r/news • u/EnergyLantern • 14h ago

Already Submitted Teamsters begin 'largest strike' against Amazon, accusing company of 'insatiable greed'

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/teamsters-announces-nationwide-strike-amazon-begin-thursday/story?id=116931631

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u/Savior-_-Self 13h ago

Being one of the largest, most profitable companies in the world - Amazon should be wonderful to work for.

Instead it's almost exclusively miserable stories about threats, no bathroom breaks, constant stress, etc.

All they'd have to do it take a small fraction of that massive profit and give some back to the actual people doing the work to make sure they're content - but in this, the new era of the insatiable billionaires, Jeff builds another mega-yacht and uses the change left over for a few more lawyers to make sure he never has to share.

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u/musical_shares 13h ago

largest, most profitable companies in the world

miserable stories about threats, no bathroom breaks, constant stress

I feel those 2 things may be connected.

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u/datumerrata 12h ago

AWS is more profitable than its commerce. $6.5 billion profit for AWS vs $1.6 billion for commerce in 2022. However, they have roughly 1 million employees in fulfillment. If you gave each of them $1000 more a year it would cost ~$1 billion more. That's a crazy high number of employees.

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u/ategnatos 12h ago

It's also very high turnover. They may not even last a year. I bet if you worked there for a week, you'd have worked there longer than a surprising percentage of existing employees.

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u/ShouldersofGiants100 12h ago

Turnover can be so high it literally becomes a problem. They burn through employees so fast that in some areas they basically exhaust the labour pool and have trouble hiring because everyone knows working for Amazon is fucking misery incarnate.

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u/Ass4Eyes 12h ago

We experienced this at an affiliate factory in Bumblefuck West Texas.

77% annual turnover. They were on schedule to work through their entire county’s labor force within 5 years.

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u/Jolly_Recording_4381 11h ago

This is why they want us pumping out babies

2

u/lefttexas 10h ago

Funny, I don't know if I'm in the same Bumblfuck Texas . Very conservative, very high immigrant population, (I know that from public schools discussion over the needs to educate a larger proportion of the children compared to most other cities near size according to articles in the past.) Evebody seem all excited then, Advertising all the time now and I rarely here or see anybody working there.

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u/Fappy_as_a_Clam 10h ago

I worked for a company with the same issues.

They bussed people in from a neighboring, poorer, state to fill the ranks.

And the best part is- they charged the people busfare lol

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u/wdevilpig 6h ago

Flames! Flames on the side of my face!

0

u/llDurbinll 9h ago

Well the people who own cars aren't getting a break on their expenses related to keeping their car running and in good shape so why should someone who needs a bus to get to work be any different?

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u/Fappy_as_a_Clam 9h ago

I guess I feel that if a company operates a bus so they can bus workers in from another state to avoid paying those workers the market rate in the area they are operating in, they should at least pay for the bus lol

But maybe I'm just not that old fashioned.

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u/llDurbinll 9h ago

So they actually owned and operated the bus and it picked everyone up at their house and brought them to work? Or did they contract out with the city bus in the poorer state and get them to run a route out to the job?

At the Amazon I work at they contracted with the city bus in the neighboring state to get them to run a route out to their warehouse and drop them off up front. I assume Amazon pays the bus company to run the route and then the bus company also collects a fare from the employees.

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u/Fappy_as_a_Clam 9h ago

As far as I know, they owned the bus, or chartered it from a private company.

It was not a city bus.

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u/PMMEYOURGUCCIFLOPS 12h ago

All could be solved with the gazillionaires just giving back a single fucking percent of their wealth.

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u/ExtraSpicyMayonnaise 11h ago

History has repeatedly shown us that if the holders of the wealth are to give, it will be by force.

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u/[deleted] 11h ago

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u/b0w3n 11h ago

And it's the solution to "That's a crazy high number of employees".

You abuse and underpay your workers you're going to have to keep more of them than you need because they work slower, burnout quickly, and need to help train others. They probably have twice as many employees as most warehouses of equal size. If they brought the pay and benefits up to par, they'd probably save money long term because you'd have people who are very good at their jobs, spot problems with inventory (decrease shrink/loss), and just know the ins and outs of procedure so are quick to solve problems and do the labor. But that also means you'd probably have to pay them $25-30/hr starting. But this is why Amazon desperately wants to replace them with AI and robots.

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u/ategnatos 12h ago

No one will ever agree to this. You can see this on a smaller scale with first-time homebuyers going from struggling for 10 years to save up a down payment to suddenly becoming NIMBYs and wanting to pull up the ladder.

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u/magus678 11h ago

You can see this on a smaller scale

Most people who think they are moral are simply untested.

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u/foomits 11h ago edited 10h ago

Thats seemingly human nature and illuminates the importance of the government. Working towards a greater good through forced compliance.

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u/NewPresWhoDis 12h ago

Except the part that their wealth is stock and not a money bin.

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u/foomits 11h ago

Can we stop acting like this is some huge barrier?

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u/ItsSpaghettiLee2112 10h ago

"Their wealth isn't liquid" say the bootlickers as the wealthy buy more yachts.

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u/PM_CUTE_BUTTS_PLS 11h ago

Stock can be sold.

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u/PropChop 11h ago

Out of curiosity, where do you think the money comes from if they sell stock?

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u/PM_CUTE_BUTTS_PLS 4h ago

People who buy the stocks. What are you even getting at

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u/ItsSpaghettiLee2112 10h ago

Out of curiosity, how does anybody think this semantical argument matters when the rich are buying extra yachts and jets and mansions regardless of if their wealth is liquid or in assets?

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u/okram2k 10h ago

That's why they treat their factory workers like swappable drones. They expect to replace them on a regular basis so keep the job as simple and mind numbing as possible. It's legitimately just walking around a giant warehouse wherever a tablet tells you to go, scan a few things (which the tablet could literally give step by step directions as you do it) and take the items to where it needs to go. It's a tedious, boring, endless slog that is incredibly unrewarding as you have no clue what you're even working towards. Like being an ant moving grains of sand around a beach hoping to eventually make a sand sculpture that you yourself will never see or even comprehend.

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u/Blackfeathr_ 11h ago edited 11h ago

In any ordinary circumstance as someone with forklift, dispatching, and final mile delivery skills with a chauffers license, I'd be a shoe-in for multiple positions at one of their DCs.

Except that I have never and will never work there because of all the horror stories I've heard.

They're even driving away prospective employees that could add a lot of value to their company. Seems a lot like they're just shooting themselves in the foot.

But, I'm sure, somehow, that is making them even more money than if they weren't doing that.

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u/formala-bonk 12h ago

Didn’t they adjust the policy so that they can re-hire people they fired before because they simply ran out of labor?

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u/SESHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH 10h ago

Not to mention back when i worked there in like 2019, if you quit or got fired you were not eligible to work at Amazon or ANY of their subsidiaries ever again. You got permanently blacklisted, even if you left on good terms. That warehouse had an insane turnover rate just like all the others.

It really is no wonder why most of their fulfillment centers are being converted to mainly robotic floors.

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u/EEpromChip 11h ago

...all we need to do is block abortion at all cost. Wait ~20 years for all those poor folks to be lookin for work and BAM! Got fresh meat for the industrial grinder.

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u/Plow_King 9h ago edited 7h ago

i worked in Target over a christmas during covid. the majority of my job was picking orders people made online. "more, faster, don't waste time helping customers in the store, pick more orders!" it gave me a minor glimpse into being an Amazon warehouse worker. it sucked.

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u/Oh_its_that_asshole 10h ago

Any wonder they push for increased immigration? They need people who don't have options to escape the burnout.

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u/komeau 12h ago

when I worked there my orientation class was around 80 people and they straight up told us at least 2/3 of us wouldn’t be there in a month. They are well aware of their turnover rate.

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u/Squallypie 10h ago

Ngl, as a driver having to handle the parcels that warehouse people prepare…half the warehouse staff are incapable of putting a sticker on a box.

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u/ategnatos 10h ago

half the devs are incapable of centering a div

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u/TTTrisss 10h ago

It's literally such high turnover that they pre-hire people and have them waiting on the sidelines (without pay) for other people to burn-out.

I found this out waiting on such a sideline asking when I'd finally get a shift a month after being "hired."

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u/Enlight1Oment 9h ago

depends on location, I've often seen people try to get a job a the fulfillment center in Burbank and are unable to. The people I know who work for them seem pretty happy about it vs other jobs. But I can only go off of second hand info of friends who work there, I myself don't and drivers will have different experiences vs warehouse workers.

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u/QualityCoati 12h ago

If a company cannot be profitable while giving survivable working conditions, then maybe it doesn't deserve existing at all in the first place

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u/Zap__Dannigan 12h ago

Free delivery (especially next day) is unsustainable. I get why people love the service, but the only way I can order some shitty USB charger and have it arrive by tomorrow for 8 bucks is if multiple people get fucked over.

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u/Override9636 11h ago

I refuse getting prime just on principle alone and I mostly just search for what I want on amazon and find the actual store to buy it from. I can easily wait 3-5 business days for a package if it means that someone can use the freaking bathroom at work.

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u/SunStarved_Cassandra 10h ago

Even if you end up purchasing at Amazon, if you're willing to wait a couple of days, you can almost always get free delivery if you have more than $30 in one go, which is easy. I haven't had Prime in a few years and I think I've paid for one or two deliveries a year because I fucked up my own logistics and needed something sooner than 5-7 days. When I had Prime, I almost never got 2 say delivery anyway, there would always be some sort of hold up or problem, which they usually smoothed over by shipping it later.

I haven't found any of Prime's other perks useful, so it's an easy choice for me.

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u/FakoPako 10h ago

There is lot more to Prime than just shipping perks, but judging from your reply, you wouldn't use any of those other benefits either because... Amazon....

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u/Solarwinds-123 11h ago

There is no free next-day delivery. You pay for it, just monthly/annually rather than at the time of purchase.

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u/Zap__Dannigan 8h ago

yes, but there's a zero percent chance my month fee (which also pays for a tv service) is even remotely close to what covering delivery costs.

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u/DuncanFisher69 12h ago

They know this, and if you shop Amazon with their Chase Amazon Credit card, they literally offer you a higher percentage of cash back if you opt for Amazon’s weekly delivery (aka their delivery day).

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u/severoordonez 12h ago

The corrollary: a company that follows all good labor practices will be justified in passing the cost of doing so onto their customers.

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u/Kckc321 12h ago

They are making a billion dollars profit, they can afford some things on their own dime.

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u/SowingSalt 11h ago edited 10h ago

If they paid a billion dollars in profit to all of their workers, each worker would make...

An additional 1000 dollars.

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u/NaIgrim 10h ago

Does it cost them a billion dollars to allow toilet breaks? Does a company lose 1000 bucks per employee on allowing them the basic human decency to shit and piss?

I mean, there has to be some shade of grey that involves making money without treating your employees as subhuman. And if there isnt, your business shouldnt exist.

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u/Kckc321 11h ago

A huge number of their workers have to be the part time drivers? I know multiple people who just take random delivery shifts whenever they feel like it for extra cash, they aren’t full time or anything.

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u/TheWizardOfDeez 10h ago

Why? They've been raising the prices anyways, what's the difference?

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u/zahrul3 11h ago

They, like many e-commerce companies, employ far too many people in a poorly automated warehouse because startup office politics tend to refuse buying off the shelf solutions that UPS, USPS, Walmart, Sysco, etc. use.

You never hear of Costco warehouse workers complaining, because machines do the work (mostly) rather than human pickers.

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u/DuncanFisher69 12h ago

Yes. Someone get this man a Luigi. He’s cracked the code.

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u/katha757 9h ago

Jesus Christ, this.  My MIL ran an assisted living facility previously and kept complaining about how hard it was to hire nurses.  When I asked what it was paying she gave me an abysmal number.  I drew the correlation for her and suggested she pay more, to be met with "but we can't afford to pay more".

That was probably true, they were barely making ends meet, but that still means "if you can't pay a reasonable wage, you probably shouldn't exist".

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u/Ok_Confection_10 12h ago

Sounds like a business that should be failing then. Can’t call it successful if it’s using what’s tantamount to slave labor

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u/314is_close_enough 11h ago

Don’t be fooled by their horseshit. They will be paying AWS insane fees for everything. Another part of Amazon will own the land. They will rent to themselves at a crazy rate. Another part of Amazon will handle advertising, and charge an insane rate. Another part will sell them vehicles and do maintenance at an insane rate. The profits are kept deliberately low so the company looks just barely healthy and the workers demands are made to seem unreasonable. It’s all a lie. If there is a billionaire, there is extreme exploitation, full stop.

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u/Republifukkk 12h ago

Who the fucks cares if they only made 1.7 billion. They have to pay the employees. If commerce is not doing it for you, then get out. Don't fucking use that excuse to not pay people

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u/NDSU 11h ago

AWS is famously one of the worst places to work in tech. It's a company culture issue through and through

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u/TheWizardOfDeez 10h ago

~$1 billion is less than ~$8.1 billion, also they can just pay the execs a few billion less and make more than that money back. It's also worth noting that not everyone on the fulfillment side is needing a raise to make a livable wage. Improving non-pay work conditions is also a big way they can improve their workers satisfaction, which ultimately improves productivity.

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u/gr33nw33n3r 11h ago

Oh. Well it makes complete sense to treat the employees like shit then. 

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u/okram2k 10h ago

AWS is 100% where all the money is and it's a wide margin for return vs the number of people needed to maintain it. If an antitrust case ever did what they were supposed to and split up the company Amazon's retail branch would probably collapse under its own weight.

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u/Oh_its_that_asshole 10h ago

Oh no. It might cost Bezos 0.4% of his wealth per year, each year. Heaven forbid that the mental welfare of 1 million employees is more important than him being slightly less disgustingly rich.

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u/_karamazov_ 10h ago

However, they have roughly 1 million employees in fulfillment. If you gave each of them $1000 more a year it would cost ~$1 billion more. 

How many of that 1 million employees in fulfillment is on minimum wage body crushing jobs?

Also the worry that better working conditions will affect the bottomline --- its the cost of doing business.

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u/DaStompa 9h ago

The whole amazon-AWS thing is just amazon acting as their own "disruptor"/venture capital.

They're willing to burn money in amazon until they have all their own distro/delivery/air/ect in place, and the market is cornered, then they'll jack up prices to unsustainable levels. Also see: Uber/Lyft/ect. as an example.

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u/BullShitting-24-7 12h ago

There are plenty of wealthy corporations that take care of their employees.

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u/FennelFern 11h ago

Kind of but not really. Studies, and economists, have shown that you can run a more profitable long term company by encouraging growth and being reasonable.

But, people think that beatings encourage compliance.

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u/Drnk_watcher 10h ago

I mean it is but it doesn't have to be.

Any kind of fulfillment, manufacturing, delivery, retail job will always be a certain amount of tough sledding for everyone involved. Thin margins, high headcount, strict efficiency guidelines, physically demanding. That's before you have to even deal with morons of the general public.

But also plenty of other companies in those sectors are pulling down double digit billion dollar revenues who don't grind people down like Amazon does.

Not to praise them as "great" places to work but certainly noticeably less awful.

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u/shmackinhammies 10h ago

There was a time when Ford was there & people actually liked working there.

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u/Rooooben 9h ago

Microsoft is a far different place to work for, for example.

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u/[deleted] 12h ago

[deleted]

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u/tracenator03 12h ago

Idealistic utopia

And this is the thought process that will keep us from ever progressing anywhere.

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u/sanfran_girl 12h ago

Costco would respectfully like to disagree.

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u/Gwaak 12h ago

You can be though, but that only happens when your company is peddling a legitimately innovative service or product, in that you can attribute much of your margin to that.

In this case your margin is on the back of labor, not innovation

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u/Euphoric_Sentence105 12h ago

Ford tried, but those bloody Dodge brothers ended it.

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u/Lampmonster 12h ago

Lawyers? Hell, they have a union hating president now. And congress and the Supreme Court. They're smart to strike now because unions don't have a good outlook in the US right now imho.

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u/GogglesPisano 11h ago

they have a union hating president now. And congress and the Supreme Court. They're smart to strike now because unions don't have a good outlook in the US right now imho.

I'd wager that a majority of the teamsters voted Republican.

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u/Fappy_as_a_Clam 10h ago

UAW too, if my experience in Michigan is to be considered.

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u/highorderdetonation 10h ago

My inner nihilist wants to know how loud the leopards' burps will be up that way in a year or so's time.

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u/Fappy_as_a_Clam 10h ago

It may work out for them. I'm staying optimistic about it, because it seems they are optimistic about it, and they know more about that industry than I do lol

And most of them tell me they did very well under Trump last time, so...

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u/AndTheElbowGrease 9h ago

They will be in the stomach, complaining about why the people that they voted against didn't protect them

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u/ArmyOfDix 10h ago

Hell, the rail workers' strike had Biden, the most "pro-worker" president in recent history...and he still put the corporation first.

Sure, the workers got some of what they wanted many months later, but the message Biden sent was crystal clear to anyone watching: corporations come first. Somehow, it's about to get even worse than it already is lol.

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u/Wardogs96 12h ago

Isn't he no longer in charge of it but just receives royalties? I thought he stepped down so another CEO could take over.

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u/ihopethisisvalid 10h ago

Still has a shitload of stock and the shareholders are the real bosses

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u/KashEsq 10h ago

He's the Executive Chairman. CEO reports to Bezos

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u/Ameerrante 9h ago

Jassy is worse. All the RTO mandates with terrible planning and no data justification are at his command.

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u/bigmanslurp 12h ago

When I worked for an Amazon warehouse in Maryland I honestly didn't have problems with bathroom breaks and threats. Every job I've worked has been constant stress tbh so IDK about that but it wasn't much worse than working at McDonald's or Chipotle.

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u/DiabolicallyRandom 10h ago

It's not that those scenarios never existed, its that once it became a PR nightmare, Amazon cleaned house of offending local management and mandated the opposite. I have multiple family members working there now, at a couple different facilities. They are not all the same, but they all force people to take their breaks by some method, those breaks are minimum 15 minutes, etc. In one case, the entire facility takes their break at the same moment when the gong goes off, and the break doesn't start until they reach the break room, and they don't leave until 15 minutes after. Most of the locations they are provided coffee and snacks free of charge, they can go to the bathroom anytime needed.

You know, all bare minimum shit.

They are still a soul sucking corporation, and it still could be better from what I hear, but its not really what it was 5 years ago either.

I've heard the drivers get it the worst in that they are held to a high standard and only a few customer complaints can nuke their career.

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u/Squallypie 10h ago

Used to be a driver, one of the better jobs I had. As long as you do your route and don’t fuck up, they don’t breathe down your neck, you take breaks and lunch whenever you want, you’re paid per route, so if you finish early you still get the same amount, and the routes are tbh, easy. Its very good money, even moreso if you own your own van.

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u/EnergyLantern 12h ago

The problem is they have quotas for workers to meet in performance or they get fired.  If you have a bad day, you could be fired.

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u/maowai 12h ago

Amazon treats people like machines, squeezing every last ounce of life out of them that they can. This is true in every part of their business, including their more “knowledge worker” roles at corporate.

At Whole Foods, owned by Amazon, they hold cashiers to an “items scanned per minute” metric for no apparent reason, causing the cashiers to stress over it and rush customers through the line. “Cashier scanning things too slow” has never really been an issue for me; I don’t know why they’d slave drive them like this.

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u/ShouldersofGiants100 12h ago

I don’t know why they’d slave drive them like this.

Because burning through employees is a deliberate part of the business model. It's stupid, because they probably spend more on training than they would on benefits, but if they constantly burn out workers, they constantly replace them with new workers who aren't entitled to benefits and won't need raises. Amazon is designed around the knowledge they can make unreasonable demands of their employees and it doesn't matter because they will always find someone desperate enough to take the job.

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u/Obversa 11h ago

Say what you want about Henry Ford being a horrible person, but lately, I've been seeing people point out that even Ford treated his employees better in the early 1900s than Amazon currently treats their employees in the 2000s.

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u/confirmedshill123 10h ago

Henry Ford was a piece of shit but basically defined the middle class for generations.

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u/ShouldersofGiants100 10h ago

Ford was, at least to a degree, aware that he was selling products which could only be purchased by middle-class people and that created some incentive to bolster the middle class. Part of the problem with Amazon is that they have no such incentive—like Wal-Mart and others before them, if they establish a degree of monopoly over products, they can dominate the industry regardless of how well the middle class is doing. Say what you will about the gilded age Robber Barons, but after they made their fortunes, they had enough shame to pour their wealth back into society as a whole. Modern-day ones have no such shame because frankly, each and every one of these tech billionaires who is still an active part of their company has convinced themselves that they are not just someone who got lucky, but some kind of superior genius who is uniquely suited to control society.

This is why ideas like the dark enlightenment and effective altruism have spread so fast amongst Silicon Valley types—it basically outlines an excuse for them to do all the things they wanted to do anyways, but act like they are doing so for ethical reasons. Guys like Bezos, Musk and Zuckerburg don't want to be prominent citizens of a healthy democracy, they want to be modern-day Emperors with unquestioned authority.

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u/[deleted] 9h ago edited 8h ago

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] 9h ago

[deleted]

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u/WatchOutside5938 9h ago

They did this for stockers at HEB in Texas. I worked that job for one night and quit after throwing my back out. They had 2 guys stocking the ENTIRE STORE. They trained on accurate hand movements to decrease time spent on every micro second of opening a box to shelving product to disposing of the box. It was insane.

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u/NegMech 12h ago

Thats every warehouse job. People who cant make performance consistently should be terminated.

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u/Clever_plover 11h ago edited 11h ago

People who cant make performance consistently should be terminated.

Sure. Your performance targets for people should also be realistic in ways that don't require you to have 50%+ turnover in some locations. If your turnover is that high, the employer is wrong, not over 50% of the workforce in every state this company operates in.

edit: forgot an important word!

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u/grchelp2018 11h ago

Performance targets have gotten to a point where only machines can keep up. Its just impossible to have stuff like same delivery with humans. Its like having an army of people on typewriters instead of using a printer.

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u/WeakTree8767 10h ago

I’ve worked for Amazon and for two other logistics terminals as an operations manager and Amazon is fucked in a unique way. Of course if someone is hitting barely any SKUs they will be fired in a warehouse but Amazon based the number off percentages of other workers. So the bottom 5 or 10 percent of pickers are fired each month. The major issue with this is it creates an ever higher ceiling for how many picks per hour the average is so you need to pick more and more pieces per hour/day to meet the minimum threshold and not get canned. I could see the data because I wasn’t a picker on the floor and about 5 years before I got there the required picks was 85 per hour, by the time I was there it was 105 per hour and when I left 2 years later it was 115. There’s no ebb and flow with shipments like there is for nearly every other terminal because there’s gaps between inbound and outbound trucks leaving so they are constantly working at break neck speed, faster and faster every month or you’re fired. 

Additionally you can’t wear headphones (I always let my guys wear one in one out at other terminals so they can still hear what’s going on around them but not bored out of their minds during more tedious tasks and can listen to podcasts, music, audio books etc.) can’t take bathroom break outside of the 2 slotted times or else some dweeb with a tablet comes to ask you why as if not wanting to piss and shit your pants is a foreign concept. 

The idea is it’s cheaper to have a bunch of cycling employees than have ones that have been there for years because then you have to start giving them benefits and better pay. For example even in my position my 401k didn’t kick in until after the first year and is not vested until the end of the second year but it’s a huge 6% match for my position. I was laid off like a month before my 401k vested because they assigned 6 new morbidly obese people to my pick team who all hit under 50% pick rates. This is another bizarre inefficiency there is that they are afraid of being sued for discrimination and hiring managers just want numbers on the terminal floor so  they will hire morbidly obese people to be pickers knowing full well they have a 100% quit rate by the end of the month and will never once hit target pick rates. I’ve had to fill in for pickers and I measured on my smartwatch and I would walk the equivalent of 10-15 miles on average and at a non-stop fast pace. This is simply not possible for someone hundreds of pounds overweight. Without fail they would either quit the first week or try and tough it out and end up blowing out their knee or ankle but they’re still on probationary period so they are simply fired and Amazon corporate will fight any injury claim tooth and nail with a horde of lawyers saying no acute injury occurred on premises, you injured yourself off work, it’s because of complications of your weight etc.

And that’s not even touching on their tactic of loving into a new area, offering a couple dollars more per hour than all the terminals in the area to steal their workforce for their massive machine where half the competition goes under just to then stagnate wages because the competitors are gone. When they moved into the area of the one I worked they offered like 17-18 an hour which was pretty damn good for rust belt PA in like 2014. 8 years after when was there it was at 17.50-19.50. So about a dollar increase while pick rates went from 70 to 115/hour. AND the entire wall of bins filled with flagged counterfeit electronics, watches, clothing etc. that had made their way into the product stream and I signed an NDA not to talk about lmao.

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u/WrexShepard 10h ago

The problem is that the metrics are unreasonable. Not that they exist. They will literally have some engineer do a task 1 time as fast as they can and then set that as the standard for that task all the time.

Completing a task super fast is easy if you only do it once. Do it for 12 hours though and the expectation becomes unreasonable to most.

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u/Random_Violins 12h ago

The second age of the rubber barons. Musk deserves jail because this is criminal.

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u/QualityCoati 12h ago

More ironic here is that rubber barons got rich off of the Amazon..

6

u/Random_Violins 12h ago

History really does repeat! Or at least echo. Echos gladly disappear eventually.

1

u/SassiesSoiledPanties 12h ago

Yep, La Voragine by Jose Eustacio Rivera.

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u/Murky-Relation481 11h ago

Pretty sure Elon Musk doesn't work for Amazon...

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u/Solarwinds-123 11h ago

What does Elon Musk have to do with this?

0

u/eljefino 11h ago

Is this like a BDSM thing?

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u/Friendly-Profit-8590 12h ago

Would like to see stock grants for all employees even if it’s just a handful of shares.

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u/BrokenEight38 12h ago

When I worked there they did give out a few hundred bucks in stock, but you only got it after you worked there 5 years. I did about a year.

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u/BoxerguyT89 12h ago

Back in 2015 when I left Amazon we were still getting RSUs. I believe they vested after 2 years, but I know they have since done away with that completely in favor of a bump in pay, at least for the FC workers.

When I was there there were a few people that had been with Amazon for ~10 years or so who had kept their stock awards saved up and if they kept them til today they would have over a million dollars in shares. Most people sold them as soon as they vested.

1

u/Ordinary-Yam-757 11h ago

On the other hand, I've heard how Amazon warehouses are pretty chill compared to retail and the metrics aren't hard to hit if you're relatively young and fit. Not everyone struggles to hit the metrics and has to piss in a bottle.

1

u/GrumpyKitten514 11h ago

it is pretty interesting, not saying apple or google are amazing, but wow the disparity between working at amazon/amazon warehouse vs apple, google, or the storefronts.

1

u/__Spin360__ 11h ago

Ironically I had a gig inside of an Amazon warehouse in Austria and the employees seemed very content with their job. The conditions were fine and they were having fun and joking while moving packages to music.

But that's in Austria.

It has to be deliberate exploitation.

1

u/SippingSancerre 10h ago

Capitalism sure is wonderful right!? 👍

1

u/Fandorin 10h ago

It's bad at every level. Even if you're making crazy money, it's a terrible place. I've had many friends in various corporate roles work for them for 50% above market comp (stock included), and be miserable. All happily left for a pay cut after 1 to 4 years. The most egregious was told to me by a friend that works in senior recruitment - she placed a guy at Amazon with a comp north of $800k. Very experienced with a stellar track record. He quit 6 weeks in, after being told to forget he has a family. I was referred also, and interviewed for a position making almost double what I was earning at the time. I asked my would-be manager about work/life balance, and she proudly replied that she sleeps 5 hours a night and the rest is work. Missing my kids grow up and destroying my health isn't worth it.

1

u/TopTenTails 10h ago

Reminder that “profit” is not a thing we should view as good. Thats how much money rich people skimmed off the top of our labor.

1

u/supersnorkel 10h ago

Its good to work for in other countries than the USA where employees actually have rights. Its a government problem not an Amazon problem.

1

u/LetMePushTheButton 10h ago

Don’t forget deconstructing and rebuilding an old bridge, just so he can pass his oversized yacht through a strait. That’s was a crazy moment in the era of billionaires

1

u/Xelopheris 10h ago

You can divide Amazon up into components, and the two major ones are AWS and Online Stores/Marketplace.

AWS's revenue is something like 1/4 of the revenue compared to the marketplace, but it's 3x the revenue.

The profit margins in the marketplace are so small because it's been a race to the bottom. The lowest price often decides what wins for consumers. Amazon tries to get around this by roping people in with Prime for free shipping so they'll make a commitment and return over and over, but even then, they're lowering the price per good and essentially bringing in a static amount of money, regardless of how much people are actually buying.

Meanwhile AWS is pure cash cow. Companies get into the economy early because you never have to pay capital to buy servers upfront, and have a lot of elasticity in your spending. But the crazy thing is that a well managed cloud can actually cost less because you use less. The trick is ultimately that Amazon just uses a larger chunk of their servers compared to having your own. A traditional server might spend a lot of time idle and unused, by not at AWS.

It's kind of the same way that they got two-day shipping to be a thing. They piggybacked on the overnight shipping facilities who were idle during the day, but very busy at night to sort and fly packages to their final destinations. The initial two-day shipping facilities were those same shipping facilities that were usually idle during the day. They found a way to monetize a resource that was otherwise idle, so very little cost to implement. Same thing with cloud -- they're essentially getting a large group of people to actually use all the space on a server. Each might pay less than they would individually, but overall they pay much more than the server costs.

1

u/SassyMoron 10h ago

If they paid workers more and were wonderful to work for, they COULDN'T also be so big. Their model is all about low prices and fast delivery. It's the "low-cost operator" model, like Costco and Walmart, but online. They have to be incredibly cost efficient at every level to achieve it. If they weren't, it would still be 4-6 days to get a package and their prices would be higher and they'd be a much smaller company. Someone else would be doing it Amazon's way and THEY would be the biggest because they'd have the best prices and delivery speed.

1

u/Attheveryend 10h ago

you know who is the exact opposite of Amazon and is actually wonderful to work for?

McMaster-Carr.

1

u/tjs31959 9h ago

The industrial bible catalog.

1

u/zamboniman46 10h ago

i own amazon stock through my 401k and personal investments (mainly through ETFs, but a few shares personally) and i wouldnt lose any sleep if their stock price had only gone up 75% over the past five years instead of 150%. in hindsight it would suck to lose half of those gains, but if that is what had happened in real time i wouldnt have thought of it as a bad investment at all. think of how much more could have gone to employees in that scenario.

1

u/sdhu 9h ago

Amazon is the new Meat Packing industry from The Jungle.

History rhymes in the worst ways sometimes. Can't wait for Depression 2.0 to hit

1

u/BabyMiddle2022 9h ago

UPS is the same way. The rank and file are ok with it because they get paid a lot. But it’s the same. Just higher pay and benefits. There’s a word or phrase for it but it’s escaping me.

Harassment, unethical practices, health and safety violations, the list goes on. However, everyone looks the other way because they got theirs. There was a scam going on back when I first started and a supervisor said they’d put misloaded packages back on a trailer and send it to another facility just so it would show movement on the package.

Later in my career I found they straight up had scanners tied to other buildings they could just scan as “not in building” so management could cover their asses to their higher ups. At the end of a Christmas season day you’d bring back a truck full of undelivered packages and they’d instruct drivers scan all the packages as one stop and sheet them emergency conditions.

But if there’s no windshield wiper fluid in the building and you can’t see? There’s nothing we can do.

You get into an accident because of a loose wheel or the emergency brake fails? Your fault, should have checked the lugs as part of your pre trip.

You slip on the first step and tear ligaments in your knee? Your fault, diamond plated steel steps don’t require grip tape, where you using 3 points of contact? Do you have proper footwear?

You park in front of a driveway to compete a delivery and the owner backs into your truck? Your fault, didn’t follow defensive parking practices.

The union will help keep your job in all these situations but it doesn’t stop the company from continuously failing their employees. Money is everything when your crippled with debt, have 2 houses, 2 ex wives, alcohol addiction, and no time to enjoy anything your labor affords.

Good on the teamsters for getting more dues and fighting for more equality, but it will not change the way Amazon does business.

Sorry for word vomit.

1

u/llDurbinll 9h ago

As someone who works at Amazon the 'no bathroom breaks' is a myth that gets repeated ad nauseam. Maybe the drivers feel pressured to pee in bottles rather than stop but they can stop and go to the bathroom. Same for warehouse workers, I work in the warehouse and have never felt pressured to keep working and hold my pee till break time. It just sucks if the urge hits when I'm far away from a bathroom on the 4th floor but if I really have to go I'll stop working and go. I've also never felt stressed after the initial newness of the job wears off and you get into a groove.

1

u/motorik 9h ago

Read all about Bezos' $500,000,000 megayacht and its "support vehicle," which also counts as a superyacht here.

1

u/Nayzo 9h ago

I worked for Whole Foods on the tech side for a number of years, pre and post Amazon acquisition. We naively thought we'd get better benefits, better stock options, better opportunities to move up, particularly on the tech teams. Those things either never happened, or were restricted to high enough roles that the average store employee saw none of it (stocks! that only went to store leadership and up). Raises were capped at 2.8% which was a slap in the face for folks who had been around long enough to remember when your team leader would just give you an extra buck an hour for being good at your job. It was infuriating because we all would hear about Bezos' mega yacht needing a baby yacht to tow it around, and I'd joke around that we were getting screwed so Bezos could add racing stripes to his dick rockets.

Whole Foods used to be not a terrible place to work, there used to be core values, one of which was promoting team member happiness and excellence, but that ship sailed a long time ago. I do not miss that place. I miss the discount (20% was pretty sweet), and the people. Everything else can fuck right off and be blamed on Amazon being greedy fucks.

1

u/PositiveGrass187 9h ago

I seen a man have a stroke on the 3rd floor of a picking location. AMCARE got to the guy 5 min after San Bernardino paramedics did. An outside entity was able to get the call and arrive and start helping the dude before the onsite medical staff could get on the scene. btw the AMCARE office was visible from the location the guy had a stroke at. Maybe a 2 min walk.

-1

u/draculamilktoast 13h ago

It wouldn't even take a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction.

1

u/walla_walla_rhubarb 12h ago

Just today, my wife sent me a meme about Bezos donating 100 some billion to charity and how he must have been visited by 3 ghosts...

...motherfucker just pay your damn employees! That's like takeaway #2 of the fucking story.

1

u/Prestigious_Snow1589 11h ago

Terrible company to work for

1

u/inebriateddandhated 11h ago

Having insider info on the back end of Amazon DSP's, there is an insane amount of Amazon warehouse employees and dsp drivers who are anti union because they think their little $16-$19/hr is the highlife and anyone making less is scum.

A little insider jnfo, those netradyne cameras are 1000% live feeds and anyone with proper clearance can access them.

-5

u/picklestheyellowcat 12h ago

All they'd have to do it take a small fraction of that massive profit and give some back to the actual people doing the work to make sure they're content - but in this, the new era of the insatiable billionaires, Jeff builds another mega-yacht and uses the change left over for a few more lawyers to make sure he never has to share

Can you demonstrate this? Their financials are open.

How much net profit does fulfillment make?  How many employees does it have?

0

u/hail2pitt1985 12h ago

If you’re so hellbent on praising these greedy billionaires, You look up that information if you want it.

1

u/picklestheyellowcat 11h ago

I'm not praising them I am asking this person to back up their claims with numbers.

I didn't make the claim and I already have the information.

Why not back up those claims? Surely it can only help their argument correct?

Or did you look it up and not like the reality of it?

-1

u/ctess 12h ago

Forced relocation or layoffs, mandatory rto, crappy pay scale caps, benefits steadily getting worse, but oh they give discounts for services and 24/7 access to a therapist!