
I work in an Amazon warehouse in West Sacramento - juokaz
https://quillette.com/2019/07/19/the-problem-with-tourist-journalism/
======
vharuck
I like the author's take on warehouse work, probably because it squares with
mine. I went to high school with almost entirely white peers, was going to
college without having to take on any loans, and I got the warehouse job
because my dad worked in the offices. I met people who lived in completely
different environments and believed completely different things, and it was
awesome.

One thing I don't agree with:

>If Bloodworth believes Amazon is inhumane for looking askance at a worker who
asks for a sick day during his first three weeks on the job, then he and I
live by different work ethics.

If a person's sick, they're sick. If they're faking, they're faking. Days with
the company doesn't affect the ethics.

~~~
MuffinFlavored
Yes and no. I was once in a HR seminar where they welcomed you to the company.
When the woman said "we get 19 days PTO a year", you'd be surprised how many
people shot up and said "can we start taking them right now?"

Before they had even worked a day! PTO days are accurred by hours worked. For
me, it's ~6 hours per 15 calendar days. You think you're entitled to PTO
having worked 0 hours?...

~~~
jkaplowitz
For vacation days, your point makes sense to me. For sick days, people don't
get to choose when they get sick. Someone can just as easily get sick on day 1
or 2 of a job as on day 401 or 402.

~~~
WalterBright
I once talked to a manager about how he handed out raises. He mentioned one
engineer who was sick exactly 10 days out of each year. Coincidentally, the
company offered 10 days of paid sick leave a year.

He laughed, and said she wasn't fooling anyone, and didn't give her a raise.

~~~
lkey
So he decided he'd figured out her scam without ever bringing it up in yearly
or monthly review. He also never asked for proof of the 10 days of sick leave
after the first year, which is reasonable to do if he had a suspicion she was
flouting a rule. If he wanted to factor sick days into his pay decision, he
had a _responsibility_ to make sure he was correct using the proper internal
channels.

An alternate and equally plausible view is that she had a condition that
rendered her borderline ill more than 10 days a year, but couldn't afford to
take unpaid leave. So she just 'toughed it out' instead for the remaining
days.

Laughing vindictively as you deny a raise to someone isn't something be lauded
or emulated under any circumstance.

~~~
WalterBright
Fair enough, I agree he was being passive aggressive, but on the other hand,
if someone is doing something that has the appearance of impropriety, it's a
good idea to proactively bring it up with the boss to head off the suspicions.

~~~
chrsstrm
What does "improper" mean and who gets to decide what actions are improper?
Paid days are paid days and just because they have a certain name doesn't
change a thing. Has anyone ever been accused of faking a vacation? Of course
not, because that would be ridiculous. But since sick days are called sick
days all of a sudden you need to prove you're bedridden or else face
consequences? That's absurd. Treat your employees like adults.

~~~
zdragnar
Sick days and vacation days typically have different notification
requirements- in most places that had them I've worked at, it was 2 weeks for
vacation and asap for sick leave. Vacation time could be denied if, say, the
job involved time sensitive equipment or safety related tasks (I.e. nursing)
and others had already requested the time off.

Abusing sick leave- depending on the job- has very real consequences for your
coworkers and company, if someone absolutely has to pick up your slack.

~~~
jschwartzi
Why is it abuse if I use my PTO? The whole point of PTO is that the company is
agreeing to give you 10 days worth of slack. So obviously it shouldn't be a
problem if you use that 10 days of slack. Are you telling me that the company
is lying about the benefits it provides, and that it doesn't actually provide
10 days of sick leave? What else are they lying about?

~~~
zdragnar
In reverse order:

> Are you telling me that the company is lying about the benefits it provides,

No, I'm telling you that there's a difference in requirements for taking sick
leave versus vacation. The only reason that sick leave doesn't have the same
requirement as vacation is _you don 't choose when you get sick_. If you take
a sick day as a vacation day, you're forcing others to scramble to make up for
you not being there.

> Why is it abuse if I use my PTO?

Perhaps you missed my intended emphasis on certain jobs that have time or
safety sensitive responsibilities, such as nursing. It may not hurt the
company for you to take those 10 days, but it does hurt whoever gets called in
to fill in for you when they otherwise would have had off.

Here's a simple, real-world example: A company that runs a group-care home for
disabled adults is currently understaffed due to a number of circumstances
(the difficulty of the job being the biggest). There are four employees to
cover 21 8-hour shifts each week (24 hours a day, 7 days a week total).

If someone calls in sick, the one of the others has to cover the shift. Under
no circumstances can the house ever be unstaffed. Aside from a bit of overtime
pay, the company isn't hurt, but everyone else is.

Not all jobs are like this. The consequences of taking a sick day as a
vacation day (or simply being sick) usually aren't that severe. Maybe it's a
manufacturing line and the manager has to step in to fill your role or
something. Maybe it has no effect at all on anyone around you. In those cases,
maybe it doesn't make sense for the company to distinguish between time off
for being sick, and time off for vacation.

> The whole point of PTO is that the company is agreeing to give you 10 days
> worth of slack.

No, that's only true if the company doesn't distinguish between sick time off
and vacation time off. Typically, where I've worked, all PTO was lumped into a
single bucket, and no-one really cared. However, that is really more true of
white collar work with long timelines and not so much in most other jobs (or
the parent post I was replying to).

~~~
pnutjam
Understaffed is a management issue, not an employee problem.

~~~
tripzilch
I suppose the disabled adults living there have the biggest problem ...

~~~
pnutjam
Are they hostages?

------
vore
The author seems to very much worry that negative press is going to be the
cause of him losing his job due to automation:

>Just about every job in my sortation center could probably be done by a
robot. In fact, it amazes me that Amazon hasn’t simply automated the entire
facility. [...] If I had to guess, I’d say that Amazon continues to employ
lots of human beings because, by putting money into the pockets of working-
class people, the company creates more customers.

>If Amazon is going to be castigated publicly every time one of its 650,000
employees has a bad day, it may well decide to automate as many positions as
possible and do away with most of its human workforce.

>But if John Oliver and his ilk keep harping away at how inhumanely Amazon
treats its workers, Bezos might decide to completely automate his operation
and people like me will be out of a job.

It's as plain as day that Amazon isn't keeping manual labor around out of the
goodness of their hearts. There is no bottom line calculation other than the
cost of manual labor vs the cost of automation, and no amount of deflection
about the working conditions of warehouse work (whether better than Home Depot
or not) is going to keep your job once the scale tips in the other direction.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> It's as plain as day that Amazon isn't keeping manual labor around out of
> the goodness of their hearts. There is no bottom line calculation other than
> the cost of manual labor vs the cost of automation, and no amount of
> deflection about the working conditions of warehouse work (whether better
> than Home Depot or not) is going to keep your job once the scale tips in the
> other direction.

Be that as it may, agitating for rules that make it more expensive to employ
people can make the scale tip the other way _sooner_. It's not unreasonable to
prefer a $15 job to a "$25 job" that promptly gets automated away because the
automation threshold is currently e.g. $22 (and will be $19 in five years).

~~~
vore
That's a valid concern and I think there's no really great path forward, aside
from broad structural changes that will blunt the negative consequences of
automation: how do you balance good working conditions with the specter of
automation? If human labor forever has to undercut the cost of automation,
then we can't discount the human cost of doing so.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
The problem isn't actually automation. If a job gets automated, now the thing
being produced costs less. At scale it means you can have the same standard of
living with a lower salary -- a boon for the poor.

The real problem is when some of the things have artificial scarcity. If we
have zoning laws that prevent new housing from being built, the poor can't
afford housing. If we have restrictions on the number of new doctors and
regulations that create high compliance costs and barriers to competition in
medical services, the poor can't afford medicine.

You can't make a robot to build housing for people in a place where there is
effectively a law against building new housing. So that's where we get into
trouble -- people building moats around stuff that make it more expensive, to
prevent its cost from staying in line (i.e. declining) along with everything
else, until those things are unaffordable.

The real problem is the high cost of housing and medicine and education.

~~~
c0vfefe
> If a job gets automated, now the thing being produced costs less. At scale
> it means you can have the same standard of living with a lower salary -- a
> boon for the poor.

This is making the massively optimistic assumption that cost savings will be
passed onto the consumer rather than hoarded for executives & shareholders.

------
conorh
I had read a few of these negative articles about Amazon fulfillment centers
and then a guy we know working the counter at our local pizza place got a job
at one of them. That made me change my mind and doubt the reporting after
talking with him. The pay was much better better, the benefits if he
transitioned to full time were much better, and he was really excited about a
program Amazon has to cover tuition after (I think) a year for some
educational programs.

~~~
seraphsf
Reminds me of the classic Nicholas Kristof article, “Two Cheers for
Sweatshops”. ([http://archive.is/W6ABE](http://archive.is/W6ABE)) The gist of
which is, a job can be ‘not good’ from the perspective of the privileged but
still ‘much better than the alternatives’ from the perspective of the people
who take that job.

If the employer of a “sweatshop job” is not coercing or lying to its
employees, then I have a hard time faulting the employer directly. We may
still want systemic change to create more options and more equity for
employees, but the “sweatshop” (that pays more than alternatives and which
employees freely choose) is not the villain in this story.

~~~
hackermailman
I saw a documentary once on a slum in Kampala, where they interviewed a guy
living in the slum who's job it was to clean out the public toilets there. He
claimed it was one of the 'best jobs', because he was paid on time, given a
uniform/gloves to wear instead of having to buy one himself, set his own
hours, and the labor was not back breaking agricultural labor in the open sun
all day. He also remarked he was able to contribute to his community in a
positive way by keeping it clean, something all the other residents rewarded
him for with various tips as thanks for his service since they had to use
those toilets everyday. Wasn't the response I expected.

~~~
ishjoh
That's very interesting, I don't suppose you know the name of the documentary?

I wonder if the biggest reason he didn't hate his job was the gratitude from
other people. One of my first jobs was stocking shelves on the graveyard shift
at a grocery store, and the 1 hour or so before the store closed I would
occasionally help shoppers find things, help take heavy things to their car,
or help them reach items high on the shelf. A sincere thank you always made
the 7h of mind numbing stocking go a lot faster.

------
m0zg
I (and people I directly worked with) have been interviewed a couple of times
by what one would call "mainstream press". Once by a NY Times columnist and
another time by TechCrunch.

The resulting articles bore very little semblance to what we said, omitted
crucial facts, and contained the kinds of exaggerations that neither I nor any
of the people interviewed would ever make. I'm talking "breaking the laws of
physics" kind of exaggerations, and making it look like we said things that
not only aren't true now, but will never be true in the future, which is
something that would be immediately obvious to a technically competent person
in our field of work.

Nothing changes one's view of the press quite as readily as being a part of
the news. I'd wager the majority of what you see and read is handpicked BS
made to fit an agenda, and outright lies to drive traffic aren't as infrequent
as you think. If you think the tech press is any different, you're naive.
There's really no incentive structure currently in place for reporting to be
factual and balanced. You always get the behavior you reward.

I now always try to "read between the lines", like I would back in the Soviet
Union when reading Pravda.

~~~
reaperducer
I was going to ask if you contacted The Times about this. It used to take such
things very seriously.

Then after I did a search for the Times' ombudsman, I came across an article
stating that it eliminated its Public Editor position in 2017.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/public-editor/liz-
spayd-f...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/public-editor/liz-spayd-final-
public-editor-column.html)

While The Times is prolific in its corrections, all I can find now is this
sentence: "Messages on news coverage can be e-mailed to nytnews@nytimes.com or
left toll-free at 1-844-NYT-NEWS."

~~~
m0zg
What would be the point? We got our "free PR", and nobody reads retractions
anyway.

~~~
mattigames
Retractions are always a small corner while the original story got a full
page. They fear saying "we were wrong" too many times could affect their
credibility and therefore their (economic) bottom line.

------
awkward
I worked as a union picker for a warehouse in 2001 - I was just there until I
went to college, but if I had stayed for a year the 12.50 an hour I was making
would have been raised to 16.50, and subject to raises as I stayed longer.

Nearly 20 years later, and under a tighter labor market, amazon has raised the
minimum for pickers to $15 an hour. It's great that this guy likes his job,
but I have no doubt that amazon has been a suppressive force on waged labor.

~~~
tw2019072089237
Meanwhile, over 6 years ago, when the economy had barely even started bouncing
back, Walmart was paying me—and other newish employees with short tenure—over
$17/hr for this type of work. But look at mainstream attitudes towards the two
companies and try measuring opinion about willingness to say something like "I
bought it at Walmart" vs "I bought it from Amazon".

There's more, though. And I write all this as a pro-social, anti-libertarian
leftist:

The obsession with trying to "help" the workers in these jobs—and in
industries like Uber—mirrors a lot of the arguments you'll see in the pro-life
vs pro-choice debate. People are fond of pointing out that conservatives care
disproportionately about unborn fetuses when measured against how willing
conservatives are to let infants be thrown to the wolves after birth. I see
the public outcry that something has to be done about these companies (so as
to help their workers, but comparatively little care for what's in store for
those workers after the movement's immediate goals are met) as the left's own
paradox (to call it by a charitable term; "hypocrisy" if you're less worried
about hurting anyone's feelings).

Shouldn't be surprising. Most "opinion" is accounted for as a bunch of dumb
trends and fashion and idpol talking points more than it is arrived at by
thoughtful consideration.

~~~
dang
Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We
ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some
identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames
and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum.
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20community%20identity...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20community%20identity&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

------
bhl
Note that the publishing title of the article is “Tourist Journalism Versus
the Working Class”, which should be an indication of the author’s bias. The
story initially begins with comparing the personal, working experience of the
author with what he has seen depicted in the media. I thought it was
compelling, even if the author worked in a “sortation warehouse” instead of
the “fulfillment center” frequently covered, and only represents one
datapoint.

But then he interjects his argument with how working for Amazon has allowed
him to interact with diverse colleagues? The story felt like it went from an
appreciation of the working class to a defense of corporations and capitalism,
with a bit of nationalistic pride sprinkled in. I don’t know what to think.

~~~
floatboth
> a defense of corporations and capitalism, with a bit of nationalistic pride
> sprinkled in

About what you should expect from that awful publication.

------
noir_lord
When I was young I did agency employment for a few years between leaving
school and figuring out what I wanted to do.

A lot of that was in warehouses (I also worked in greenhouses harvesting
cucumbers 45C and 100% humidity, a paint factory moving 15l paint tins all day
- never eaten so much or been so fit, 15l tins of bitumen are heavy to
handball all day, steel plant that powder coated so hot tanks of acid and full
PPE and a cardboard box factory) and almost nothing I’ve read about amazon
surprises me much.

Warehouse work is often physically demanding and rote, same thing over and
over again, I never had a problem with that because I’d just go on autopilot
and the day would pass in a blur - never had an issue with hard work and got
multiple full time offers, I’ve always been a naturally hard worker, I always
figured I’m here for 8-12 hours day goes faster when you are busy.

It was an interesting experience and after moving into enterprise software
development served me really well when it came to producing things operatives
actually got a benefit from.

It also makes me think that TUI’s with shortcut keys are often massively more
efficient than a pretty GUI but I digress.

~~~
heymijo
> _never had an issue with hard work_

Very similar boat as you when I was younger. Lots of physical labor. No big
deal when you're young. Extrapolate that out to a decade, two decades, or an
entire career and I bet we would both be singing a different tune.

~~~
noir_lord
Oh I'm sure, some of those jobs would break you if you did them for a decade
or two, it's why I got into programming after training as an industrial
electrician, I looked at the guys I was working with who where 20-30 years
older than me (40-50) and they where messed up so I took a different path.

Again though I don't regret it, the training was useful and it taught me life
skills that are applicable to software engineering (though the stakes are a
little lower when not working with 11kV systems).

~~~
fzzzy
Serious question, you don't think programming is going to break you after a
decade or two?

~~~
noir_lord
I've been doing it full time since my mid-20's and I'm 39..so no?

------
frereubu
As David Runciman has pointed out in his book How Democracy Ends and on the
Talking Politics podcast -
[https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2017/71-how-
demo...](https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2017/71-how-democracy-
ends) \- if you could only ask one question of someone you'd never met before,
which would give you the best possibility of guessing whether they'd voted for
Brexit, it would be whether they went to university (Remain) or not (Leave).
He argues that, in the UK at least, there's a bubble of professional
politicians who all went to university and were completely blindsided by the
result of the Brexit referendum because they knew almost no-one who'd consider
(or admit to) voting Leave.

Also John Lanchester's compelling (to me) argument that the bailing out of the
banks after the crash (which was, on balance, right) followed quickly by
austerity (where everyone else unfairly picked up the cheque for the bailout)
lead directly to Brexit and Trump, because people were (to paraphrase the film
Network) "mad as hell, and not going to take this anymore!"
[https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n13/john-lanchester/after-the-
fall](https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n13/john-lanchester/after-the-fall)

It really does feel that the university crowd (which I'm a part of) have
completely detached from the lives of large chunks of the rest of the country.
I get that this account of Amazon workplaces may be rose-tinted. Perhaps this
facility is run by a good manager, and others aren't. But as it says, for this
to be a specific kind of evil it needs to be compared to all other jobs in a
similar environment. There are things that can be made better, sure, as there
always are. But I find quite a bit of this middle-class hand-wringing tricky
because it always seems to be well-paid journalists going "undercover". They'd
probably find any manual labour degrading when compared to their comfortable
Aeron chairs and plate-glass offices.

~~~
brownbat
That University disconnect is powerful and cuts across issues.

I remember hearing a freshman lawmaker talk about transitioning from other
fields into politics. The first thing campaign advisers did was cut all
references to advanced degrees from her website, replacing them with stories
about how her grandfather was a farmer.

30 Rock's Duffy--a caricature of someone unrelatable--described his politics
as "Fiscal liberal, social conservative" in one throwaway joke.[0]

I thought it was pretty clever at the time, but the college-educated writers
of 30 Rock and I probably underestimated the relatability of Duffy's position.

I read a political attitudes survey a few years later that contrasted beliefs
of constituents with representatives. It found that Republican constituencies
are far more sympathetic to large government programs and redistribution than
their reps, and Democratic constituencies are far more supportive of morality-
based restrictions and social regulations than their reps would suggest.

Maybe most of the population is far more like Duffy, but education operates as
a filter, making you either passionate about fiscal responsibility from econ
classes, or passionate about social freedom and tolerance from liberal arts
classes, or some mix of both.

That is likely to cause some friction.

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/30ROCK/comments/88ztl8/dennis_duffy...](https://www.reddit.com/r/30ROCK/comments/88ztl8/dennis_duffys_political_views/)
He naturally meant liberal in the American sense.

[1] I've done a quick review of political attitudes lit and sadly can't find
the study at the moment, will update if I find it and would welcome anyone
pointing me the right direction if this sounds familiar.

~~~
SmirkingRevenge
> I read a political attitudes survey a few years later that contrasted
> beliefs of constituents with representatives. It found that Republican
> constituencies are far more sympathetic to large government programs and
> redistribution than their reps, and Democratic constituencies are far more
> supportive of morality-based restrictions and social regulations than their
> reps would suggest.

> Maybe most of the population is far more like Duffy, but education operates
> as a filter, making you either passionate about fiscal responsibility from
> econ classes, or passionate about social freedom and tolerance from liberal
> arts classes, or some mix of both.

That reminds me of the research this group is doing/has done, which is
somewhat related to your points here. The basic upshot is that most people
really are moderate, and share more views in common than we tend to
appreciate.

[https://perceptiongap.us/](https://perceptiongap.us/)

Disclaimer: I've only skimmed that stuff, so I don't vouch for it, but its
interesting

------
ibudiallo
Last year, I was interviewed for a public radio show in Europe. There was
nothing more exciting for me to be in the spotlight. A week later they ran the
interview and it was eerie to hear myself say things I didn't remember saying.

I mean, I said it, but I didn't say it like that. At first I thought I was
crazy and didn't remember the interview correctly. Luckily, I had recorded the
whole session on my computer. I was not crazy.

The interviewers questions were rephrased, and my answers where edited to make
them more dramatic.

I had received many calls from journalists, and many didn't run the story at
all after I said I will only answer some parts Off the record.

Most often then not, the journalists already has a story when they come to
you. All they need is a quote of you saying what they already wrote.

~~~
jacquesm
That's so dishonest it isn't even funny. I was interviewed a few years back
because I built an - unreleased - search engine and the interviewer wanted me
to say some particular stuff about Google. I refused and the interview
atmosphere was definitely very much different after that. There are plenty of
good journalists but there are also a bunch of them that are complete jerks
that fabricate stuff rather than report on reality.

------
brownbat
I especially liked the points about how often we vary our criticism of
journalism based on the topic.

Reminded me a lot of Gell Mann amnesia, which I catch myself suffering from a
little too often:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-
Mann_amnesia_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect)

~~~
ajross
The Gell-Mann thing is dangerous pseudo science, stay away. It's not even
invented by a scientist. It's the excuse people go to to disbelieve something
they see in coverage, or to win arguments about "the media" or "fake news". If
you want to dismiss something as a falsehood, you have to do it with evidence,
not quips. This article is an excellent example.

~~~
jdietrich
The Gell-Mann amnesia effect doesn't say "all news is bunkum", it says "the
news media consistently make obvious errors when they report on physics, they
probably make similar errors when they report on your field of expertise, so
take what they say about other things with a pinch of salt". There's a world
of difference between cynicism and scepticism.

------
seibelj
There is similarly a great EconTalk episode from 2009 about what working at
WalMart is like [http://www.econtalk.org/platt-on-working-at-wal-
mart/](http://www.econtalk.org/platt-on-working-at-wal-mart/)

One thing I took from that episode is how so many people yearn for the mom-
and-pops to come back, even though their prices were awful, selection poor,
service subpar, working for them had less protections, and on and on.

WalMart is actually a pretty good employer compared to many other low-wage
industries and the benefits in terms of price and selection for rural areas
should not be underestimated.

------
dcre
Lots of interesting and worthwhile detail, none of which undermines reporting
about what goes on in warehouses in which the author does not work, nor does
it undermine the argument that paying $30,000 a year for full time work in
California is only possible because America maintains a permanent underclass
willing to work for next to nothing.

~~~
rb808
In which other country can unskilled workers earn $30k?

OK maybe a handful. (AUD has gone down since 2013)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#/media/File:Hourl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#/media/File:Hourly_Minimum_Wages_in_Developed_Economies,_2013.png)

------
seraphsf
I love this article. It’s so hard to find moderate voices, especially when
algorithmic curation tends to surface outrage first.

As the author puts it:

“I don’t object to journalists writing about the trials and tribulations of
Amazon employees. I only wish they would do so fairly.

Just because a journalist has found an Amazon employee somewhere who got
sprayed with bear repellant, that doesn’t mean Amazon employees spend their
days in mortal fear of a chemical attack.

...we need fair-minded and accurate reporting about the companies we
patronize, not scaremongering polemics preaching a black-and-white gospel of
tyranny and exploitation. ”

~~~
burlesona
Why would we expect journalists to write fair articles? They’re in the
infotainment business and need to sell clicks.

Reporting that working at a warehouse is “hard work but mostly okay,” is not
going to advance that reporters career or help the publication make money. But
finding a shocking and at least mostly true story, and ignoring whether or not
it’s a 1% outlier, just might.

We shouldn’t be surprised by this. What we ought to do is ignore it.

I think the biggest problem is that most people _want_ to be genuinely well-
informed, won’t accept that this isn’t actually possible, and thus accept a
lot of commercial infotainment because it provokes strong feelings, makes for
good shared outrage dinner chats with “in the know” friends, and helps you
imagine that you are well informed.

~~~
jacquesm
> Why would we expect journalists to write fair articles? They’re in the
> infotainment business and need to sell clicks.

Because if journalists stop writing fair articles in the longer term our
societies will lose a lot more than just a bunch of $ in the coffers of the
press owners.

------
fzeroracer
The logic applied in the article cuts both ways, however. I've seen my fair
share of companies find one happy employee, and use that to try and sweep all
of the bad shit going on in the background under the rug. Look at John Manson
and how happy he is. All of the other stories are just workers looking for
revenge, lazy good-for-nothings, etc.

So while it's true that the writer of this story might not be abused or
experiencing disparate work conditions, there are many others that are.

------
ilaksh
Glad to hear a different side to this. There absolutely are not any robots
that can do all of the tasks the people in the sortation center do as quickly
as they do them. Not even close. I actually think that deep learning systems
can be trained for all or almost all the fixed tasks already, but there are no
robots that have anywhere near the combination of mobility, power-to-weight,
flexibility, speed and agility necessary to replace humans in those jobs.

I think that it's going to take a new type of more effective artificial muscle
to get there.

But then absolutely all of those jobs will be eliminated.

I think Marshall Brain's books are pretty good on the subject.

------
ma2rten
_Oliver’s researchers even uncovered an incident in which a worker had died on
the job and her co-workers were told to carry on working in the presence of
her corpse._

No, they didn't. This was about a different company.

------
dvfjsdhgfv
> Apart from employing a lot of staff, Amazon does a number of things
> progressives ought to like. For instance, it employs a very diverse group of
> people. On my shift, I work with African-Americans, Asian-Americans,
> Hispanic-Americans, white people, gay people, deaf people, ex-convicts, and
> people whose ethnicities and even genders are a mystery to me.

This is a warehouse job with a medium low salary. If the author worked as a
programmer and could still repeat the above, that would really be commendable.

~~~
DrScump

      If the author worked as a programmer and could still repeat the above
    

As a programmer for a "stodgy" defense contractor, the programmers in my group
alone included our Chinese-born female project leader, a Hong Kong-born
female, a deaf male (and new parent), an African-American female, a Cuban-born
male, an Iranian-born male, a Kuwaiti-born female, an ethnic Chinese SF-born
female, and me.

And we were _awesome_.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
> And we were awesome.

That's excellent and I envy you, it must be a great team to work with and even
hang out after work. But how is this related to Amazon?

~~~
DrScump
It addressed the parent comment that implied that programming organizations
are inherently not diverse.

Too many are not, but it's not because programmers from other demographics
aren't _available_ ; it's because true diversity isn't wanted.

Look at the photos on the Careers page for your typical USA coastal tech
company. I see over and over again 22-35 year old Asian and white males
(mostly). Latino faces are rare; black faces are rarer still. And faces over
45 or so are non-existent.

------
gruez
>Warehouses, such as the one I work in, have huge cargo bays that are almost
always open to receive the back ends of incoming tractor trailer rigs. When
these bays are open it is virtually impossible to control the temperature
inside the warehouse artificially.

Why can't they section off the loading zones and put something like air doors
or strip doors to keep the cold/warm air from escaping?

~~~
sct202
The company I work for encloses the entire dock area with a giant overhang and
there's a giant door for the semis to drive thru into the warehouse. It's
totally a thing, but it costs extra. We do it because some of the products are
temperature sensitive.

------
JetezLeLogin
Everyone drinks some flavor of Kool-Aid. Confirmation bias: it's the human
condition. Do and think whatever whimsical thing you want to, then do the
cognitive contortions later to justify it.

------
Johnny555
_Warehouses, such as the one I work in, have huge cargo bays that are almost
always open to receive the back ends of incoming tractor trailer rigs. When
these bays are open it is virtually impossible to control the temperature
inside the warehouse artificially_

When I worked in a warehouse in a northern state, they kept the bay doors
closed when there was no truck there, and even when the doors were open, they
were covered by strip curtains to help keep the heat in.

Even when it was below freezing outside, it was warm enough inside the
warehouse to walk around in an insulated shirt and no jacket (~50 degrees
inside, ~20 (or less) outside).

Of course, they didn't do it for the employees, we dealt with a lot of food
products that couldn't be allowed to freeze. So climate control even in a
warehouse is _possible_ , but maybe not cheap in 95+ degree Sacramento summer
days.

------
iamtheworstdev
John Oliver did not say that Amazon had an employee die. John Oliver started
off talking about Amazon and then switched the discussion to the companies
trying to keep up with Amazon (in the order fulfillment business) which is
where said death occurred. These competitors apparently have far worse
employee treatment than Amazon but claim they have to in order to keep prices
down due to Amazon's efficiency.

~~~
hogu
I believe the specific incident is xpo logistics

[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/21/business/preg...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/21/business/pregnancy-
discrimination-miscarriages.html)

For example, last October, a 58-year-old woman died of cardiac arrest on the
warehouse floor after complaining to colleagues that she felt sick, according
to a police report and current and former XPO employees. In Facebook posts at
the time and in recent interviews, employees said supervisors told them to
keep working as the woman lay dead.

~~~
Spooky23
A relative worked in a big bank in the 80s where a vendor CE died of a heart
attack while doing maintenance on a mainframe at 6AM.

Directed by operations management, security did a “these aren’t the droids
you’re looking for” move, rebuffed first responders, who shrugged and left.
Employees in the data center were directed to go about their business. They
rolled the guy around for most of the day until someone told a bigshot of
sufficient stature to override the lunacy of the production control people.

Given sufficient empowerment and toxic enough culture, people are capable of
anything.

------
throw2016
This comes across as click bait. This is not the opinion of an actual
warehouse worker but someone with an agenda who has taken the job specifically
for that purpose which only becomes clear once you click through to read the
article. What value can this have? How can this be taken seriously?

Let Amazon workers fight for their rights, why are outsiders who do not do
that work skeptical of their concerns? What is the basis?

We are always talking about free speech, democracy and protest and yet it
seems when people use these rights a whole group of prosperous and well off
individuals who don't have anything to do the conditions of the protestors
rush to trivialize and dismiss their concerns. There is something extremely
mean and smallminded about this.

------
kevintb
I was agreeing somewhat until this part:

> “Never take a sick day during your first year of employment with any
> company, no matter what.” My wife and I have literally gone years between
> sick days.

And it all went downhill from there. God forbid this guy be struck with cancer
or a chronic disease.

------
apexkid
I for one cannot buy the fact that this article is authentically written by a
worker in Amazon warehouse. Seems like a shadowed approach from a different
segment of media to just do cleanup or take a shot on Oliver's program.

~~~
wideasleep1
So, you think this article is some shill..to what end? Just a potshot at John
Oliver? Who is this 'shadow' you perceive?

------
rainyMammoth
The issue is that John Oliver whole business is to try to make humorist
exaggerated content look like real life facts.

Every other week there is a John Oliver monologue that gets hyped and it seems
that no one looks at it with a critical eye.

John Oliver is to the left what Fox News is to the right.

------
metalgearsolid
For a second I thought nobody was going to stick up for the bajillion dollar
mega corporation.

Every employer I've worked for has had: * Billions of dollars less money than
Amazon * Better working conditions

Amazon doesn't need your voice. The workers who fear an extended bathroom
break might get them fired do.

~~~
astrange
How happy were your customers?

------
simonebrunozzi
I generally like John Oliver, although I find most of his content geared
toward a shallow journalism that I don't enjoy.

If he were an amazing man, he would read this piece, decide this critique made
sense, and run a new episode in which he corrects and fixes everything that
was not super accurate in his previous take on Amazon.

John Oliver, I know you lurk on Hacker News every day, for several hours,
under a fake username. Please, do this!

------
jccalhoun
I saw that this was a link to the quillette and wondered how they would tackle
the topic. I thought, "I bet they are somehow going to say working there is
great."

I guess if nothing else you can say quillette is predictable.

------
jrochkind1
I wonder if different warehouses could have different working conditions.

------
dang
A related recent thread is
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20485859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20485859).

------
locallost
> or that workers somewhere in Iceland (360,000) have been required to work
> around a fallen co-worker. But neither of these things, if they happened,
> would be proof that working conditions in Luxembourg or Iceland are
> appalling.

They would however be proof that working conditions in a company in Iceland
are appalling.

~~~
the8472
Not really, since they are single events you don't know anything about the
frequency and how it compares to the frequency in other locations.

The law of large number causes unusual events to happen every day, which means
the more globally your news operates the more freak events you can accumulate.
Your town newspaper regularly reporting that someone had to work next to a
corpse would be concerning. BBC world news reporting that this happened
somewhere in the world might be statistical blips.

~~~
Guest42
"The weak law of large numbers states that the sample average converges in
probability towards the expected value"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers)

~~~
the8472
Ah, I was thinking of "The Law of Truly Large Numbers"

------
SamReidHughes
Related: _The Jungle_ purportedly was a similar piece of propaganda.

------
nameismypw
It doesn't seem appropriate to discuss a Quillette article without mentioning
that it's an alt-right publication. We must not normalize it, and I strongly
encourage people to flag the submission.

A preliminary search will turn up plenty of reprehensible authors and plenty
more reprehensible articles. Posts like these are low-key attempts for
Quillette to legitimatize itself.

~~~
dang
It's penalized on HN the same way we downweight all mostly-political or
ideological publications. But such sites do come up with the occasional
interesting article, and on HN we care about the article, not the site. Same
with Jacobin or something like that.

~~~
depr
"ideological" meaning not matching the HN ideology of course

~~~
dang
Leftists think HN is rightist, rightists think HN is leftist. We moderate on
both sides of the ideological abyss, in the hope of preserving HN for
intellectual curiosity rather than ideological battle. One can't have both.

That doesn't stop anyone from perceiving bias, indeed obvious bias ("of
course"). It's the instant reflex that every ideologically committed user
experiences, but it's in the eye of the beholder. People's own views determine
how they imagine HN's bias or mods' bias—not only which polarity they
perceive, but how intensely they perceive it. If you tell me what bias you
perceive in HN, I can tell you what your own politics are. This is perhaps the
most reliable phenomenon we see on HN.

------
oneepic
...Wow. This article changed my opinions dramatically. Really thankful to see
an article like this. It puts the emphasis on irresponsible (whether it's
intended or not) journalism as a huge problem here in the US, as opposed to
all the dystopian news stories that come out these days.

Of course there are real exceptions, like stories that turn out to be true
about really bad working conditions in some places. But it particularly struck
me to see this example, of John Oliver and his team grasping at straws to put
together a damning narrative about Amazon, only for one guy with firsthand
warehouse experience to come out and tell a much more positive and convincing
story about his job.

We definitely live in a time where social media and the news tend to make us
think the world is a hellscape of things like big tech and AI, corrupt
politics, and corporate greed, all coming together to destroy our world as we
know it. I don't think the world is perfect, there's still tons of problems
that really suck (homelessness, poverty, actual corruption and greed, ...) but
I feel like we're gonna be totally fine and this is pretty manageable overall.
We'll figure it all out.

