
Amazon to employees: Quit your job, we’ll help you start a delivery business - codesternews
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/amazon-to-employees-quit-your-job-well-help-you-start-a-delivery-business/
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ThePhysicist
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.

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.

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).

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benrmatthews
This is known as IR35 in the UK and is currently being implemented in the
public sector. Will be enforced in the private sector too shortly, especially
if companies like Amazon try to pull of things like this.

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nimbius
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?

\- do they receive regular CDL related physicals that are required by DOT?

\- do they receive an automatic drug screen after an accident?

\- do they perform the pre-flight check on their vehicles before getting
underway?

\- are their vehicle logbooks and inspections current? can they produce them
if pulled over?

\- do they maintain acccurate weight, and accurate logs of vehicle
maintenance?

being a commercial driver is much, much more than just clicking "yes" on
amazon and hoping for the best.

~~~
matz1
I think the government should change the regulation (less regulation) to make
it easier for people to be commercial driver.

~~~
ljm
I’d rather the government make it more difficult for big companies like Amazon
to exploit their workers, as opposed to making it easier for workers to be
exploited.

Forcing a full-time driver into a contract role is pure exploitation, given
that it absolves Amazon of a certain level of civic responsibility (now the
contracting driver isn’t paying himself enough... and Amazon sees a nice
reduction on the payroll).

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matz1
So you want the government to actually care about its citizen well being ?
Then do something like basic income instead.

~~~
IggleSniggle
Basic income does not address the fact that many of these regulations are
required for the safety of the driver as well as other drivers on the road.
Removing those to make the job cheaper to perform and thus more profitable
doesn’t make it better for society, regardless of who reaps the profits.

~~~
matz1
I'm addressing your comment of worker being exploited (not being paid enough).

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IggleSniggle
This was my first comment, but the heart of the exploitation here is that the
regulatory burden being placed on the worker IS the exploitation, because the
related cost is hidden. Removing the regulatory burden is not the right
solution to the exploitation.

~~~
matz1
If your concern is safety then one of solution is to impose high
penalty/punishment for reckless driving.

~~~
IggleSniggle
Amazingly, people often fail to respond to negative incentives, because they
think they will be lucky enough to avoid them. See: \- heart attacks \- lung
disease \- saving for retirement \- vehicle emissions \- etc.

And, even if you can’t afford the punishment for killing another human being,
you might still be able to afford to take the risk to do so. It’s a sort of
lessor version of a free-rider problem.

Even there, this is assuming that people that take on this level of personal
liability are even _aware_ that they are taking that risk.

~~~
matz1
negative incentives works otherwise we wouldn't have it. Does it work
perfectly ? no. The goal is to reduce. To eliminate completely maybe
impossible.

~~~
IggleSniggle
Preventative medicine is the most effective treatment.

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maxxxxx
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.

~~~
yeahitslikethat
Uber doesn't work. Lyft doesn't work. Airbnb doesn't work.

Why would it work for delivery?

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maxxxxx
It works great for these companies and it will work great for Amazon.

~~~
yeahitslikethat
Exactly. It's disgusting. Totally unethical.

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docker_up
This is most certainly a trap.

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.

DO NOT DO THIS!

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spir
Interesting, I wonder if this could be used to dodge the "employee vs
contractor" problem that companies like Uber have.

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.

~~~
Infernal
Does FedEx not do this already?

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sethhochberg
FedEx Express / Freight is traditional (union) employees.

FedEx Ground are nonunion independent contractors.

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AYBABTME
That's an interesting anti-union strategy.

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mola
And in a few years we'll get to see why unions came to existence, yay. Hooray
for forgetting about history.

~~~
Loughla
Honestly, do people not learn about labor history somewhere in school?

~~~
braindouche
In public schools in the US? No, not really.

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akulbe
The picture from someone who's done doesn't look so good.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/amazo...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/amazon-
flex-workers/563444/)

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matz1
In the future everyone should be a contractor anyway. Health care should be
decoupled from employer.

~~~
jmathai
That future is not here and it's naive to think full-time and contract
employees should be the ones leading the charge :).

~~~
matz1
Future is created by what one is doing now.

~~~
jmathai
Thanks for being a trailblazer and not using any employee sponsored health
insurance.

~~~
matz1
Thanks to amazon for accelerating the way.

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giardini
Amazon once again being a corporate tool and trying to squeeze everyone else
involved: this time their employees and the USPS.

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peter_d_sherman
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.).

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).

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...

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...)

So, brilliant Amazon, absolutely brilliant!

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rtkwe
There's nothing in there about eliminating the local warehouses in favor of
storing a smattering of items locally in the partners houses/where ever. All
this is is replacing the swarms of Amazon vans (and the costs and depreciation
of those vans) with their new 'partners' vans. They're basically having people
start tiny UPSs or DHLs for a (hopefully for their sake) very small area.

~~~
peter_d_sherman
I apologize for asking, but how was it inferred from my comment that local or
other warehouses would be eliminated? To imply that they would was not my
intention. Amazon has a variety of Amazon-owned store/ship locations, that
includes Amazon's warehouses. Local partner store/ship or even just local
partner ship locations do not detract from that in any way, although, Amazon
could, at its discretion, choose a subset of products to cache at partner's
locations, IF the partners had storage space and were willing and amenable to
that arrangement...

~~~
rtkwe
What I should have said is they're not talking about the distributed warehouse
model where all these small partner companies would be storing little bits of
inventory.

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SomaticPirate
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.

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peter-m80
In Spain we call this "fake freelancer".

