
Amazon warehouses are ‘cult-like’ sweatshops run by robots: ex-employee - dsr12
https://nypost.com/2019/11/30/amazon-warehouses-are-cult-like-sweatshops-run-by-robots-ex-employee/
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solidasparagus
This feels like an overly negative article. Maybe it's just me, but it seems
like the author was unhappy with some pretty innocent things - stretching,
being instructed how to bend in a way that doesn't do long-term damage, having
managers that emphasized staying hydrated, having to wear gloves to handle the
merchandise. Other things seem like the normal shitty reality of manual labor
jobs - she complains that her 1 month on the job crippled her, but I didn't
really understand how it's worse than any other manual labor job.

I'm sure there's some valid problems in there, but she's so hyperbolic that
it's hard to tell what is and is not worth listening to.

> I soon learned that only difference between an Amazon warehouse and a third-
> world sweatshop were the robots

I'm going to guess she's never actually seen a third-world sweatshop.

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rpiguy
Article is ruined by sensationalism, but I’d expect no less from the NY Post.
It is a shame because I am sure there are real issues with Amazon warehouses,
but choosing an employee who took a job they are not physically capable of
doing and then focusing on her really detracts from the story.

Complaining about the cult-like “great place to work” brainwashing? Welcome to
all of corporate America...

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supercanuck
The point of the article seems to be to warn people that they are not
physically capable of doing these things and to explain the human toll of a
job like this.

Why so sensitive to Amazon?

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9HZZRfNlpR
Because people work day and day out shitty doing shitty manual labour without
people even noticing them. Having worked there fur very long the whole article
is just big whining, for some reason Amazon warehouses is a popular subject.

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supercanuck
And those people deserve to be treated with respect and dignity too.

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MiguelFCA
We do get treated with dignity and respect. In my FC I have never felt like i
wasnt. I have great relationships with all my associates. I feel like some
many news articles go for negative attention and Amazon is an easy target for
people to report on and get lots of attention.

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zaroth
Picking and placing items into these cubbies at a rate of 12/minute for 10
hours... tracking performance down to the individual item placed... Obviously
this is not really a job fit for for a human.

How long until robots can reliably do the stowing for the majority of items?

Or to alter the problem, why not require packaging to conform to certain
standards such that robots can do the job today?

$16/hr - let’s say $24/hr fully loaded - placing 600 items in a hour would be
a marginal cost for this stocking task of $0.04/item.

If Amazon was willing to tolerate $0.05/item for this particular task along
the pipeline, that would translate to 8/minute items shelved instead of
10/min. $0.06/item comes out to 6.66/min (again assuming a fully loaded cost
of $24/hr).

Adding just $0.02 of packaging obviously cannot eliminate this job, so
automation which required certain packaging would be quite wasteful.

What I don’t quite understand is why the job has to be so breakneck. I wonder
if they are limited by the number of humans who can be in the plant at once,
meaning it’s not a question of hiring more humans. Or perhaps part of the
issue with breaks is if they are limited by law to how many _unpaid_ breaks an
hourly worker can take? Otherwise I can’t see why they would care about breaks
as long as their algorithm can capacity plan by adjusting for your average
break-rate.

The only reasonable explanation is they have an expensive asset (their
fulfillment plant) where the humans are the gating factor to the total output
(deliveries) and an equation where at some point adding more humans actually
decreases total output.

None of this is to excuse creating a system which requires humans to perform
tasks in this manner though.

Amazon ships ~600 million packages per year, so assuming a human touches each
item 10 times on the way in and out, spending an extra $0.10/package makes
those human’s jobs significantly more tolerable, that’s only $60 million on
Net Income of $10 billion...

But again that calculation only works if shipment volume can be maintained
with more humans doing slightly less work each. If shipment volume falls a
corresponding amount because stocking goes from 12/min -> 10/min (16.66%) then
Amazon loses an extraordinary amount of money.

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krapp
>What I don’t quite understand is why the job has to be so breakneck.

The faster stowers, counters and pickers work, the more money Amazon makes and
the faster Amazon makes it.

It's as simple as that.

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MiguelFCA
So I work at an Amazon fulfillment center and I experience is really
different. I can go to the bathroom when ever I need and get 2 thirty min
breaks one of which is paid. We have fans in the FC the only time i ever get
spoken to about going to the bath room is when i make a conscious decision to
talk to my friends at other at stations and I take for ever to get to my
station. I dont know how other FCs operate but not of this article resonates
with me...

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IXxXI
Its weird how amazon receives more hate from the media than china which
utilizes actual slave labor on a mass production basis.

