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.
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":
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.
But how do the low-paid and exploited workers get the kind of representation and voice that results in the law makers and policy makers hearing it?
If the workers are not valued enough to be paid well, do you think the employers themselves value the employees enough to listen?
That is the point of the union.
Some unions do indeed give the entire concept a bad rep, but the fundamentals of "workers coming together to acquire a collective voice to be heard" isn't a bad one.
The output of that voice is law. Such as equality in the workplace, safety regulations, working hour regulations, etc, etc.
Few of those laws would have come to pass without the worker being able to have a representative and voice.
I see parallels between democratic representation in society and representation against powerful employers. To some extent, given globalisation, multi-national corporations and the power of corporations in political lobbying I'm becoming more of the view that multi-national unions need to come into existence.
And not to hit the "strike" button every 10 seconds. Withdrawal of labour is a nuclear option and likely no-one will ever win when it occurs. But... to have that kind of representation and voice against corporations that increasingly cannot be held to account by sovereign governments and local lawmakers seems an important check.
We remain people. Work isn't the be-all and end-all, and people should be valued. If a business cannot sustain itself by valuing people fairly and with respect...then the business is at fault. We shouldn't create human misery, and people who work for us (entrepreneurs, leaders, decision makers in companies) do deserve a voice and representation to hold us to account and constrain us (to some extent).
1. It's not completely free to businesses or completely unpaid: the person continues to receive pay in the form of benefits from the unemployment fund, but the company kicks in 17% on top of that as a pension contribution. This is partly to ensure the company takes it seriously, and partly because making sure everyone has a funded pension is in the state's interest.
2. The job must actually provide relevant training, not just gruntwork. The company must propose a training programme and learning outcomes, and there are periodic evaluations of the company's performance in fulfilling these.
3. It's opt-in; you are never required to do it. It's an option offered to people who are deemed to be having trouble finding a job because of lack of in-demand skills. One option among several: others include vocational courses run by the municipality, going back to school for an adult masters degree, etc.
4. The benefits are at a reasonably high level, so things like paying for transit are not a problem. Minimum benefit is around $1800/mo, I think.
Who do you think is going to get these protections built into the law? Who do you think has been responsible for getting the protections we do have built into the law? It's unions. They're not perfect (no organization of people ever is), but they're a hell of a lot better than an alternative economy in which unions don't exist, all workers are atomized and disorganized and the public policy dialogue is entirely dominated by what large corporations want you to think.
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?
Currently those poor workers are cheaper than the machines that could do the same job. Once the machines become cheaper than a sustenance-wage for a human, there will be literally no jobs for those people, ever.
And than means that either by that time we drastically change our distribution of resources - where 'having a job' is not needed for living; or expect literal class warfare.
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.
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...
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?
When the recession hit, I was unemployed, but got a decent paying construction job from a friend. It involved lifting a hundred pounds at a time, working in dangerous areas (near elevator shafts, on the edge of a 45-story office tower, under cranes) in cold weather (up to minus 40 degrees celcius), and with plenty of dangerous equipment (cranes, concrete pumps, excavators, etc...). The typical work week was 70 hours of gruelling physical work, with even more hours available if you wanted them (and some people would take as many as 100 hours per week).
And that job was quite mild, compared to all the oilfield jobs people take up north, where the weather is consistently much colder, and the hours even longer.
If working at Amazon was so terrible, there wouldn't be 5000 people employed there. Or the demand for jobs there would be so low, the wages would be much higher. But let's face it, there's much worse jobs even in our western countries.
Good employers can make this kind of menial job a great place to work for many people. Bad employers can very quickly ruin it.
> 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.
Yes, bad companies don't listen to their employees. When someone sits at a machine for 8 hours a day, moving a widget, pushing a button, and putting the widget in a box for someone else, that person knows a lot about that process. They can tell you about the lighting or the draft or the position of the bin or the seat or how stuff piles up too fast for them or how they're left waiting for product.
Find these people. Reward them for their insight. Apply those tweaks.
"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."
Would you like to be a permanent 'mechanical turk'? As in... you had zero choice in the matter and no chance to change things ever? That's not 'a bit boring'... that's soul crushing (and I mean 'soul' in a non-religious sense). Studies have shown that sort of stress causes heart disease over 'good stress' (you're manning the Very Important controls).
"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."
But what if you're not very good at problem solving (quite possible if you're working in a warehouse)?... you being a human with very real needs doesn't stop because you can't 'get serious and solve problems'.
Quite honestly... from your comment, I can only deduce that you are an asshole with an inability to imagine yourself in other people's shoes.
I worked there, it wasn't that bad. The article is sensational.
You have choice. To work there or not to.
By the way, welcome to pretty much every construction job ever. And depending on your priorities in life, it's not necessarily soul-crushing. The ability to leave your job at work when you go home every evening is quite under-rated...
"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.
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).
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
Those are pretty good signs that robots in the warehouse are about to happen in a mass scale.
Also ,there are rumors that amazon is building large amounts of robots , and will launch a service in 2015 based on those(just rumors).
And to the question why does it take so long? for many expensive technologies, 20 years from talking to industry acceptance is normal.It takes time to improve the technology in reliability , cost, performance , convince industry to use it and scale it.
They are cheaper. And it keeps them occupied.
Also; I don't know much about the robots involved and what they would cost and how much prices are going to drop; seeing that humans are wasting quite a bit of space on the floor and have other issues, I'm not sure if it's cheaper? I'm sure Amazon calculates that often though , so I guess it is.
Occupied; I see that as a reason, but that's an issue anyway; we cannot keep doing it that for that reason (and they don't, but as you say). If the work can be done by machines, it will be done with machines.
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.
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 :(
> 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.
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".
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"
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.
Welcome to the future.
The 'Australia Project' part is fanciful sci-fi, but the point is clear - the work that all humans have put in for generations is being co-opted by the few in the ownership classes. Ordinary people find themselves treated more and more as replaceable machines then are finally optimised out of the process and disenfranchised entirely.
OTOH when you look at much of the non-western world, thinking about problems with concentrated ownership in a post-scarcity society seems a million miles away from the people who still need a clean water supply and a reliable source of food.
It's really not. The pre-capitalist world had a much more egalitarian international wealth distribution, with India, for example, making up a double-digit percentage of the world GDP. These non-Western poor countries wouldn't be nearly so poor if not for the same capitalistic process that is steadily leaving the Western working classes out in the cold (and now even the Chinese working classes, as they get to be more expensive than robots or Africans).
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.
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.