> Trainers don’t seek to extract the maximum value from an athlete only to discard them if they’re hurt.
They kind of do? I get the point the article is trying to make, but they're just throwing everything at the wall to make that point, even when it doesn't really match reality.
> It’s little wonder then that reports continue to find Amazon’s comparatively high injury rates: Amazon’s warehouse workers had almost double the number of serious injuries compared to other warehouse workers in 2020, which is actually a “marked” improvement compared to the numbers from 2017, 2018, and 2019.
The article they quote says "the interpretation of the OSHA data used to classify a “serious” injury — which, in the various reports here, is defined as those that require time off or work reassignments — is skewed by what the company claims is more generous recovery time".
(I don't know whether this explanation even makes sense, though I feel it does. On an intuitive level, it feels to me that every logistics company probably overworks its employees; I don't see a reason to assume Amazon does anything that every other warehouse doesn't do. But maybe I'm wrong and Amazon is uniquely bad.)
But when they quote their own article, they get to skip the counter-claim (which the original article doesn't refute) and make it sound like their point is undisputed.
>I don't see a reason to assume Amazon does anything that every other warehouse doesn't do.
my understanding is that Amazon does do something that others don't - that is to bring extremely advanced tracking and analytics to employee performance and activity. This is of course imported as a philosophy from its side as a technology company.
I'm sure smaller warehouses / companies would like to do what Amazon does but cannot because they do not have the size and expertise to do it.
The bad part then comes that in the past warehouse work has not been algorithmically optimized as it can be now. Imagine monitoring a machine very closely, pushing it ever closer to peak performance, as you push it parts start to wear out quicker but that is ok because your monitoring catches this wearing out of parts as it happens and replaces them as needed - no one cares after all if the parts are worn out quicker, what one cares if the wearing out of parts damages the performance of the machine and due to your much better monitoring of this machine the wearing out of parts never damages the machine.
Now take a step back and imagine the parts are human beings and the machine is Amazon.
I was building walking and inventory opimization for a mid size retailer/warehouse back in 2010. It’s really not that complex. I’m willing to believe Amazon is a whole lot better, but that doesn’t mean other companies don’t do it at all.
well my assumption is that a difference in size leads to a highly different result - not that others don't do something similar but they do not do exactly what Amazon does because probably not capable.
As with a lot of "unicorn" issues, the underlying issue is not that they're uniquely bad... it's that they're uniquely huge. Amazon warehouses aren't just another workplace. They're a new version of an industry, replacing an old version. Being so big, they also have pronounced effects on corporate culture and norms more broadly.
On bad faith... I won't argue that it's in good faith, but it's about average relative to journalism generally and Amazon vs Labour specifically. Amazon's PR is not a whole lot more intellectually honest, and euphemisation is (to me) one of the most grating forms.
> I don't see a reason to assume Amazon does anything that every other warehouse doesn't do
Being one of the worlds biggest companies that wants to eat everything and everyone (considering the verticals they are expanding into) surely would give them some reason to push their employees more than others. Some logistic companies are fine with their current size and quality, while others try to grow and satisfy their shareholders, that must have some impact on how the companies also treat their employees.
Their points system in the warehouses/FCs is literally "survival of the fittest".
They hire anyone, but the "weak" get weeded out pretty fast, so only those who can sustain the rather high workload continue working there.
And tbh, everyone is built differently, some can take much more physical abuse and pain without breaking a sweat, others break down and get depressed.
I'm in the latter category, I sometimes (used to be a lot) complain about my knees and back, but then I see others with healed broken legs and arms still working, limping but doing their hard job. And I think, well, fuck me, maybe I should shut up.
Still, it would be great if companies wouldn't push people to the limit. We have one life, let everyone enjoy it as best as they can.
Depends what you mean as 'good'. They're quite serious about killing everything else: sheer Darwinist obliteration of all competition. It doesn't worry them one bit if their endgame is 'world of fired people and a few superheroes suffering terribly to work at demonic intensity until they break'. That stuff is not their problem.
I didn't even blink at seeing this article. It tracks with the whole Amazon concept, very closely.
Is there a MORAL reason for doing this? Only if you think there's some special merit in celebrating that state of human existence beyond all other ways to be, and outside of any larger systems thinking. It would work nicely in Dalek World, where it's moral to exterminate all failed humans.
In 'evolutionary world' where we draw a lot of innovation and originality from integrating unexpected viewpoints and novel ideas, the Amazon thing is a quick road to starving your gene pool of anything useful. They're actively making other, less efficient forms of human employment unsustainable, rather than just unprofitable.
It does it because it's profitable and because it can.
This is literally what a successful market looks like: a small number of much richer people at the top, and a giant pile of damaged and discarded people at the bottom.
Maybe it's time to redefine what "successful" means. If people are getting poorer or remain the same while a small number of people are getting richer, it's hard for me to understand that as "successful" in any way, unless you only think about the money.
>They kind of do? I get the point the article is trying to make, but they're just throwing everything at the wall to make that point, even when it doesn't really match reality.
They do not. A trainer's main goal is to keep an athlete healthy and capable of performing. In fact, rather than discard an injured athlete, they do the opposite: work with them to get them back to the best possible performance level.
In team sports the athletes and their team might have conflicting goals, especially if the team provides the trainers or an athlete is likely to sign a different team. Extract everything from an athlete and discard him / her could be in the immediate best interest for the team.
I don't know what to tell you. Empirically, athletes getting worked to the bone / abused by their coach who hopes the athlete will become a star and bring fame and money to them is absolutely something that happens.
Gymnastics is where the abuse is the most notorious, but it happens everywhere.
Trainers and coaches are different roles. Coaches are concerned with high-level performance ("Are you scoring points?"), trainers are concerned with physiological performance ("Is your body moving effectively for your athletic goals?"). For trainers, a broken body is the exact opposite of what they would tolerate. What you could tell me is, "I didn't understand the subject, sorry for the erroneous comment."
Trainers get paid by professional athletes (at least in individual sports), not the other way around. Also, in most cases, the athlete is the brand. The analogy is ridiculous.
This comes as no surprise. I mean, this is the same company who thinks adding little booths into their warehouses to try and improve mental health will benefit these overworked employees. They look like those suicide booths in Futurama.
Is it too much to ask for them not to treat their employees like slaves? Is it too much to ask for an eight hour work day? Actual bathroom breaks (I read their forklift drivers pee in bottles because they aren’t allowed to take appropriate bathroom breaks). All while paying them what they’re actually worth, given the work they’re doing and the level of stress Amazon puts them under?
I'm not disputing any of your other points, but what does "paying them what they’re actually worth" mean? Is there some objectively fair remuneration calculation that others are using and I wasn't aware of?
> Is there some objectively fair remuneration calculation [...]?
Lopsided power arrangements will always be grossly unfair to one side and generous the other. In this case it's Amazon vs the Precariat. Moreover, the two sides (and everyone else) will always have a very different idea about what is fair.
The best way to address this without directly getting into the vast grey-area of "what is fair" is to limit the political power of corporations and then address labor laws and union formation.
The sad thing is we've been through this before.
There's a reason labor unions came into being. Do we really have to wait until labor conditions for workers become the 21st century equivalent of Industrial Age steel mills run by robber-barrons? Can't we learn from history?
Thanks for introducing me to the term Precariat. It was quite interesting to read the Wikipedia article[0] about it now and attach a name to the phenomenon.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat
> In sociology and economics, the precariat (/prɪˈkɛəriət/) is a neologism for a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which means existing without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare.
There is an objectively fair remuneration calculation, but others aren't using it, except possibly in worker-owned cooperatives. That is, to pay workers the total value added by their labor.
But, if I understand correctly, by definition an employer would have no expected direct benefit from hiring at this salary. Are there any for-profit employers who use such a calculation in-practice coupled with some fixed multiplier (or multiplier range) for all their roles?
>I'm not disputing any of your other points, but what does "paying them what they’re actually worth" mean?
It absolutely means nothing because there is a queue of people that are desperate to accept any job. If you decide to ask for a higher salary then someone more desperate than you will take the job.
There's no objectively "fair" number, but there are far better approximations. No-one really cares if it's perfectly equitable between every employee, but they _can_ see obvious inequities harming people's lives.
Objective is overrated. There's a clear tendency towards evil when you try too hard driving bonuses and promotions on objective performance metrics. The ruthless deathmarchers will always outperform their more benign peers in locally measurable metrics.
The paperclip maximiser algorithm doesn't actually require a computer, it could run just fine on a group of humans implemented as their set of intraorganizational rules.
1) I'm assuming GP missed a negation, "not", before that.
2) Obviously if you can find workers for your compensation level that's some market definition of worth.
But I would also argue that ones society is broken if there are people who stay at a job where they have to resort to peeing in bottles because (ostensibly) they don't feel that taking 3 minutes to go to the bathroom is possible.
Doesn't amazon already pay way more than anyone else? 15usd an hour, more in most places, healthcare and a bunch of other benfits compared to minimum wage and nothing else at most alternatives...
I work out a lot. And sometimes I work hard at my software job.
But the #1 lesson from both had not been to work nonstop and burn yourself out, rather it’s to take regular breaks, slack off, and go easy on yourself. If you’re in a punishing situation, you won’t want to get back on the horse for the next big push.
Trainers recognize too that rest and recovery are important. I ran 6 miles Sunday, 2-3 throughout l, and am not running today.
My best work has always occurred in two types of situations:
1. Relaxed and unconstrained by other obligations, whereby I can creatively follow the course of the work rather than trying to jigsaw it into an itinerary that balances several other tasks, or
2. Such extreme time pressure that I get into "the zone."
Your comment touches on #1 but there is something to be said for the power of last-minute panic.
Some people work best under pressure. Effectively no one works best under constant pressure - they burn out[1]. Amazon is trying to promote the latter.
[1] There are a very small few that continue to be effective under pressure. They are worth much more than Amazon is willing to pay.
Couldn't agree more. I've tried to explain this to people before and gotten a blank stare and/or lip service. I think the problem is that the physical effects of overtraining are hard to ignore, whereas the mental effects are easier to rationalize away (although I would argue equally hard to ignore long-term).
The pamphlet is tone-deaf in light of the worker abuses at Amazon, but otherwise it's fine. It contains sound advice for staying healthy and uninjured while doing what is a physical job. It emphasises health, and not all-out performance. It contains useful information, like a bullet point about Amazon's program that gives employees a credit that can be used for buying shoes. It's not significantly different from the advice given by posture coaches and dieticians that have been brought into places I've worked as a software developer. Employers want their employees to be healthy and performant. These health initiatives are not altruistic, but also not evil.
I may be an extremist in some ways, but i have sworn myself (a long time ago where i was nearly homeless) that i will never work for amazon or other modern wage-slave-holders ... even if this means i have to go full on hobo.
I know it's optional, staying in the gene pool is optional. But in the long term, there looks like there will always be someone there to take these jobs. The ones resisting too succesfuly are leaving the gene pool and make room for the ones who really have no choice in the end.
Having kids in this world, knowing what’s coming, is to set yourself up for a lifetime of fear. Basically every friend I have with kids is terrified of what the US (and the world) will become in 10 years.
It’s specifically that things are likely going to fall to shit before the kids have a chance to become adults. And that nothing those kids will be able to do as adults will have any effect on the domino effects of climate change that will make WW2 look like a leisurely stroll through Europe.
If y’all know any Gen Z people, the generational hallmark is nihilism. Their humor is dark. There are good reasons for this.
We have close to 8 billion people on this planet. About twice as many as 50 years ago, 4 times as many as 100 years ago, and 8 times the number we had 200 years ago.
We're not running out of humans any time soon. In fact, humanity is a plague.
There are events that drastically change people's lives. Do you think every homeless (or close to becoming) family chose to me in that position and had the ability to plan long term? Maybe they were better off when they had their kids and for some variety of reasons reasons some time later ended up below the poverty line.
Individually it's optional, societally it's not. Point being, much as I'm happy the OP has an out, this is not a realistic nuclear option for most people to impose suffering on other dependents.
I never see hobos with kids. Does that mean they’re always taken care of before they actually end up on the street? Or does it just mean instant confiscation by CPS?
I'm interested in hearing what you are currently doing that is not "modern wage-slave-holder". Full time employee at any company would be "wage-slaving" and even being a freelancer is slaving for wage as well.
OK, where are the coaches & trainers, the practice & drills, the skill-building, all focused on exceptionally intense competition events that often result in a flow state?
Where are the rest & travel days after the competition?
Where are the cheering crowds & high salaries for the best? Or at least the acclaim for those who show top performance in the more obscure sports?
I've seen Industrial Athletes - a great example is the engine-building competitions at some auto racing trade events. Those guys go from a table of parts to a running 500+hp engine in 20 minutes - its amazing to see!
But they don't do that every day.
And, having competed at international levels and worked in physically demanding jobs, I've thought about the possibility of assembling high-performance worker teams. The problem is that it isn't economically sustainable. There are very few real-world situations where fewer people working faster really is required, and the extra pay and rest days required for even 80% athletic level performance makes it almost always better to just hire more and work them at a sustainable pace.
And sure, using a few tips from athletes such as staying hydrated is good, but trying to trick them into seeing themselves as "industrial athletes", without providing the support (like even bathroom breaks) is disgusting.
Yeah, compare Amazon today with Walmart from 15 years ago. Amazon FC workers make 3x minimum and have pretty decent healthcare coverage (I have the same plan, which is considered bad by other software engineers).
I think these people, many of whom grew up upper middle class, genuinely can’t understand why people would take a job that’s difficult - just see their treatment of military vets and police offers.
> Is there a euphemism for someone who keeps writing these articles and still order at Amazon?
Based? Neutral? "Not black and white mindset"? Avoiding outrage? Using the tools provided to you even though you don't like them?
Not sure, but I don't think we need to see people who have this view and perform those actions as hypocrites or whatever.
I don't like the capitalistic system we have today, but I do participate in it and exploit what I can in order to help me and others close around me. I could spend time trying to go against it, but ultimately that would make things worse for me and my closest, at least in the short-term.
>I don't like the capitalistic system we have today
It mostly boils down to the ability hire labor abroad which creates a minimum level of skill needed to compete in the US labor market. In theory companies would train their workers to reach that minimum level because they would earn more in aggregate, in practice companies pick cherries and hope that the rest educate themselves.
Being able to choose not to order from Amazon is a massive privilege that most in the middle class do not have if they want to maintain something akin to a normal life. It takes a considerable expenditure of time, effort, and money, and will have effectively zero impact on Amazon.
Even fairly widespread organized temporary boycotts have not made more than a blip for them, because they're just too goddamn big. The only remedies that will work against Amazon are government-level, not individuals either on their own or in organized groups smaller than at least a state government.
It is not hard if you are privileged enough that alternatives are within your budget—not just of money, but of time and mental effort—to seek out and continue to use.
Most people on HackerNews, with incomes well above the national median, and often sources of passive income that earn above the national median income, are thus privileged. Many, many more people are not, and to decide that what is not hard for you is not hard for anyone is a conclusion without merit.
> One thing Amazon doesn’t bring up is that athletes train for an event with a definite end date. Athletes aren’t competing day in and day out, and they have time to rest and recuperate in between. The comparison becomes even more ridiculous when you look at what a pro athlete’s day is actually like: significant time is spent warming up to avoid injuries, practice may be only a few hours out of the day (read: not in eight or 10-hour shifts), there’s time made for rest or even naps, and significant effort is spent on nutrition. It’s safe to say that most Amazon warehouse workers don’t have professional nutritionists and / or chefs taking care of their dietary needs.
It seems to me that Amazon is trying to set the expectation that their warehouse jobs are physically demanding. Other physically demanding jobs/industries are: the military, construction, landscaping, firefighting, fitness trainers, farmers, dancers, etc...
Workers in those fields aren't necessarily given time to nap, and "don't have professional nutritionists and / or chefs taking care of their dietary needs." Of course most employers in those fields don't call their workers "athletes", but most athletes outside of professional sports have perks like naps and nutritionists. I think a lot of amateur athletes have jobs, and practice and compete in their free time.
Amazon treats employees like soulless robots. This already starts when you apply there (as a SWE) and instead of talking to people you get an automated coding test.
Coding tests aren’t uncommon at all as a prerequisite to talking to a human, I’ve had them as the first step when applying to Twitter, Akuna Capital, Asana, Airbnb, Yelp (though I asked for it from a recruiter so perhaps not the same), Dropbox, Zoox, Robinhood….
Every BigCo that hires tons of un/minimally skilled workers does.
That's their whole shtick and a main part of their competitive advantage. By process-ifying everything they can use the cheapest, crappiest parts of the labor pool and still get good results. The operations that haven't abstracted away the need for employees to think somewhat about what they're doing either need to hire better labor or put up with lesser results.
Amazon's PR department is just making things worse. Same as with the zen cubicle things - it just comes across as here is your dedicated crying space & you're allotted a full 3 mins of crying time per day.
Yes mindfulness etc, but it just doesn't come across as genuine.
Among the pros and cons of mindfulness, the biggest negative they find is that it’s a great way to turn your employees into more efficient cogs.
I feel this way about every company that tries to teach their employees about mindfulness (lots of FAANGs do this as well)… they want you to be able to de-stress, not because they care about your well-being, but because they want to increase your tolerance for stress, and thus your expected productivity.
Work-from-home should really have made this whole mindfulness industry obsolete.
You no longer need to do all this crap to look sophisticated in front of your co-workers, you can just, say, pick your nose and contemplate on the gradual change in texture as you rub it between your thumb and index finger.
I'm all for mindfulness, but you don't need any fancy techniques or rituals, and you most certainly don't need to pay a subscription for it.
I think they are doing all this on purpose. With the long term goal of scaring away most of the human labor. Creating the opportunity to auto the entire process.
Is 13 miles over the course of a day really such a terrible distance? As an untrained and fairly out of shape engineer I can comfortably walk a 20km distance (in around 5 hours, with stops), and if you do it more often it only gets easier.
Humans are basically made for walking. I think there’s a lot of bad things about Amazon, but making their warehouse workers walk is not one of them.
It's not just about walking. It's about walking while carrying stuff (not in a backpack either), interspersed with other kinds of physical effort. "13 miles" is just a proxy for total effort, requiring multiplication by some factor to get an equivalent number for walking alone.
What would that factor be? A clue might be in the "400 calories per hour" number also mentioned in the story. That's nearly 7km/h at average (male) weight, or 56km equivalent during a shift. Would you feel comfortable walking 40% faster for 60% longer? Every day? It doesn't get that much easier.
Appalachian Trail through-hikers would consider 35km to be a good day. I can cover 20km in under two hours, not five, but if I did that every day I'd be seriously over-training and probably headed for an overuse injury. Requiring even half that level of daily effort for people who are not in their twenties any more, who are sleep deprived due to non-work (or other-work) demands, or who already have one or more other injuries or chronic conditions, really is a bit problematic.
I did warehouse work when I was in college. That distance is not unusual (I wore a pedometer during a shift one time - about 9 miles a shift, 12 if you did overtime). It’s actually amazing exercise and I was in great shape. Lifting 50 lb boxes, climbing stairs and walking all over the warehouse. I remember my feet swelling so much after hours of over time that if I sat down I could barely walk after getting up. But the pay was great compared to retail work.
You are 100% correct. This has been a common term in the manufacturing industry when focusing on ergonomics safety and reducing repetitive stress injuries for quite some time.
The connotation has generally been positive and was a created by the staff trying to improve safety and reduce injuries.
How come Amazon makes so much money, pays next to no tax, floods countries with Chinese junk and pay employees below living wage? How is it legal?
The system is broken.
The bigger a company, the more disposable its employees. When you quit, you lose 100% of your income, but when Amazon fires you, they lose 0.0001% of their productivity.
I think more effective would be if salaries were tied to company revenue (Not profits, as they disappear with creative accounting), so that employee gets a fair share. Offshoring work to countries without employee protections should be illegal as well.
If revenue-salaries gets company under, they could apply for tax credits.
I think unions need a reform and more accountability. Often they work in their own interest instead of employees.
Tying it to revenues sounds nice, but isn't feasible. Or, in order to make it feasible, the slice the employees get would have to be vanishingly small in order to mitigate the risk.
Legal corporate tax breaks are used to encourage incentives that we (as a society) want. We can and should continually monitor and tweak them, but as a concept they are not inherently bad - I mean, Amazon is now this enormous beast, but it's also an enormous beast that created over a million jobs.
It's really ironic that MegaTaylorism is touted as such a great "innovation."
I wonder if, like Uber is doing with transport, Amazon is scaffolding their warehouse processes so that it will be an easier transition when the day comes to replace all the wetware with robots.
Amazon really strives to push the boundaries of what is inhuman and unnatural.
There have got to be some sick people who enjoy this sort of thing.
Any sort of large company that employs actual slave labor through the American prison system has a dark character about it. Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft, and similar modern corporate giants.
It is interesting to me that The Verge quotes a union study as gospel along with a one off anecdote from Britain about peeing in bottles as some sort of official legal conviction. Amazon workers rejected unionization by huge margins. Why is The Verge writing this? Maybe ask yourself about that Union they formed….
They kind of do? I get the point the article is trying to make, but they're just throwing everything at the wall to make that point, even when it doesn't really match reality.
> It’s little wonder then that reports continue to find Amazon’s comparatively high injury rates: Amazon’s warehouse workers had almost double the number of serious injuries compared to other warehouse workers in 2020, which is actually a “marked” improvement compared to the numbers from 2017, 2018, and 2019.
The article they quote says "the interpretation of the OSHA data used to classify a “serious” injury — which, in the various reports here, is defined as those that require time off or work reassignments — is skewed by what the company claims is more generous recovery time".
(I don't know whether this explanation even makes sense, though I feel it does. On an intuitive level, it feels to me that every logistics company probably overworks its employees; I don't see a reason to assume Amazon does anything that every other warehouse doesn't do. But maybe I'm wrong and Amazon is uniquely bad.)
But when they quote their own article, they get to skip the counter-claim (which the original article doesn't refute) and make it sound like their point is undisputed.
This is bad faith journalism.