A common theme I see with these articles is how "grueling" the work is. People need some perspective on what grueling work is. I worked at a UPS hub during college, where I'd load, unload, and sort the contents of trailers. What they do seems pretty easy compared to what I did at UPS. Picking and packing orders is a lot less grueling than unloading trailers full of 60 pound paper boxes, or loading hundreds of packages an hour into outbound trailers (where if you backed up too much you could shut down the entire line), or sorting over a thousand packages an hour. None of us ever complained that the work was too hard or grueling -- at best we just wanted another person in our trailer to split the load with and BS with. I honestly miss that work; it's just too bad I can't make as much doing that as working in tech.<p>Compare that to an Amazon fulfillment center, where from what I've seen they walk a lot to pick packages (but even that's being automated away by Kiva robots), put the contents into boxes, and load the boxes into trailers. Amazon packages are relatively light compared to most business shipments of stuff that went through UPS (which are usually things packed in bulk). Maybe it's mind-numbing, but the horror stories about how physically grueling it is (save for maybe when they weren't properly air conditioning the facilities) seem overboard. Even then, there were days in the summer where I'd be unloading a trailer that was baking in the sun all day, and we didn't get AC in there -- we just sweated it out and drank a lot of water.<p>I don't really know what people expect when they work in a warehouse. It's not glamorous and it's not easy, and it doesn't require that much skill so it doesn't command that much pay. But it's better than no job at all.
It frequently seems to be the case that when tech companies interact with unskilled labor, the unskilled labor gets a worse deal than they would before the tech economy. See Uber, Amazon, Blue Apron, and many others.<p>In me this inspires a high-level of cynicism. Now when I hear a startup wanting to "change the world" I'm always curious whose underpaid labor is going to subsidize that change. Underneath all the Silicon Valley virtue signalling about improving the state of mankind you see the same gears and levers of labor exploitation as old-school sweatshop manufacturers like Nike.<p>And make no mistake, the ultimate goal is to make the "knowledge workers" at these companies just as expendable.
These Amazon jobs are most useful to think about by comparison.<p>Four decades ago, analogous jobs (manual labor, no college degree) were in the car industry: at Ford and GM. Those jobs were good middle-class jobs with good salaries. On those jobs, one could raise a family with a 40 hour work week, and do very well working 50-60 hours a week.<p>Today, the similar jobs are in Amazon warehouses. What is different? A big one is that we have removed worker protections from our economy. By going to an unregulated free market, now Jeff Bezos is a multi-billionaire and his workers are living in near-poverty.
Yes, intensively competitive companies like Amazon sometimes press workers hard. Without endorsing nor assigning blame to the company (which faces pressures from globalization and shareholders), there are many potential approaches to the problems:<p>1. Amazon could build a brand around treating workers better (UPS has at times had this reputation) and thus differentiate themselves and justify the cost of better pay and benefits.<p>2. Government regulations could require a certain standard of job creation or insurance coverage. These could be coupled with incentive programs.<p>3. Workers can organize. (i.e. into unions)<p>4. Consumers can vote with their dollars.<p>5. Investors can vote with their dollars.<p>There are many more variations on these themes.<p>If these kinds of solutions don't work, workers tend to get squeezed. Due to the complexities of our economic and political systems, in practice, certain companies end up treating human resources (people) as expendable assets to exploit. Sometimes they do so for a long time. That is why other power centers (government, labor organization, consumer activism, investor activism) are necessary to achieve broader goals.
I feel like journalists are just trying every way possible to create an anti-tech sentiment. Crazy how fast things can change from all hail the tech titans to oh these tech companies are creating a dystopia. Theres way too much noise in every aspect of information these days to help society focus on the problems that actually matter.
Most folks I know seem blissfully unaware or uninterested in these realities behind their next day delivery. Even supremely liberal folks in boston and new york seem to think that complaining that their prime delivery being a day late or poorly packed is reasonable to gripe about, totally ignoring the human cost behind such offerings.
It would be convenient to think that the Amazon ops executives have this all figured out and that the numbers support their labor strategy, but after having been one of the people whose job it was to put data in front of those executives, I wouldn't trust their judgment with data at all. Their ideologies and their incompetence trap them to inferior analysis.<p>They think their pay is good because it is higher than other warehouse jobs. They don't actually compare the workload at other warehouse jobs, but needless to say nobody is worked anywhere near as hard in those other jobs. Their hiring and retention costs are insanely high, but they don't recognize their role. They view their retention as belonging in two categories: those who are fired and those who quit. Both are much higher than competing warehouses. They fire more because they have zero tolerance policies for too many things and three strikes for everything else...with no forgiveness for anything ever. Voluntary quits are high because they don't pay enough for the job that they are hiring for, but they see voluntary quits as being a problem with management. So they churn the management like crazy too. And since they churn management like crazy, they institute policies that basically take all judgment out of the hands of managers and only use them to enforce policies. Besides, retention, training, and hiring costs don't fall into the ops budget, it falls into HR, so it's not their problem anyway.<p>At least from one anecdotal exchange with a local ops manager, they would likely need to be paying <i>double</i> their going rates if they wanted to bring their retention and hiring rates in line with the rest of the industry. But it's not gonna happen. They're gonna keep playing this musical chairs blame game until it breaks them.
I think the issue may be with poor cities. If a city is poor it should have cheap housing, low utility cost, low taxes. I can't speak to San Bernardino, but one of the issues in Detroit is that they are taxing people like the city is rich
About another company's warehouse:<p>> Wages start at $26 an hour, but many workers make a lot more than that because Stater Brothers operates an incentive program in which people who grab orders—doing similar tasks to workers at Amazon—are rewarded if they go faster than the average speed.<p>I wonder if it would be possible for a group of workers to pay another group of workers to slow down, thus lowering the average speed so that the first group ends up in the rewards group without having to raise their speed?
I couldn't help but to think about basic income while reading this article. It seems like the vast majority of people in these Amazon warehouse stories hate working there but really have no other options at the moment. Basic income would allow these individuals to perhaps work at lower paying companies that prioritize worker morale over profitability.
Sure, Amazon fulfillment center jobs might not be high-paying, middle class jobs, but what's the alternative for these areas? High unemployment and stagnation?
I wish the article talked more about what Amazon and other companies can do to better invest in their communities and employees: how they can train employees for advancement, how they can proactively recognize and nurture talent instead of churning and burning through workers, how they support the community to attract better jobs and help more people, etc. it presents unionization as the only solution. I worry that unionization might increase the cost of labor and just push jobs elsewhere.<p>Perhaps I'm naive, but how hard would it be for Amazon to really commit to investing in its workforce and community rather than just strategizing to avoid unionisation? The article states they invest in schools in whatnot, but are they just doing this for political points or actually dedicated to investing in the workforce / community and helping its workers grow?
> “It’s a step back from where we were,” said Pat Morris, the former mayor, about the jobs that Amazon offers. “But it’s a lot better than where we would otherwise be,” he said.<p>That makes complete sense. /s It sounds like where you were was a city without jobs.<p>> San Bernardino is just one of the many communities across the country grappling with the same question: Is any new job a good job?<p>Yes, if you don't have a job then any job is a good job. Sentiments like this article is why people are "too good to work for McDonalds."<p>> The share of people living in poverty in San Bernardino was at 28.1 percent in 2016, the most recent year for which census data is available, compared to 23.4 in 2011, the year before Amazon arrived.<p>Something that can't be attributed to rising inflation? These are meaningless stats.<p>I didn't read the rest.
Amazon (and other companies) should just leave these ungrateful areas. I mean, San Bernardino should be thanking Amazon but instead they are complaining. Once the big companies threaten to leave and ignite a race to the bottom, these cities will come back crawling on their knees begging for jobs, any jobs.<p>It's not like worker are going to politically unite and retaliate. All (both) the political parties are controlled by 1%. Any popular movement is either squashed (Bernie) or appropriated (Trump) by this moneyed elite. Unions too are successfully stigmatized and restricted legislatively ("right to work").<p></s>
Amazon Fulfillment centers are cold calling cell phones with employment advertising. That's a $1,500 fine _per call_ under the TCPA. These poor people shouldn't apply to work for pay, they should contact a lawyer and get paid. Amazon is flagrantly breaking the law. Easy money.
I think its time that instead of reporting "what percentage of a made up number of people have jobs", and instead report "salary percentiles". 5% unemployment isn't that great if 50% of the people have a $24k/year job, and if that number is 5% of only 40% of the population because everyone else gave up.