Don't see why Amazon gets singled out for drivers peeing in bottles. UPS drivers, which are members of a very powerful union also do this. Their official forum is completely filled with posts about urinating in bottles. They're not even complaining, just casually discussing, because it's an every-day part of the job.<p><a href="https://www.browncafe.com/community/threads/what-do-you-do-w" rel="nofollow">https://www.browncafe.com/community/threads/what-do-you-do-w</a>...<p><a href="https://www.browncafe.com/community/threads/urine-bottles.36" rel="nofollow">https://www.browncafe.com/community/threads/urine-bottles.36</a>...<p><a href="https://www.browncafe.com/community/threads/urine-bottles-le" rel="nofollow">https://www.browncafe.com/community/threads/urine-bottles-le</a>...<p>I guess public restrooms aren't exactly the most common thing in the world on suburban delivery routes. Don't see how this is the parcel company's fault.
My question is: Do people REALLY care about these drivers?<p>Because I get the feeling that "Yeah that sucks, Amazon should do something about it.." is generally followed by "Where's my package? I ordered it yesterday, where's my f*$#ing package?!"<p>This IS a government problem, it takes more than a few tweets to make a behemoth like Amazon to play ball and people generally only do what's in their self-interest, again where are the politicians?
Amazon is in an interesting situation. They create the delivery routes, dispatch the drivers, and set the KPIs the drivers need to meet, but if anything bad happens they can say "The driver isn't an Amazon employee so we're not responsible." If a crash occurs you often can't figure out what the contracting company was as the trucks are often unmarked and Amazon won't help as they have plausible deniability that the truck was even performing an Amazon delivery. If a contracting company is identified with a crash it often goes out of business the next day and those records are lost.
20ish years ago I was driving ingredients to restaurants. The business owners had metrics that required drivers to break speed and traffic laws in order to hand off all of the ordered goods to the customers. They never specifically ever said to speed or break the law, but the amount of stuff they piled our vans and trucks with made it impossible to deliver in the timeframes they set.<p>I was grateful to get the job, as previously I was fired from a 24x7 McDonalds store - I had used my personal vehicle to transport boxes of product from the owner's other store to meet demand after a rostered shift, and being sleepy after doing a graveyard shift plus that, woke up to the owner calling me and saying "if you can't even bother to wake up for your job, don't bother coming in again."<p>Anyway so in the first two days of my induction, my trainer taught me about driving over median curbs, waving as if you made an accidental mistake down one way streets, doing u-turns into oncoming traffic to get to a street that took a few extra minutes to get to, demonstrating the most efficient way to park the vehicle in front of the target establishment.<p>So this is nothing new. Amazon can stick it if they've just managed to commercialise it better than all the small businesses, but yeah, this has been happening since warehouses, telephones, and automobiles existed together. Just "wave and pretend" like you made a mistake, or this is normal, or whatever. Some low-level shitkicker will get the fine for parking in a fire zone, or jumping a curb, or whatever to meet targets. Alternatively, they can quit or be fired if they don't like doing that. for me having the cheese cutting guy ask constantly if I was gay and if he could shave my haemorrhoids was the cherry on the cake.<p>My heart sincerely goes out to all drivers. It is a very unforgiving task for many.