20200823 Links
Amazon and Union at Odds Over Firing of Staten Island Warehouse Worker
“Getting out customer orders is all they care about,” Mr. Long said in an interview. “They don’t care if you’re tired, if you’ve worked 60 hours. It’s irrelevant.”
The union’s filing says the safety violation cited as the reason for Mr. Long’s dismissal “was pretext for being outspoken against the working conditions at the facility.”
“Firing people silences other people,” said Molly Elkin, a labor lawyer at Woodley & McGillivary. “It becomes difficult to organize. But if the employee is successful getting his job back, you’re back at square one. It’s very, very important.”
Amazon’s Aggressive Anti-Union Tactics Revealed in Leaked 45-Minute Video
While warning managers that activities like threatening employees cross a line, giving personal opinions that accomplish nearly the same are within their rights. “Opinions can be mild, like, ‘I’d rather work with associates directly,’ or strong: ‘Unions are lying, cheating rats.’ The law protects both!”
“I think the parts in particular where it teaches team leaders how to subtly manipulate conversations with their team members is just really gross…”
Inside an Amazon Warehouse, Robots’ Ways Rub Off on Human
…underlying Mr. Long’s charge was the idea that Amazon treats workers as if they were something less than people — that its obsession with optimizing fulfillment centers for a world of one-day delivery requires a system of stifling routines, rules and metrics. That system can make workers feel patronized and spied on. It can crowd out personal initiative. There seemed to be something to the picture Mr. Long painted, though the problem may be less with Amazon than with technology itself.
At many warehouses, pickers walk miles each day in search of items, but algorithms provide them with the optimal route.
A picker named Shawn Chase said he motivated himself by competing with a friend in a different part of the warehouse to see who could earn the higher productivity ranking. “Last week I was 41st in the building,” he said. “This week I’m trying to be top 10.” The company has taken this logic even further in a handful of warehouses, The Washington Post has reported, creating video-game interfaces that allow workers to accumulate points and badges for completing these tasks.
“We try to eliminate any wasted movement,” LeVar Kellogg, a picker who trains other pickers at an Amazon facility near Chicago, told me. “If you have one second that’s adding to the process, it doesn’t seem like a lot. But if you do that 1,000 times a day, that’s when it starts adding up.”
This steady stripping of human judgment from work is one of the most widespread consequences of automation — not so much replacing people with robots as making them resemble robots. “The next pod comes, and a pod comes after that, and after that,” Mr. Long told me. “All day till you get off.”
The Grim Job Diary of an Amazon Worker at Christmas
When you arrive at the warehouse, the first thing you see are the words “Work Hard, Have Fun, and Make History” emblazoned on the wall. It’s like some kind of Orwellian nightmare. Every time I see it I want to fucking shoot myself. The days here are so long and dreary. You never see the sun.
He’s not the sort of person I’d normally be friends with — he’s a rugby lad, and I’m a leftie socialist — but he’s the only person I’ve met here who didn’t just want to talk about my rate. That’s the first thing anyone asks: “What’s your rate?” The level of self-surveillance is crazy. Because you know that people in the bottom 5 percent of rates are liable to get fired, everyone’s always trying to work out where their rate sits so they know where they stand.
Most of the time, you’re on your own. Every minute feels like an hour, because nothing interesting is happening. You start getting into your own head. You become weird. Words rotate around your head, and you start to feel like you’re going mad.
My manager came around today and asked me if I wanted to know my rate. I said no, but he told it me anyway! Fucker.