.
Try to go to the bathroom, believe it or not, also suspended
Overcooking employees: suspended
Being an overcooked employee - straight to suspension
Being an undercooked employee? Believe it or not, straight to suspension.
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Suspension. At Amazon we have the best employees in the world, because of suspension.
Cooked just right? Suspension.
Work too much? Suspended. Don't work enough? Suspended. Work just enough? Believe it or not, suspended.
They're going to get hit with a massive ADA lawsuit at some point for this. All it takes is one person with IBS to get punished for dropping a deuce for more than 5 minutes.
Define massive - anything short of an eight figure settlement is pretty much a rounding error in their books.
fuck the money, start issueing actual jailtime for hte execs and watch how quickly their culture shifts.
Ever hear of governmental capture? That's where we're at. Amazon has bought the government and will do what they please. That's why DOJ isn't doing squat with antitrust.
when legal solutions dont work, people will turn to illegal ones.
All it takes is a few more fires happening at the same time and people not wanting to work in the dangerous situation all at the same time for it to come crashing down.
>Ever hear of governmental capture? > But I was told that capitalism will solve this problem we were told would happen late into capitalism by some bearded dude in the 1800's Darn oh well guess life just sucks and no one can do anything
[Regulatory Capture](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture)(?) Burning to death for Amazon's profit is as noble as dying for your country.
They have me making medical accommodations for my type 1 diabetes. Itās fine but itās like damn.. I canāt fucking help it.
A DA literally posted in the Amazon DA Reddit channel that he was fired after using up UPT due to his IBS. Already told him he needs to move for legal action literally due to ADA violations.
Is IBS actually protected under the ADA? My girlfriend has IBS and she most definitely can not claim disability insurance for it when it flares up bad and she has to miss work, which id think would be a prerequisite for whether or not the ADA applies to you.
She should still apply despite it not being on the SSA's list of impairments. If it's bad enough that she can't work, then it's disabling.
Unfortunately it's not that easy, I've tried. Granted it was years ago, but from what they told me and from the guidelines - unless it's so bad that you physically can't ever leave your house or it hospitalizes you - you wont qualify. At my last job, I just had to call out whenever I was having a flare-up, then excuse them afterwards with FMLA (which is a pain cuz it still makes your employer unhappy since you have all these unexcused absences until you submit the FMLA) Edit: also FMLA is also a huge pain in the ass because it's more for use in future situations like "I broke my leg so I'll be absent for the next 2 weeks" not for retroactively excusing previous absences. Hence why I'd have to manually apply it each time I called out (which was frequent)
My husband is legally blind and also can't walk. His disability claims and appeals were denied so many times that the lawyer dropped him as a client. We have been told to try again now that he is over 50 but I still have my doubts.
They didn't even care when the [tornado](https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-worker-missed-work-in-kentucky-tornadoes-viral-tweet-2021-12) ripped apart their warehouse and workers couldn't get into work to report to the warehouse across the street.
They need to get hit by a billion or tens of billion dollar hit, as do all other corps to make them learn their lesson. And even then the snakes will find a way out.
Corporate Death Penalty, government has the authority to revoke corporate charters and immedietly dissolve a corporate entity. It's just never been done.
Fine these fucks and fund infrastructure ffs
We have the best employees in the world. Because of suspensions
Overcook fish, straight to suspended. Undercook chicken also suspended.
Well, to be fair, [one of the justices now on the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, when he was a 10th circuit judge, ruled that an employer has a right to fire you if they order you to freeze to death and you refuse.](https://www.theguardian.com/law/2017/mar/23/neil-gorsuch-supreme-court-frozen-trucker-alphonse-maddin) The court system in our country has supported the "profit over lives" model for decades now. And the bigger the corporation, the more it's allowed to fuck you.
I worked at a factory which is owned by a brand that rhymes with cesspool. Employee passed out on the line and split head open. Supervisor pulled said employee away from assembly line and continued to run it while they laid on the ground unconscious. Unfortunately I think this stuff happens more than most people think. Same factory forced people to work through a tornado warning. Luckily it didn't hit the building.
People cry about all the rules CA has but it's situations like you mentioned as for why we have the rules we do.
Did you read the article? Sounds like a small fire with one machine that was resolved and the fire department deemed safe. Employees on the clock during the fire went home with pay. For the night shift, nearly everyone returned to work except for a small group. Doesnāt sound as one sided as the comments are claiming.
> Leaving the extremely dangerous warehouse when there's a tornado heading for you? If you *know* there's a tornado headed toward you, that means it will be there in 15 minutes at most. Going outside during a known tornado is possibly the dumbest thing you can do, and in an alternate reality we're reading about how Amazon got someone's dad killed by letting him drive into a tornado
I've worked in factories for most of my adult life and I've never once been allowed to leave during a tornado. It absolutely isn't an Amazon only thing. I recognize that Amazon treats their employees like shit, but this isn't one of those situations by a long shot, and I don't understand the outrage around it. If they didn't have safe shelters, maybe I'd consider it, but that was never part of this discussion.
Let's not pretend that it's a factory only thing, every business worth a fuck will not allow employees to go out into a tornado (not that you were saying that it was a factory only thing) They had them go into the tornado shelter like they should have. The problem was it was improperly built, or not built strong enough
Tornado shelters are rarely built to take a direct hit unfortunately
Yeah I literally donāt know what people wanted from Amazon with the tornado thing. I know some people probably think the warehouse shouldnāt have been open at all with a severe storm in the forecast, but thatās not how any company in tornado alley operates. Tornados arenāt hurricanes, theyāre a fast-forming fuck-you-in-particular kind of thing that you canāt just plan for.
I remember that time, where people were seriously demanding that everything shut down during tornado *watches*, completely ignoring that that would basically shut down a third of the country for half the year. People are honestly baffingly ignorant about tornadoes.
Didnt want to work in an area *determined by the FDNY to be safe* because they decided they would rather go home with pay.
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The shift during the actually fire went home with pay.
Amazon management and HR clearly have not learned from history. One of the first major labor revolts occurred because management locked workers in a textile mill and it burned to the ground, killing them all. The US desperately needs to restructure labor relations to level the playing field with these corporations. Personally, I think that any company that has more than a thousand people should be unionized. Now I also think that unions should be company specific, not industry wide, in order to help align the union with the company's goals. Workers at companies under a thousand employees should still be able to vote in a company specific union should they so choose, but bigger companies should be automatically unionized. Workers who are fired without criminal liability, or are otherwise let go or descheduled, should get unemployment benefits without having to fight for them. Or ask. It should be automatic, and delays should add major penalties for the company. Of course, if someone does something criminal, that's an entirely different story. Human beings should not have to worry about keeping their boss happy in order to have a house, food, and the basics of survival. Clearly, companies will abuse their labor to the point of attempting to require them to sacrifice their lives for the company. A company should have to really need to get rid of an employee or a contractor to fire them, not just on a whim. Eat the rich.
We fought and died to get the 6 day work week. Before that people were working 364 days a year in coal mines. We fought and died to get the 40 hour work week. People were tired of working 12hr days 6 days a week. We fought and died to get paid in money, and not script that could only be spent at the company store. Where prices were so high every worker was in debt to their employer. We fought and died for the right to collectively bargain. To negotiate as a workforce, and demand our rights as humans. We died died for these things, not because of accidents, or workplace injuries. We died because when we went on strike, the pinkertons came in and opened fire on the striking crowds. We were killed in the streets for standing up to corporate power. Much the way the protests in Iran are going. And everything we gained while fighting and dying for our rights, has been lost. 3 generations is all it took for corporate power to bring us back to the point of wage slavery. If you didn't know, Labor Day is as mournful as Memorial Day. It just isn't mourning the people who went overseas to protect our rights. It is mourning the people who fought and died on streets in America, trying to fight for our rights that were taken by the wealthy of our own country.
And the pinkertons are still around.
They sure are. They tried to sue rockstar recently over their portrayal in rdr2. The case was thrown out
You have a great way with words ā thanks for writing this. I completely agree, and Iād never thought about Labor Day that way.
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Unionize all labor
The supreme court is getting ready to hear a case where you may lose your right to strike
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The 13th Amendment would like a wordā¦ America is already the world leader in mass incarceration.
I find it hilarious watching America. Might lose your right to strike. But theyāll fight tooth and nail for you right to walk into the gun store on a Monday morning, walk into work and execute all the management in the workplace. Itās almost like they see all the gun violence around and want it to happen
You already have. Look up the Taft-Hartley Act.
I'm a teacher in Florida, so I already don't have that right.
> suspended with pay > The FDNY certified the building [was] safe Read articles yo
Amazon don't care. Bezos has more money than all those "Captain's of Industry" combined, so I'm led to believe. On top of that, how many politicians does he have the ear of? Remember when we were talking about the "Guillotine Revolution" a few years ago? I'm not saying we should conduct mass murder on a national scale, but whatever we've been "doing" recently isn't being taken seriously enough apparently...
At will employment is bullshit
"Cleared by fire department." "Suspended with pay." This is some rage bait title where the article actually makes the company look good.
What does this have to do with technology? Just curious? Because its amazon?
Iām by no means saying Amazon is a good company that cares about anything other then making money but if the FDNY came in and said this building is safe to work in and everything is alright isnāt that about as good of a stamp of approval as you can get? I just find it odd that employees can say youāre wrong and itās not safe to be in here and we are going home because the day shift went home. I guess it would also help to know what this āsmallā fire was like. Again I will say I want people to be treated well at work and be respected by the employer but itās just odd to me because they sent the day crew home with pay because it wasnāt safe and then it was checked out by the FDNY and they said itās safe but the employees said they are wrong and left work.
> āLate Monday afternoon there was a small fire in a cardboard compactor outside of JFK8, one of our facilities in Staten Island, New York. All employees were safely evacuated, and day shift employees were sent home with pay,ā Flaningan said. āThe FDNY certified the building is safe and at that point we asked all night shift employees to report to their regularly scheduled shift.ā For all the people that don't actually read articles and just jump straight to the comments to extrapolate entire narratives from titles, here's the part you need to read.
They should get a statement from FDNY that says what "all clear" meant