A bunch of delivery companies did this in Germany around 10-15 years ago, basically helping people to start their own companies and then hiring them back via an exclusive business partnership to do deliveries for them. By doing that they conveniently transferred all the risk and hidden costs like depreciation of the delivery vehicle, maintenance, sick & holiday pay as well as social security & retirement fees to their "business partners", which were often not able to properly understand what they got themselves into.<p>This practice also spread to other industries like cleaning and building maintenance and became so abusive that a new law was introduced to counteract it, giving rise to a new legal term: Scheinselbständigkeit (false self-employment). The law basically states that if you are a one-man business that operates exclusively for a single client over an extended period of time you will gain the status of an employee of that company.<p>Hence I'm not surprised Amazon is trying to pull this off as well, I don't think they'll have much success with it though, at least in Europe (I hope).
I always wonder if people take into full consideration this gig-economy reskin of commercial driving or not. I maintain a CDL for work I perform at a large truck service center and its involved. Do "amazon drivers" or "uber drivers" even have a commercial drivers license or insurance?<p>- do they receive regular CDL related physicals that are required by DOT?<p>- do they receive an automatic drug screen after an accident?<p>- do they perform the pre-flight check on their vehicles before getting underway?<p>- are their vehicle logbooks and inspections current? can they produce them if pulled over?<p>- do they maintain acccurate weight, and accurate logs of vehicle maintenance?<p>being a commercial driver is much, much more than just clicking "yes" on amazon and hoping for the best.
This seems like a terrible career move. You have one big customer who has full power over you. Soon they’ll get squeezed left and right. The only way I could see this work would be if they could deliver for other companies like Walmart.
This is most certainly a trap.<p>They're going to start their business, and then Amazon is going to drop the prices they pay them, and the employees will be trapped because of investment of their own money and sunk costs.<p>DO NOT DO THIS!
Interesting, I wonder if this could be used to dodge the "employee vs contractor" problem that companies like Uber have.<p>Instead of having 100k contractors that might be employees, convert 100k contractors into 40k small transportation businesses with an average of 2.5 employees each.
The picture from someone who's done doesn't look so good.<p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/amazon-flex-workers/563444/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/amazo...</a>
There is a great idea present here, which is simply this: Caching items to be delivered locally, but in whatever facilities a local delivery partner would provide (small home, small office, etc.).<p>I used to think that large retail store partners were the solution to this problem (that is, scaling deliveries beyond centralized warehouses, no matter how large).<p>But, this is clearly a much better solution because it opens a slew of additional storage/delivery possibilities to be determined by the local delivery providers...<p>It's sort of like taking a grand problem and outsourcing it to thousands of individuals or small businesses who then solve a small piece of that grand problem in whatever creative ways they can. (Also virtuous in this solution: Autonomy -- authority is presumably pushed downwards to the local providers for various package types, rather than being all centralized at Amazon's warehouses...)<p>So, brilliant Amazon, absolutely brilliant!
Sounds like Amazon is making the smart business move and outsourcing one of the hardest parts of its logistics chain to contractors. The $10,000 looks like an attempt to bootstrap the market.
I think this is Amazon saying last mile delivery is a huge concern for the company.