[HN Gopher] Amazon issued 13,000 disciplinary notices at single ...
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Amazon issued 13,000 disciplinary notices at single U.S. warehouse
Author : pseudolus
Score : 151 points
Date : 2022-07-12 10:53 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| I do not fully understand what's going on.
|
| > Bryson had made 22 errors, the 2018 write-up said... If Bryson
| erred like this six times within a year, the notice stated, he
| would be fired
|
| Six is surely more than twenty two?
| bhelkey wrote:
| I read this as being put on notice. More than six _additional_
| errors in a year would result in termination.
| bearjaws wrote:
| Anecdotal but I have a friend who works at a urgent care and he
| says Amazon workers are the most common pattern he sees. They
| have to do 1 month of physical therapy at "AmCare" (their own
| internal urgent care...) and if they don't get better they have
| to get a doctors note to get put on light work duty...
|
| 5-8 people a week coming in, from ONE distribution center.
| frankbreetz wrote:
| This seems like a good thing, right? At least better then
| Amazon requiring these people to keep working. This sounds more
| like minor inquiries that are being tended to appropriately.
| bearjaws wrote:
| Working with an injury for a month before going to a real DR
| does not seem good to me.
|
| Clear conflict of interest having your own urgent care on
| site IMO.
|
| Also that 5-8 people is probably a minority of people who
| actually get injured, since most will go to the onsite care
| or quit before even making it to a month with an injury.
|
| There's probably over a 1000 injuries a year at any given
| warehouse.
| cma wrote:
| Tesla had issues with this too:
|
| "Inside Tesla's factory, a medical clinic designed to
| ignore injured workers"
|
| https://revealnews.org/article/inside-teslas-factory-a-
| medic...
| wollsmoth wrote:
| It kinda sounds like they are pushing the limits of what
| their employees can handle physically. Just seems like it'd
| be simpler to deal with less turnover and push them a little
| less. But then again I don't have an MBA.
| hn_version_0023 wrote:
| > But then again I don't have an MBA.
|
| Are you implying that the process of getting an MBA strips
| people of their humanity? IME, this seems to be true.
| klyrs wrote:
| I'm not sure you've got the causative arrow going the
| right way...
| beastcoast wrote:
| Amazon is notorious for hiring MBAs in its senior most
| ranks.
| bannedbybros wrote:
| xibo9 wrote:
| There are more than two possible scenarios other than "work
| to death" and "work to injury, constantly".
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| > This seems like a good thing, right?
|
| If your alternative is working to death I guess it is? Or was
| that a serious question?
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| But... but what kind of pattern would he expect to see in an
| urgent care servicing mostly (I assume) warehouse workers?
| bearjaws wrote:
| This is a non-amazon affiliated urgent care, these are just
| people who live near by.
| yardie wrote:
| > Amazon told the judge in Bryson's case that it could not meet
| NLRB demands in a subpoena to provide the thousands of
| disciplinary notices it delivered to employees that year, calling
| the requirement "unduly burdensome."
|
| For a company notorious for making sure that employees dot Is and
| cross the Ts I find it ironic they can't produce the same
| disciplinary records for the NLRB as they can for their former
| employees.
| amcns8 wrote:
| therealbilly wrote:
| When reading the article, I was reminded of how things must have
| been working as a slave laborer in the underground Nordhausen
| rocket factory in 1944.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Sounds like constructive dismissal.
| [deleted]
| tiahura wrote:
| derbOac wrote:
| "Supportive Feedback Document."
|
| It's like some cross between Kafka and newspeak.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| I don't know how anyone could not see this as a pretty clear
| sign of a toxic workplace. There must be a reason they named it
| that way and you can deduce a lot from that. Nothing that
| speaks well for the company.
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| How a non-toxic company should've called it? "A terrible
| fuckup notice"?
| xdrosenheim wrote:
| Amazon is not only complaining about its own workers, but also
| about their partners in other countries. They do not (officially)
| have a Danish site, but sure will deliver anything you buy from
| their German/UK site. I work for PostNord, the Danish postal
| service (possibly the largest parcel service, not sure how well
| GLS is doing these days), and Amazon has been complaining about
| our "parcel quality", because some parcels are not delivered
| within 24 hours. (Even though it might take 3-5 days to even get
| to us)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Do you want to get a union in your warehouse? Because this is how
| you get a union in your warehouse.
|
| Companies that avoid unionization (most of them, these days) make
| at least _some_ attempt to treat the workers as partners and
| human beings: pay them well and treat them well. Obviously there
| are other factors in play and sometimes that 's just corporate
| BS, but it helps.
|
| Amazon, from what I can tell from the outside, does not believe
| in that.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Ah, Amazon. I appreciate your efforts at single handedly reviving
| the union movement!
| bilekas wrote:
| > it could not meet NLRB demands in a subpoena to provide the
| thousands of disciplinary notices it delivered to employees that
| year, calling the requirement "unduly burdensome."
|
| That must be parody on the part of the legal team... The irony.
| kevincox wrote:
| > The facility had about 5,300 employees around that time.
|
| So over 2 notices per employee. It would be interesting to see
| the distribution.
| jka wrote:
| Per-employee distribution might tell one story; per-manager
| distribution might tell another.
| Someone wrote:
| Reading https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/04/a
| mazon..., 5,300 employees means they had about 8,000 employees
| throughout the year, so the good news is that it's fewer than 2
| per employee. 8 months is extremely brutal, though.
| FreqSep wrote:
| Well, the notices were over a year.
|
| Amazon has massive weekly turnover numbers so the real number
| of employees over that full year is likely well in excess of
| 5,000, putting it at least at 1.something per.
|
| Then consider it's almost certain a small number of employees
| rack up most of the notices, and I can see this happening.
| BobOfW wrote:
| If there's a forest, I can't see it with all these trees in the
| way.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| When the workers finally unionise at every warehouse, Amazon can
| rest comfortably in the knowledge that they caused it.
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| So when the workers unionize, what's gonna change? Workers will
| not be notified of their mistakes? They will not be fired if
| they make too many of those? Miscalculating the items won't
| longer be a mistake? They will pay the double of minimum
| salary?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I've never worked in a unionized place, but from what I've
| heard over the years:
|
| Firing an employee becomes much harder. You have to convince
| the union first.
|
| Employees can file grievances. If a disciplinary or
| surveillance system is considered onerous (by them), then
| they file a grievance, and much bureaucracy ensues.
|
| Pay scales tend to depend on seniority and job
| classification, not on a supervisor's idea of your merit.
| This is negotiated in the union contract every few years, as
| a rule.
|
| Major changes in how the warehouse operates have to be
| cleared with the union.
|
| Union dues are deducted from paychecks.
|
| The union can go on strike, and other unions generally
| respect their picket lines.
|
| I'm deliberately not making this seem like Heaven on Earth.
| That's probably why union elections are contentious.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| A process to respond to these notifications and mark obvious
| bs ones as bs and prevent them from being used as a strike on
| a person's record. A process to ensure validity of these
| notifications. A process to ensure AFTER deciding to fire
| someone management didn't go on a fishing expedition for
| JUSTIFICATION for the firing. Enforcement of consistency in
| firing, making sure they aren't just shotgun recording every
| possible thing so that they can use that later to go fishing
| for justification for firing someone. The manager used X to
| justify firing Peter? Enforced consistency in firing based on
| these notifications.
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| Am I reading it right then, that the key problem of Amazon
| warehouse as a workplace is inconsistent application of
| corporate policies.
| jmyeet wrote:
| And yet roughly half of Amazon warehouse workers have been
| successfully propagandized into not supporting unionization. I
| can sympathize to a degree with those who aren't subjected to
| such conditions not understanding how this works in practice (to
| be fair, a lot of Americans simply don't care if others are
| suffering straight up) but for those subjected to this? Many of
| them are _still_ temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
|
| The American Dream.
|
| Labor organization is the only effective tool against
| dehumanizing and exploitative labor practices.
| doyouevensunbro wrote:
| Or they are afraid of retaliation and losing their jobs? Amazon
| hits them with anti-union propaganda from day one. We've seen
| Walmart close locations that plan to unionize.
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores...
| trasz wrote:
| This could be easily fixed by introducing a law forcing
| companies to give out half of company's shares to the union.
| The only reason this doesn't happen is political - peoples
| votes don't matter, what matters is company lobbying.
| vanjajaja1 wrote:
| This line of thinking is so out of the ordinary for me. I'm
| sure you could fix one side of the equation by forcefully
| taking from the other... but on what ethical grounds?
| trasz wrote:
| Ethically the company is not a human, and thus doesn't
| have any inherent rights. The only rights it can have are
| those that were granted to benefit society - or because
| of corruption/lobbying.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Amazon used to provide one unit of stock to each full-time
| employee --- folks gave that up for a higher base salary
| and other compensation.
|
| Kind of silly to be complaining that the employees don't
| own enough of the company when they gave that ownership up
| as a bargaining position.
| mmcdermott wrote:
| Confiscating ownership of 50% of a company seems like a
| pretty big line to cross. I don't think it's purely about
| political imaging. That would have all kinds of ripple
| effects, both in terms of the direct results of doing it
| and of the indirect results of setting the precedent.
| trasz wrote:
| Questioning pope's infallibility used to be a pretty big
| line too, and now we know it was all just bluff; there
| was never a proper reason not to cross it.
|
| To put it differently: the law must keep up with times.
| The law we have wasn't designed for the business models
| we have today, from Facebook to Uber.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| > half of Amazon warehouse workers have been successfully
| propagandized into not supporting unionization
|
| Isn't it possible that they're adults who carefully considered
| the pluses and minuses and made their own decisions?
|
| Or are you saying a No vote could _only_ be explained by
| denying any agency to the workers?
| likeclockwork wrote:
| I don't think it's a coincidence that proles are getting
| juiced liked lemons in a country where everyone is taught to
| hate anything that even resembles socialism.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| > everyone is taught to hate anything that even resembles
| socialism
|
| And yet polls show that the younger population has a
| largely positive opinion of socialism, or at least, much
| more positive than it used to be. So is this "teaching"
| ineffective, or what?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Isn't it possible that they're adults who carefully
| considered the pluses and minuses and made their own
| decisions?
|
| Of course it's possible. It just seems unlikely that they are
| carefully considering unbiased plusses and minuses, and
| instead have been fed an astonishing amount of propaganda
| designed to massively inflate the amount of minuses.
|
| You could argue that pro-union stuff is propaganda as well,
| but it doesn't come with an underlying threat of "we will try
| to fire you if you don't support us" that the anti-union
| stuff does.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| > been fed an astonishing amount of propaganda designed to
| massively inflate the amount of minuses
|
| Can you demonstrate that the pro-union forces are prevented
| from countering this propaganda, calling it "lies," etc.?
| In other words, maybe the workers heard the other side and
| didn't agree. Is that not allowed?
|
| As for the "underlying threat" -- how is it "underlying"?
| Aren't the union elections by secret ballot? Are you saying
| they're not really secret, or what?
| sithadmin wrote:
| Unsurprising. I've been told by a relative that worked in an
| Amazon warehouse that the camera systems overhead (not dissimilar
| to the type you see in Amazon Go / Amazon Fresh retail stores)
| are used to issue disciplinary warnings, and it's pretty easy to
| get issued a warning for completely normal exception-handling
| behavior.
|
| For instance, the shelved/dry goods sections of Fresh warehouses
| are notorious for being a trainwreck, with items sort of strewn
| in the general area of where the inventory/pick list says they
| should be, rather than being neatly arranged. If an employee on
| picker duty stands around browsing a shelf too long to find the
| item they're supposed to grab (but can't find it, because it's
| been shuffled several feet down the shelf)...the cameras
| monitoring generates an automated warning that goes to your
| management. Mark the item as out of stock / missing from
| inventory instead? Get a warning when someone else finds it and
| scans it later that day, or when inventory is next reconciled.
| It's a no-win situation.
| Anderkent wrote:
| Given that, are the warnings a serious issue? If management
| keeps getting those and knows the workers are not at fault in
| this particular warehouse, the only reason to act on the
| warnings is political. which yes, might well be an issue, but
| just the number of warnings issued is meaningless without
| knowing how they're acted upon.
| sithadmin wrote:
| From what I've been told, yes, they're serious. Accumulate
| enough warnings of a certain type, and you're automatically
| removed from the scheduled and queued for termination, from
| what I've been told. Local management isn't empowered to do
| anything about it, and as a warehouse employee you're
| basically relegated to making an appeal to an automated
| system.
| Anderkent wrote:
| yeah, mid management being incompetent and not noticing
| that the metrics are fucked up for a location i can totally
| believe. hopefully after some time with outlier retention
| issues the facility would get some attention from someone
| competent? ;/
| frou_dh wrote:
| Maybe I'm imagining it, but I vaguely recall reading
| something about Amazon workers being fired in a fully
| automated fashion. So there is not necessarily always a human
| manager reviewing all the automated warnings and pondering
| their validity.
| toofy wrote:
| we just had the news yesterday of the fairly large youtube
| channel that was automatically permanently closed due to
| false dmca claims.
|
| it would be fascinating to see if anyone were thoroughly
| outraged by the automated failures in youtube's dmca
| channel closure system yet defend amazon automating the
| firing of workers.
|
| i'm guessing we'd find more than a few people defending one
| while being outraged by the other.
|
| at the end of the day we need to consider that maybe we
| need to put more resources towards _human_ intervention in
| certain areas where automation seems to be causing harm
| needlessly to quite a few people where the path to rectify
| the situation seems anything but clear.
| kitanata wrote:
| Selective enforcement is one of the principal ways that
| workers experience discrimination in the workplace. Remember
| that Amazon doesn't fire people for unionization, or because
| they are black or transgendered. They fire them for
| disciplinary reasons that are completely "normal" and
| "typical" as under-performers. This kind of system of
| "feedback" is a weapon and it is absolutely used to that
| affect in every place where it is implemented to the degree
| that Amazon does.
|
| Can we please stop be apologists to giant profit-driven
| organizations and start maybe... just maybe... empathizing
| with people instead?
| treis wrote:
| >Selective enforcement is one of the principal ways that
| workers experience discrimination in the workplace.
|
| Amazon is creating an extremely detailed paper trail of
| their enforcement actions. It'd be trivial to show that, as
| an example, on average black workers got fired for 3 errors
| while white ones were fired for 5.
|
| The warnings seem mostly fair too. Counting 19 items when
| there we 20 in a bin during inventory as an example. I can
| see why some look at this as dystopian but this sort of
| objective measurement is pretty darn appealing. If we had a
| programming equivalent I think it'd make my life better by
| weeding out the bullshitters and those that fake
| productivity by creating complicated solutions.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| Yeah what could go wrong when technocrats try to
| completely remove subjectivity from the world and
| optimize everyone's life and work towards some completely
| arbitrary measure so that my shitty things can get
| delivered 0.002 seconds faster.
|
| I'm not sure if you've ever had a job where you worked to
| specific metrics exclusively, but it make's everyone's
| life worse and it makes the product/service worse.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| You prefer getting vaguer metrics to work towards? Sucky
| and misaimed metrics exist with the qualatative too.
| Blaming quantitative efforts is misplaced. Subjectivity
| is not your friend.
| Anderkent wrote:
| pretty sure we've all been in school, and while it's not
| a great experience, you can work with it
|
| i'm pretty sure amazon's optimizing the work more so that
| my shitty thing gets delivered at all, rather than 0.002
| seconds faster. which is very valueable to me, as it
| happens
| skrtskrt wrote:
| As it happens your stuff still gets delivered when
| workers are unionized and treated like human beings
| djbebs wrote:
| If that's the case why are Amazon's competitors not as
| successful as Amazon?
| yurishimo wrote:
| Amazons competitors in America*
|
| In Europe, Amazon has plenty of competitors found in
| regional companies (CoolBlue in NL/BE) and they seem to
| deliver within a day or two just fine.
| treis wrote:
| Because there's no objective metric for programmer
| productivity.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Amazon as an organization doesn't care who you are or what
| demographic groups you belong to so long as the ROI of your
| continued employment is in the same ballpark as everyone
| else with your job title.
|
| You remove the metrics and then anyone who has the
| authority to fire people for poor performance gains the
| ability to fire people for personal bias reasons while
| saying it's for performance reasons.
|
| The whole point of the metrics is that it makes it harder
| to make decisions that are bad for the company (like firing
| otherwise productive people because you don't like them)
| under the guise of them being good for the company. Because
| of the metrics people with the authority to do influence
| hiring and firing at scale can't fire protected
| demographics without leaving an incriminating paper trail
| and getting told by legal to knock it off. Nor those people
| put their thumb on the scale fire non-protected
| demographics before some MBA sees what's going on and tells
| them to knock it off because they're leaving money on the
| table.
|
| Literally none of the bad stuff you have described is made
| better by removing performance tracking and much of it is
| made worse. Go read about what working for BigCo was like
| for members of race/religious/political groups in the first
| half of the 20th century if you don't believe me.
|
| Maybe think through your comment before you call everyone
| corporate apologists.
| incogitomode wrote:
| Is your corporate apology coming from personal experience
| in Amazon or another "BigCo" where you can cite actual
| instances where a massive corpus of petty infractions has
| protected line workers from the malicious "people with
| the authority"?
|
| Otherwise the parent commenter's conjecture as to how
| this surveillance system functions in reality is about as
| good and useful and thoughtful as your own. Maybe worth
| keeping in mind.
| lalopalota wrote:
| That is the whole point of the parent comment: if
| everyone gets a plethora of warnings for normal
| occurrences (poorly implemented performamce metrics),
| then anyone can be fired for non-discriminatory reasons
| (backed by data!!) when the real reason for firing is
| something else (unionizing, protected class, workplace
| politics, etc.). Selective enforcment allows for non-
| provable discrimination.
| buck4roo wrote:
| 1000 times, this.
| galdosdi wrote:
| You probably don't realize this, but (in the USA) it's
| very illegal (although unevenly enforced) to actively
| prevent your employees from unionizing. This is because
| there is a huge incentive to prevent it, because as an
| employer you can keep wages lower that way. Because of
| this, to use your own clinical language "the ROI of your
| continued employment" is very negative if you might help
| start a union. But it isn't actually legal to act on this
| information.
|
| So yeah, Amazon is absolutely trying to play the same
| game many big companies do, which is hamper union
| formation as much as possible without actually getting in
| too much trouble. Having all employees officially have
| bad performance warnings (which can then be acted upon if
| you see them unionizing) is one great tool in the toolbox
| of the union suppressor.
| badRNG wrote:
| Even if Amazon gets in trouble for union busting, it may
| be the case that the consequences of getting caught are
| outweighed by the costs associated with rising
| wages/benefits/conditions for labor under a union.
| feet wrote:
| Okay? They're still doing a bad, actively harmful and
| illegal thing to their employees
|
| Who gives a shit about their profit when their workers
| are being suppressed
| Anderkent wrote:
| I empathize with people working the tough jobs! That
| doesn't necessarily mean I think the jobs must be made less
| tough, even if I'd prefer they had better options to choose
| from.
|
| A claim that the produced warnings are selectively used to
| fire black or unionizing workers would be much more
| interesting, but I don't see enough evidence to make it
| yet. It also doesn't really connect to the big headline of
| 13000 notices at one facility - if that was the purpose of
| the system, you'd hardly need so many.
| p_j_w wrote:
| >A claim that the produced warnings are selectively used
| to fire black or unionizing workers would be much more
| interesting, but I don't see enough evidence to make it
| yet
|
| That's because they've designed the system from the
| ground up to make collecting such evidence nearly
| impossible. Unless they're going to open up their books
| to you, how would you see such evidence?
| hourago wrote:
| > That doesn't necessarily mean I think the jobs must be
| made less tough
|
| Humans get injuries, psychological damage, and that
| translates to families and society.
|
| To make jobs insufferable just because Amazon can is
| horrifying. And society will pay for it even if Amazon is
| the only one profiting.
| spoils19 wrote:
| Conservative towns have had tough jobs for decades and
| we're better aligned and more stable than many liberal
| towns who desire for easier jobs.
|
| Sometimes it's better for people to suck it up and tough
| it out.
| feet wrote:
| What the hell does it have to do with politics
|
| Your statement is the definition of cucked by capitalism
| panarky wrote:
| You don't need fancy machine vision when you can just count
| events in a database.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Amazon seems to be hiring the wrong people for the job. They
| are hiring humans when they really are looking to hire robots.
| WillAdams wrote:
| I dunno.
|
| I worked part-time in an Amazon warehouse for over a year,
| then full-time for a couple of weeks in-between jobs.
|
| Once, when rolling up to a bin full of non-descript boxes, I
| was able to choose one, flip it in hand for the six-sided box
| check, and scan it to determine I had the correct box, w/o
| having to consider any of the other boxes.
|
| A trainer and a group of trainees nearby asked how I had done
| this --- it took a couple of minutes to break down the
| description from the scanner and compare it to all of the
| boxes and explain how the box I had selected was the only
| possibility based simply on a visual examination.
|
| Given how many singles Amazon ships, I'm really surprised
| that they haven't gone to a standard of just packaging on
| receipt of product, then shipping the boxes by pulling them
| and slapping a shipping label on --- it would be far more
| automatable.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| > Given how many singles Amazon ships, I'm really surprised
| that they haven't gone to a standard of just packaging on
| receipt of product, then shipping the boxes by pulling them
| and slapping a shipping label on --- it would be far more
| automatable.
|
| Because physical volume matters and directly correlates to
| all transportation expenses.
| Scalestein wrote:
| You might say they are using humans as an MVP/POC test for
| what their robots should be like. Make the humans as robotic
| as possible to see what features are really needed in the
| robots they eventually use.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > For instance, the shelved/dry goods sections of Fresh
| warehouses are notorious for being a trainwreck, with items
| sort of strewn in the general area of where the inventory/pick
| list says they should be, rather than being neatly arranged. If
| an employee on picker duty stands around browsing a shelf too
| long to find the item they're supposed to grab (but can't find
| it, because it's been shuffled several feet down the
| shelf)...the cameras monitoring generates an automated warning
| that goes to your management. Mark the item as out of stock /
| missing from inventory instead? Get a warning when someone else
| finds it and scans it later that day, or when inventory is next
| reconciled. It's a no-win situation.
|
| I would like to see any evidence you have to support any of
| those issues, because having visited an Amazon fulfilment
| center myself, I can guarantee you that the problems with
| picking items you mention literally cannot happen.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > the problems with picking items you mention literally
| cannot happen.
|
| How?
| beastcoast wrote:
| Fresh warehouses are verrrry different than the robotic one
| you probably visited. I'm not surprised at all that a fresh
| building would have those problems.
| kristjansson wrote:
| I've never been in one, but I'm imagining a Whole Foods
| without a front door or windows?
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| You're saying that you guarantee it?
|
| Congratulations. The burden of proof is now on you. Please
| prove your claim.
| gnatman wrote:
| It's pretty easy to imagine both of these things being true,
| and the one fulfillment center you visited having
| substantially less than 13k disciplinary notices. I worked 7
| years in industrial staffing for a variety of large
| distribution centers (not Amazon), and the automated
| discipline systems in place around voice-pick efficiency were
| borderline draconian.
| FreqSep wrote:
| The real question is, are there any examples of companies
| achieving what Amazon is achieving at its scale, *without*
| employing these techniques? And if so what are they doing
| differently?
| phantomathkg wrote:
| What do you want to achieve? Inhumane world for the sake
| of tiny productivity gain?
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| I think the closest you'll get is Costco, but obviously
| their distribution model isn't super comparable. (They do
| have some similarities though, especially in how they
| make a lot of their profit from a yearly subscription)
| [deleted]
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Even if the answer is a clear "no" that doesn't make this
| case acceptable.
| politician wrote:
| That's not the the real question. The real question is
| "what is the maximum amount of productivity that our
| culture will accept beyond which it considers the burden
| inhumane?"
|
| For example, in antiquity, slavery was acceptable.
| mc32 wrote:
| Even more recently, Taylorism. I mean, yeah, it's good
| for robots but not for people.
|
| When people design systems they should consider the
| humanity of such systems despite the issue of people
| knowingly and maliciously short-circuiting things.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| I never said that the punishments are not possible, just
| that the processes in place and just the basic way Amazon
| FCs work prevents the picking issues from happening.
| macNchz wrote:
| I've never worked for Amazon but have worked in a couple
| of warehouses, I'm trying to envision any system that
| involves a lot of humans working as quickly as possible
| while still making it _impossible_ to have out of place
| items...I 'd love some more detail on how this works.
| sithadmin wrote:
| There are TONS of videos and photos leaked by workers
| that demonstrate how much of a disaster some of the Fresh
| warehouses are, e.g. a particularly egregious example
| where there are dozens if not hundreds of products fallen
| from bins, smashed to bits in the aisle by picker foot
| traffic: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonUFF/comments/skmt
| to/so_disgus...
| darksaints wrote:
| I can assure you, as someone who has both visited multiple
| fulfillment centers as well has worked on the inventory
| systems that manage them, that this literally happens
| thousands of times per day.
| IE6 wrote:
| Both of your experiences are purely anecdotal but I would
| explain away the difference in your opinions as the
| difference being "someone I know who worked there" versus "I
| visited (a potentially curated) fulfillment center once".
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| To be more clear I visited an Amazon FC during the first
| week when I joined Amazon in one of their operations teams,
| in which I have then spent 4 years.
|
| There are processes in place and physical things that are
| completely different from what the original commenter says
| and those things prevent the issues (having items on
| another shelf multiple feet below where they should be)
| from being possible.
| deepspace wrote:
| A close family member worked in an FC for 3 years. They
| agree that what the original commenter said happens ALL
| the time. Maybe you were only shown a shiny new FC, but
| the older ones are often much less organized. Depends a
| lot on local management too.
| [deleted]
| camtarn wrote:
| Another ex Amazon guy here. I visited the Dunfermline FC,
| did picker training, and shadowed a picker for an hour. I
| also followed company email lists and FB groups for
| years. It became extremely obvious to me that what I saw
| in my curated experience was nothing like what I was
| hearing from the other FCs.
|
| So, even though from my experience I can't see how items
| could be 'shuffled' out of their bin by mistake (other
| than falling on the floor and being chucked in an amnesty
| bin or onto a random shelf, but that seems like a rare
| case) I also wouldn't find it super surprising to find an
| FC which just uses a completely different way of
| organising stuff.
|
| That said, I wasn't in ops. Perhaps you had a much better
| birds eye view of every single FC organisation scheme?
| More details would be greatly appreciated.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| The radio plays what they want you to hear...
| dylan604 wrote:
| >I can guarantee you that the problems with picking items you
| mention literally cannot happen.
|
| That's a very bold statement. Guarantee that something can't
| go wrong? Where do I put my money on this bet?
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