
Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness' - klearvue
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25034598
======
ck2
Average people get all upset about unions when they see them applied to jobs
that don't seem too too demanding.

But places like Walmart and Amazon are exactly why unions should exist, to
counterbalance the inhumane over-optimization and maltreatment of people.

Amazon could probably make work less toxic by hiring 10% more people, but that
would make things cost a few cents more.

~~~
csmuk
Yes and no. This subject somewhat angers me.

Yes people like Walmart and Amazon workers need protection form maltreatment.
Definitely. This should be built into the law though, not into unions.

And no because the existing unions don't really protect people. If you look at
RMT, Unison and NUT they regularly pop up just to cause trouble. From a
perspective of people having to consume services offered by their staff
regularly, they want masses of additional pay and do not improve standards
along the way _at all_. They are simply allowing the incompetent to be propped
up by the good staff. Also, the professional minority who agree that this is
the case are forced to be dragged into union ballots and vote with other staff
in favour of strike action regularly in fear of retaliation from their
colleagues.

Also let us not forget a much greater threat of exploitation: being forced to
work with no pay under the guise of "training". This is happening a lot in the
UK a the moment as the Job Centre has been pushing for people to do this by
threatening to cut their benefits if they don't do it. The result is people
being forced to work for no compensation and having to pay for travel expenses
out of their own (literally destitute) pocket. The employers don't have to pay
the staff either. The result of this is a dangled carrot of "if you do this,
after 6-12 months we'll give you a permanent paid position". This inevitably
results in being laid off as not needed immediately when they agreed to take
you on.

There are even posters going up in Job Centres telling people "try staff for
free":

[http://imgur.com/SdWpgvx](http://imgur.com/SdWpgvx)

Edit: Also I've spoken to some business associates (the sort who worship the
fully paid up Lord Fuckwit Sugar himself) and are applauding this as a great
way of building their businesses. This is simply unethical. I've been pretty
much excluded for mentioning the inevitable "abhorrent slavery" point, not
that I care.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_This is happening a lot in the UK a the moment as the Job Centre has been
pushing for people to do this by threatening to cut their benefits if they don
't do it. The result is people being forced to work for no compensation and
having to pay for travel expenses out of their own (literally destitute)
pocket._

From the perspective of the employee/trainee, the only difference I see
between this situation and actual employment is that the name on the check is
different from the name of the employer. So what's the big deal?

~~~
csmuk
That's the sort of ignorance that is promoted.

The big deal is that JSA which is the only paid amount is £56.80 a week. For a
40 hour standard week that is £1.42 an hour.

The national minimum wage is £6.31 an hour.

Not only that, the jobs in question can be literally 20-30 miles from your
residential address so travelling is not even possible.

Also, we end up paying the JSA for the business. The business sees this as
another expense avoided rather than an investment in the business. This should
not be promoted!!

~~~
yummyfajitas
That number isn't right at all. I just pretended to be a single unemployed
female with one child, and they said I was entitled to this:

Jobseeker's Allowance (Income based) £71.70 per week

Child Tax Credit £62.72 per week

Housing Benefit £115.39 per week

Child Benefit £20.30 per week

Total weekly income £270.11 per week

(This excludes the below market rent, $500gbp/month, I claimed to be paying
for council housing.)

[https://www.dwpe-
services.direct.gov.uk/portal/page/portal/b...](https://www.dwpe-
services.direct.gov.uk/portal/page/portal/ba/lp?_piref301_66309_301_66308_66308.__ora_navig=action%3Dentitlement%26pageno%3D14)

That works out to 6.75GBP/hour.

As for the incentives on the business side, I agree with you. Rather than
being private sector jobs, these should be low skill government jobs. We can
even help the budget by replacing overpaid unionized govt workers with job
seekers working for their benefits. But it's dishonest to claim that they are
paid only 50GBP/week for their labor.

[edit: I took out the child, benefits were 187 GBP/week, ignoring council
housing subsidies.]

~~~
csmuk
It doesn't work like that. As someone who has been unemployed you have to deal
with the following:

1\. Child tax credit works on your previous year's income so it can take up to
a year to get adjusted. Same with child benefit.

2\. Housing benefit takes 8-12 weeks to come through. Not only that it won't
cover most private rents inside the M25. The council waiting list is 3-5 years
in London so you'll have to go into arrears. The only way out is to stop
paying your rent and go the council and tell them you are homeless. At which
point either you or your children are split up or you get wedged in what I can
only describe as a "crackhead den" at best. My other half had to clean the
needles away before she could wash in the morning when this happened to her
(after she was made redundant and the market was suddenly saturated with her
speciality).

3\. You don't get JSA immediately. It takes 4-8 weeks for it to start.

You don't just clap your hands when you're unemployed and cash starts rolling
in. There are other concerns.

It's a fucking rough ride and not only that you have to do the legwork and
deal with government incompetence and prejudice along the way which is more
than rife.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Try to pay attention. We were discussing the "problem" of people already
receiving benefits being compelled to work for those benefits.

While it is a problem that the council allows crackheads into public housing,
and there may be problems with government incompetence, this is a somewhat
separate discussion. Tangentially, if you want to require drug tests for
benefits and kick people out of council housing for antisocial behavior, I
have no objection.

~~~
csmuk
There is nothing wrong with receiving benefits. I actually receive low rate
disability for two members of my family and child tax credit.

My point is that only the JSA covers your salary. The rest is for the care of
your children and your accommodation, some of which you still have to pay from
your JSA allowance.

You are likely to still receive all other benefits equally whether salaried at
a low rate or on JSA so the difference is moot. This is simply a case of
salaried vs JSA.

Actually people with social problems such as drug use and psychological
problems need more help than most so they should probably get more money, but
in a controlled way (untradeable LV's, healthcare etc).

------
nicpottier
"Desk jockey does manual labor and his feet hurt, story at 11"

I worked the graveyard shift as a picker at Amazon back around '00\. Back then
Amazon was so nervous about anybody introducing a bug in the site that all
software engineers were put to work either at warehouses or as customer
service agents during the holidays. I worked customer service one year and
picked for two years, both times during graveyard shifts. This involved flying
out to the middle of nowhere from the Seattle headquarters and living out of a
hotel.

Honestly, it was a lot of fun. Seeing those parts of the operation was
fascinating, and Amazon encouraged you to look for inefficiencies and offer
solutions or think about how you could fix things once you got back behind a
keyboard.

Our shifts were exactly the same as the full time workers, but they were
faster than us, especially at first. Your feet do indeed hurt and you do
indeed walk a ton, but that is more because you've been sitting on your ass
for 12 hours a day instead of actually using your body.

Yes, you are a mechanical turk in the strictest sense of the word, being
dispatched by your hand scanner to go find something and put it in a cart, but
it isn't hard work, just a bit boring. If you take it seriously and get good
at troubleshooting shortages, then you start getting to do things that require
a bit more problem solving, but even the really menial stations aren't
terribly bad.

In short, this is just a bunch of whining that manual labor is hard work and
not terribly engaging. The conditions themselves are plenty good, hard to
imagine them being better while doing the same job.

They are nothing, nothing at all like the conditions any number of people work
every day to manufacture your shoes, t-shirts and electronic equipment. You
get to move around, you aren't on an assembly line, the work is varied in its
environment.

So shut your trap and get back to picking, there's product to get out to
customers.

~~~
kolektiv
There are some rather key differences though don't you think? I imagine as a
reasonably valued software engineer you weren't likely to face disciplinary
action or loss of employment for not picking fast enough, thus negating a huge
cause of stress/anxiety. You also had the knowledge of a definite finite term
of employment followed by more relaxing/agreeable work, another rather
significant difference.

You also talk about troubleshooting shortages and getting to do things that
require problem solving. It sounds from this article (and others like it over
the last few years) that this kind of thing, if even still available at all,
is not likely to happen to your average seasonal employee.

The fact that other people have it worse in various sweatshops around the
world is hardly relevant, or particularly edifying. We are quite capable of
seeing problems as a matter of degree I would hope.

Your comment comes across as a little like the CEO who spends a day on the
factory floor and proclaims that he had a marvelous time and everyone treated
him wonderfully. Unsurprising, but hardly enlightening...

~~~
nicpottier
We were definitely measured the same as everyone else and had the same
targets, though obviously didn't face the same repercussions. The targets were
hard at first but once you got the hang of it nothing terribly difficult.

It is manual labor, I don't really understand the arguments against. Yes, it
is work, yes it is boring, but so it being a gas station attendant. The people
I worked side by side with seemed happy enough.

Maybe I lack empathy, but geez, I actually did it for a while, and you and the
other respondent didn't... so maybe another option is that the article is a
bit sensational and it isn't as bad as it is made out?

Sore feet and that it is boring and are his primary complaints.. really? This
is something to get up in arms about?

------
ada1981
Which headline is more likely in the next 5-10 years?

"Amazon improves lives of 5,000 manual pickers by introducing fully automated
robotic supply chain. Workers now free to find other employment."

Or

"Profit crazed Amazon to employ 5,000 android robot zombies, lays off entire
human workforce."

Manual labor of this sort isn't exciting or creative for most people. You
don't really have room for creativity with this sort of job unless you are
iterating on the system level -- and I'm most certain they have a way for
pickers to contribute ideas to that. Then again, people play Candy Crush saga
for hours a day and PAY for the privilege.. At least these guys get paid and
get to walk around.

Once the cost of automating people out completely is less than human labor, it
will happen almost instantly.. That is the bigger social issue folks should be
looking at -- what will we do when General Human Labor is more expensive than
General Machine Labor? Combine this with General Artificial Intelligence and
human labor becomes worth less and less.. As someone formally trained as an
Urban Planner, this was the biggest issue I saw in grad school as a rapidly
approaching social concern.

------
henrik_w
Here is another scary read: "I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave"
[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-
mcclelland-f...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-
free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor)

------
tluyben2
I worked as a picker for a few days in a large distribution facility in my
home town when I was in high school; this was over 20 years ago. They had
rails everywhere through the complex which seemed to do nothing; when I asked
what that was, they explained that they, together with the biggest IT company
in NL, made software and robots to do our work automatically. It would be put
in production the next year. It hasn't still. Why are humans still doing this
work? Surely this can be automated, especially as companies have been working
on that idea for well over 20 years, probably more?

~~~
arethuza
"Why are humans still doing this work?"

Given that Amazon is no stranger to technology I suspect the answer is that it
simply doesn't make financial sense. I suspect the capex on a standard Amazon
shipping center is probably pretty low (lease a warehouse, put in computer
systems, hire a crowd of temp workers).

~~~
waps
Take it from someone who's tried making it work : grasping is too fucking
hard. It looks so simple, a baby could do it. A hand grasping objects.

Many things that many people believe robots can do are in this category. The
absolute state of the art is balancing (not walking) on 2 legs (which does
allow you to move, but ...), and walking on 4 legs (it's not really walking
like for example a cat does, but it's better than balancing)

But the control loop for grasping arbitrary 3d objects given a camera image of
the object and the hand ... such a stupid thing is a completely unsolved
problem, and it's we're not anywhere near solving it.

Here's how amazon sidesteps that problem :
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KRjuuEVEZs&noredirect=1](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KRjuuEVEZs&noredirect=1)

~~~
emilga
On the problem of grasping, can you please comment on this video [1]? Instead
of making a robot "hand", they have filled a balloon with ground coffee beans.
"Grasping" and "ungrasping" then simply becomes sucking air out of, and
pushing air into the balloon.

Is there some downside to this that I'm not seeing?

[1]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKOI_lVDPpw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKOI_lVDPpw)

~~~
VLM
"Is there some downside to this that I'm not seeing?"

Most real world engineering problems boil down to long term reliability. Its
just assumed you'll get your statics and dynamics correct and all that basic
stuff, the actual brain power burned on the job is designing stuff that
actually works 1M times and tolerates every component being 5% off the exact
value or whatever. I think this would be a huge headache in the very long term
reliability category.

~~~
emilga
Thanks. I did not know this.

~~~
waps
What you see in that movie, the uncooked egg pickup, is becoming somewhat of a
litmus test. Trying to reliably instruct a robot to put some 20 eggs from one
basket into another without breaking any, and without prior knowledge of the
position of the eggs and so on, that'll mean a lot.

------
thelettere
I worked at an Amazon warehouse in Texas as a seasonal employee about a month
ago. It was an absolutely miserable experience - and I say that as someone who
has worked plenty of low-end manual jobs. I only lasted a month.

Shifts were 10 hours and had two 15 minute breaks and a 30 minute lunch. The
floor is large and there is no cafeteria, so it usually was more like a 15
minute break after you walked over to the breakroom and nuked lunch.

That in and of itself was not so bad - I've had food service jobs where we had
no breaks at all. But that combined with the actual job duties, combined with
the conditions, combined with rigid management, and 1984 "ministry of truth"
style propaganda - all that added up to an absolutely miserable experience.
It's very hard for me to really communicate why it was so miserable, because I
don't fully understand it myself - but I will try. But I will say that I've
spent time in prison - and I would choose prison any day over returning to
work at Amazon.

I applied online, went on an interview and started a month later. I had a few
months free and being a long time Amazon customer and admirer I thought it
would be an interesting job to check out for a little bit. I heard it was a
warehouse for just books and dvd's, and that it was a brand new warehouse that
was just opening up. I read a long PR piece talking about how Amazon had every
year changed the design of the warehouses based on what they had learned from
the warehouses built previous years. So this was a brand new design that was
supposed to be more efficient and also more thoughtful of workers.

I was assigned a shift - Sunday to Wednesday 6am to 5:30 pm. I was not given
an option, and when I finally found an HR contact a week before I started to
ask if it was possible to change shifts I never heard back from them.

So I was like whatever and went to orientation. It was me and 6 others. By the
time I left the job a month later, only 3 remained of that original group. The
first to leave and the one I got to know the best was an ex-hooters girl who
was my age (31) who was sick of waiting tables and wanted to work for a
company she could move up in.

She left a week and a half in after having severe allergies in response to the
thick coating of dust throughout the warehouse and on all the shelving we were
working "stowing" product on. It turned out it wasn't just books and dvd's -
in fact that was a small percentage of what I worked with. Mostly it was cheap
consumer goods - the kind I despise and that is slowly killing our planet. The
shelves often reeked of toiletries and chemicals and perfumes of various
kinds, mixing with the dust to inspire a sickly feeling. FYI exposure to dust
and chemicals are conductive to good health.

The job was simple: take some carts of newly shipped product and "stow" them
on the shelves: i.e. find space on the shelving where it fits and scan it into
the system so it shows up as being available and ready to ship on the online
website. It was fairly easy in some ways - the problem was doing that for 10
hours with hardly any interruption, and being surrounded by all that dust and
smell and crappy mindless consumer goods. I didn't feel good about what I was
doing. I had 3 days off, which I thought at first was great - but it would
usually take me those 3 days to just recover from what I experienced in the 4
I was at work.

(Note: if I was given some freedom as to when I did the job, or the timing or
duration of breaks, or how long my shifts were - this would not have been that
bad a job. I can put up with shit for a few hours - but not 10 without a real
break to speak of. And that was it - it was either work within these rigid
parameters or not work at all. And so I chose the latter.)

It was a mindless monotonous job, but to make matters work, all over the place
Amazon had signs saying "Have fun". Every morning and afternoon after we had
our group meeting they repeated this over and over again before we went off to
work. Trust me, no one was having fun. Maybe a few in management, but
certainly none of the direct workers. It was insulting.

I could go on, but I'm bored. I will finish with something I came across
recently, which can be compared to my experience. How bad you consider the job
depends on what you compare it to. If you believe that someone living is
misery (or, to put it more mildly, doing uninspiring and unimproving labor) is
worth it for someone else to receive at a cheap price what in many cases is an
unneedful trinket, then my point is mute. But if human happiness and potential
is valuable, then this is not a job worthy of human beings. John Ruskin said
it much better than I:

"We have much studied and much perfected the great civilised invention of the
division of labour; only we give it a false name. Truly speaking it is not the
labour that is divided; but the men: – Divided into mere segments of men –
broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that the little piece of
intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin.

"Only in right understanding on the part of all classes of what kinds of labor
are good for men, raising them & making them happy, and by a determined
sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by
the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the
products and results of healthy and ennobling labour can this evil be met."

Prior to working there, I had begun taking seriously the treatment of the
animals whose products I ate - milk products, eggs, meat ect. Part of what
inspired me to work at Amazon was to see what I was supporting when I
purchased from them.

Needless to say, I will never again buy a physical product from Amazon - and
am trying to ween myself off their digital products. We are far past the time
when such demeaning labor should be supported.

~~~
throwaway1979
Wow ... this story reminds me of Marshall Brain's Manna story.

I don't understand how much money a company would lose if they changed the
hours to 3 or 4 hours per person. Fine, they'd double or triple their
workforce and have to deal with more HR/paperwork. But the costs don't
increase. This makes me wonder if the reason is not cost but control. If
company X is the only thing in your life, you will likely be a more
"compliant" worker. This kind of stuff scares the heck out of me :(

~~~
jrochkind1
Dude, how about this line from the OP Guardian article? It kind of is Manna...

> A handset told him what to collect and put on his trolley. It allotted him a
> set number of seconds to find each product and counted down. If he made a
> mistake the scanner beeped.

> "We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we're holding it,
> but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves", he said.

------
mabbo
Signs that today is not going to be a good day:

The BBC do an article where a well respected health researcher has analyzed
the software that you write the interface for, and described it as "all the
bad stuff at once".

------
chestnut-tree
Just watched the BBC programme associated with this story. The goods pickers
are treated like automatons. The work is pretty gruelling and pretty
demoralising too.

Some interesting information in the programme:

\- The Scottish Government gave Amazon a £6.8 million grant to persuade it to
set up shop in Scotland.

\- The Welsh Government gave Amazon an £8.8 million grant + £4.5 million to
build a road for it's distribution centre in Swansea.

\- Amazon operate a points system for their temporary workers. If you gain
three points, you're sacked. A day off sick rewards you with one point
penalty. In the programme, the undercover worker was late by two minutes which
gave him a half point penalty.

Quote from Professor Michael Marmot (University College, London) who was
featured in the programme:

 _" If you say to me there are always going to be menial jobs, yes of course,
but we can make them better or worse and it seems to me that the demands for
efficiency at the cost of an individual's health and well-being - it's got to
be balanced"_

------
waps
From the article

    
    
      A handset told him what to collect and put on his trolley. It allotted him a set
      number of seconds to find each product and counted down. If he made a mistake the
      scanner beeped."
    
      "We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we're holding it, but we
      might as well be plugging it into ourselves", he said.
    

Really reminded me of this :
[http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

Welcome to the future.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Goddamnit, why do the _nasty_ predictions for the future have to arrive early
while the nice ones are always late?

~~~
pirateking
Salvation is always just around the corner, but we are walking around a
rotating platform struggling to even just keep the corner in sight.

~~~
moocowduckquack
Alongside the platform is a railway tunnel. If you walk down it to the left
you will find a bundle of disconnected wiring and a sign reading; _" We are
sorry to announce that due to unforseen circumstances and the state of the
economy, the light at the end of the tunnel has now been switched off"_. If
you were to walk in the other direction however there is brilliant
illumination, but that is just the lights of an oncoming train.

~~~
pirateking
You take the left path.

Your inventory contains: flashlight with unknown amount of battery power,
shovel, binoculars, old brass ring, matchbox, notebook, pencil.

1\. Inspect the wiring.

2\. Continue in the dark.

3\. Turn back.

------
radical_blogger
at least the british press still cares enough about the average british worker
to write an article like this.

The american press would only write an article like this if such conditions
disparately impacted minority race workers.

Pretty soon the british press will do the same.

It just gets worse and worse. I see no light at the end of the tunnel.

The citizens of america do not even ask the right questions.

~~~
camus2
Low Wage workers need to fight for their rights and working conditions. Nobody
is going to do that for them. That's class warfare, and it has never been more
important than today.

~~~
contextual
Spoken like a person of privilege, someone completely out of touch with the
challenges of the poor.

Have you considered that low wage workers may be too exhausted after working
two and three jobs a day to engage in "class warfare"? They worry about
meeting _basic_ needs for their families like rent and paying for medicines.
Their war is survival.

Please, step out of your ivory tower and help them.

