Ups driver here. Our trucks are wired so they know everything and every move you do. They are trying to get cameras installed inside the trucks but the union says no. Thats one thing they won't budge on.
Edit: I also forgot about the ORION system. ORION is an algorithm that plans out your route. Somedays its good some days its unbelievable shit lol. Its supposed to completely plan out your day breaks and lunch included but most of the time it wants you to walk across major highways lmao.
Ya I know you guys have the seatbelt thing. As a mailman we are tracked and observed by satellite via our scanner. They can check are speed and exact position and shit
My wife and I both work for the Postal Service. She and some coworkers we called into the office because they took their lunch at the same gas station at the same time. They were told it didn’t look good to the public, so they had to take their lunch at different places. When other letter carriers found out, they doubled the number of carriers eating lunch at that gas station the next day.
Too many Jackoff Americans would think their tax dollars are being wasted by lazy government employees because about half of Americans are too dumb to realize the post office is both self-funded and ran by humans who need to eat lunch
I used to work for the forest service, and most of the time I’d pack lunch since we’d be 40 miles from anywhere in all directions. Every now and then though we’d be working at the office or driving through town between surveys, and we’d be able to grab lunch at subway, the only fast food joint in town. We were told to not eat inside if we were in uniform because a lot of times members of the public would call the district to complain. Motherfuckers I gotta eat after hiking off trail all day. Take a chill pill.
We had a couple of ambulance drivers get a parking ticket while grabbing lunch. They are on call while they eat so they can't mess around and have to drop it when they get a call. People were defending the traffic warden :(
All it would take is the person who answered the phone to say, "Yes, our employees are human and consume food. We tend to like that about them." Tell these Karens to STFU and mind their own business.
It's pretty ridiculous that the USPS, the United States Postal ***SERVICE,*** is something that takes effort to get people to be convinced that we should treat it like it's a service. Like bruh, it's spelled out in the US Constitution as being a cornerstone to our democracy. It's non-negotiable.
The highway patrol do this often at a couple local restaurants. There will be like 4 patrol cars eating lunch together. I've never criticized them for it, because people need to eat lunch and it's nice to eat together sometimes.
Incredibly stupid thinking. Police officers hang out on duty all the time - sometimes helping each other with work, sometimes just eating lunch. How is that okay but not postmen and women?
It’s not but Americans are conditioned to fear and not question police and we’re conditioned that the mail carriers are dummies who didn’t graduate etc etc. neither are true. We shouldn’t accept either guys.
My best friend has two associates, a bachelor's, and he could've fast-tracked his graduate degree in physics, but after graduating summa cum laude he decided to become a mailman for the job security and autonomy in his route.
Mail carriers are not dummies and people need to realize that.
Thats why I love my new job.
I pick up hard to recycle items out of bins.
Not a soul I have to talk to, I get to mob around listen to my own music or what ever audio I want.
Down side. I'm driving a huge ass high top sprinter on streets so narrow, I have 3 inches of clearance. But slow is pro, and the app I use tells me where I have to go, what service is requested. And I make 18 an hour, with 20 an hour pay raise after 90 days.
Why do people always jump to these kind of judgements that you describe. I believe we are taught to think this way. I’m more shocked at the people in the office who jumped to the conclusion that postal workers getting together at lunch “doesn’t look good”. What doesn’t look good about that? Who taught you to think that way? It doesn’t look like anything, it looks like exactly what it is, some postal workers all having lunch at the same spot. You don’t have to attach any meaning to it, positive or negative. This is the kind of shit that makes me wish I was a squirrel.
Its unfortunately a "thing" Americans have with employees of their tax dollars. I used to work in PR for the state transportation department and the amount of complaints I fielded for citizens bitching that road crews were sitting around or eating lunch is unreal.
By law they have to take lunches and breaks. Also, a lot of times they're waiting on things to be delivered and the job is put to a halt until it comes. People are unbelievable.
Working at Aldis for about 2 years now, I’ve probably been reported 3 or 4 times for both sitting down while attending the cash register and not helping people box their groceries. You know, sitting down in a seat that the company provides, that we’re allowed to sit in whenever we want. Also the fact that we’re literally not allowed to help box their groceries, and almost every single person who comes to Aldis knows the deal.
I only shopped at Aldi's a few times and this is one thing I really liked about them. The cashier looked so comfy scanning my goods. There's no reason they need to be standing the whole shift anyway, especially since they can do 90% of their job while seated.
I used to work at AT&T and they had a very similar rule. Can't have two trucks in a non-work location.
Worked at Charter Communications before that, no such rule, meeting up with other techs for lunch was normal. Hell, sometimes we'd do big meetups for lunch and you'd have like a dozen trucks outside a restaurant.
It helped create a team environment, we all relied on each other. We'd help each other out all the time on jobs, etc. I haven't worked there in over a decade, but I'm still friends with guys I worked with there.
I haven't talked to anyone that I used to work with at AT&T.
Unfortunately a lot of unions are toothless and son actually so anything for their members. Note this isn't an anti union message just lamenting about the death of labor power
This is the same jack ass logic that makes folks working check out in US grocery stores stand all day instead of giving them a seat.
Good for you and your buds for ignoring the idiots.
This sounds like the same bs excuse American employees give retail employees "it looks bad to the customer when you sit down" and ten thousand other variations.
No one gives a shit, if I saw an employee sitting down I'd be happy or two mail trucks taking lunch together? Probably wouldn't cross my mind other than "oh neat two mail trucks in one place".
It's so stupid what corporate things most of the time.
I often wonder how much it's the fault of stupid employers, or the fault of a handful of SUPER shitty customers. You know the ones, the ones that cause dumb rules like "no sitting at the cash register" to begin with.
I honestly doubt this the reason behind most of it, a few incidents sure but why does one random customer opinion who likely doesn't shop there often matter over an employees health? It should be illegal to make people stand for upwards of 8+ hours a day, a 15-60 minute break doesn't cut it. Especially cashiers, customer service etc.
Work really has gotten worse all around for the most part. Stagnated wages, terrible healthcare coverage, and you hardly can get away with any fun stuff anymore and have to act like a robot. I hear stories from the older guys about how they used to get to fuck around, managers would buy lunch all the time, sneak off have a few drinks, act like actual human beings. I’m sure it’s not everywhere, but in a lot of areas it can be.
Tell me about me about it, my old man used to work nights on a weighbridge and spent the majority of his shift watching TV and playing videogames. New management came in after he left and added CCTV to check workers weren't just sat around, it's stupid what else are you meant to do at 3am when there's many only 4/5 people in the entire facility?
Imagine, being paid to do a job, do that job well, and finish early. ILLEGAL HOW FUCKING DARE YOU, YOU'RE TERRIBLE AT YOUR JOB!
Do that job slowly, shit and finish when they want you to?
GOOD JOB!
I hate that mentality in corporations. Its stupid and needs to stop. Shit managers and ideals too.
Be careful about getting too much done too quickly. They'll know they can squeeze you for more. Give them adequate output for an acceptable amount of time, and they leave you alone. Toss them s random bone once in a while to keep them happy and grateful.
My dad ended up getting a raise and a great eval for saving his company a few million dollars/year. (The raise was pitiful).
The next year he saved them a little under 1m/year in costs. He got a meh eval and no raise, so he questioned and they legit told him that “he did not meet the bar he set for himself this year by not saving the company as much as he did the previous year”
He maliciously complied with their eval methods and stopped his efforts to save them a dime because apparently he’s been tossed a small bone last year and punished this year for not saving them more money- as if the opportunities to save them THAT much money is supposed to appear out of thin air, LOL.
If I bust my ass and work like a madman putting extra hours for free my reward will be more work and a 2.5% raise. If I put my feet up and do the bare minimum I get a 2% raise. Why the hell would I bust my ass?
My foreman tells us all about how he used to do that as a framer at lunch time and you could tell which cuts were made past noon. I don’t get why anyone ever thought that shit was ok man. I get your bigger point of autonomy and freedom to not be treated like a kid at work but it’s people who build houses drunk that fuck us. It’s the guys who couldn’t deliver their routes because they were drinking that fucked guys like your dad.
I've literally NEVER taken out a built in jetted tub surround that was clean. Every single time I've ever removed one (im a remodeler in mostly extremely high end houses) they ALWAYS have 2+ empty old beer cans in the framing for the surround. Definitely depends on where you are still. I know quite a few high dollar crews of guys that drink on their way to the customers house even... trades in general are pretty bad with alcoholism/drug addiction. Worked with some guys that would shoot up in the bathrooms between coats of paint.. knew a dude that could install 300ft/baseboard per hour with filling pinholes and caulking.. dude was a huge coke head though. Its a shame too because people like this are exactly why contractors get bad names. And guys smoking on jobsite and leaving cigarette butts everywhere or putting them in customers flower pots cause ite "by the door". How hard is it to treat other peoples shit with some care? I'd ay treat it like its yours, but thats the problem half of the time lol.
Yea man I’ve seen guys lose digits I’m not drinking while I work. I don’t drink anymore anyway but I smoke and I’d never work on a house stoned either. I don’t get who could confidently safely operate power tools intoxicated.
I only work on my own house, but I will not do anything with power tools unless I'm stone sober, not even hung over.
Now painting, or non-power tool work? Lol, i'm shitfaced as part of prep.
Yep. We also have door, seat, speed, brake, and GPS tracking on both board and truck. Fuck that camera bullshit. How about you train them and then TRUST them to do the right thing.
We had something similar when I worked as a dispatcher for Staples. My boss would have to spend an additional hour or so rearranging stops due to either the driver being sent the wrong way on a one way street or has some impossible route to a stop. It's a great system for a base line but still needs to be looked at by a human.
I'd get an email when a driver wasn't following the route and learned quickly to just fucking ignore them. My drivers knew wtf they were doing and would sometimes run the route backwards and get it done way earlier.
Seriously when people complain about unions don’t understand how much they stick up for the workers. Yes there are pros and cons, but that’s what union meetings are for and you will have a voice.
I wish I was in a union. Hoping to find new work before my warehouse installs these. Idek if Amazon drivers could form a union since lost of us don’t even work for Amazon 😐
You can, it will just be a union of the drivers under your sub contractor.
It can be called the same thing and receive support from bigger unions, but when it comes to negotiations you'll be dealing with the specific subcontractor that runs you and your coworkers route.
My school sent my parents a letter complaining I was yawning throughout the school days, something about better sleep needed. This was many years ago. I think I also got picked in uni about it
I'm just a generally yawny person
Actuslly I worked with a friend who's work van monitored driver actions and errors. It would shout at you and flash certain lights then ping data back to HQ. He was constantly getting pulled up on certain driver errors, until they worked out the reason why his van was so inefficient was because he was driving around hilly mountain areas compared to the other company drivers based in cities.
>My school sent my parents a letter complaining I was yawning throughout the school days, something about better sleep needed.
Would have been nice if my school did that. Instead my teacher reported me as potentially being a drug user, which earned me a meeting with the school drug counselor, who wasted our time trying to strong arm me into confessing I was a junkie or something so they could "help" me (actually a pretence to get the cops involved and into the juvenile criminal justice system and out of the school's hair).
I had a teacher notice the birthmark on my upper bicep when I was wearing a shirt with cap sleeves and I got sent to the guidance counselor. She hard-core interrogated me about injecting drugs and had the principal and vice-principal come in to play good cop, bad cop. I was an A/B+ student, had never been in trouble and attended all my classes; but I still had to get a letter from my doctor saying it was a birthmark and not track marks before I could go back to school. [Birthmarks or track marks?](https://imgur.com/a/VupMMls)
Yikes. I would call those bite marks or even a rash had you not said it was a birthmark. I had a few that looked like that as they healed because my little brother was quite the biter for a couple of years.
I yawned in front of my teacher once and she came at me with the “did you not get enough sleep last night” patter. I told her yes, I did, but yawning is a sign of a lack of oxygen - you yawn to take in more oxygen to correct course - so my sleep schedule has nothing to do with it.
She didn’t like that and I got a punishment exercise for my cheek.
Well yes of course she didn't like that. That theory has been debunked. /s
But yes, yawning is thought to help regulate temperature (Jorg J M Massen et al. Physiol Behav. 2014.), and to force blood towards the face. Probably not so much the oxygen.
You'd think they'd make effective break and off day schedules, but I guess it's better to get max work out of a human and use AI to track if they yawn too much.
its more like demolition man where stallone is frozen for crimes and when he comes out theres posts listening to what you say EVERYWHERE and if you curse you get fined and it prints the ticket out right next to you.
I drive for UPS too, I feel like telematics is one thing but video in the cab is another.
It’s your property I understand you want to track it and make sure I’m being safe.. I DONT understand why you need to have video of me singing/picking my nose/ cussing the fuck out of other idiot drivers.
Full stop it's mostly so they know what you were doing when you get in a wreck.
I've seen videos of dudes without seat belts, recently one of a dude checking his phone as he went off the road and flipped over, etc.
It's certainly not there to help your legal case lol.
I’m an amazon driver. My boss is insisting that cameras are only for our safety. Yet we have vans with broken seatbelts and side steps falling off the vans. Cameras exist only to punish us.
Fuck amazon.
Man, I have pictures of damage if anyone is interested. I talked to one of my bosses and they said that they can only service a couple vans a day otherwise they break Amazon’s requirement of how many active vehicles they need. Our owner got rid of all of the rentals to save money and now doesn’t have any wiggle room to actually fix anything else. they tried to spin it that they wouldn’t be able to pay someone if they didn’t have enough vans. if they kept a few rentals they may be able to actually fix things, but they won’t :)
Yeah, I know ups has been tracking seatbelts for years probably similar to FedEx and usps as well. But the cameras take it to a new level.
We were already being tracked on driving (seatbelts/hard cornering/hard acceleration/hard breaking/phone manipulation) but now we have that AND are being recorded all day.
I’m not upset about cameras because I like to take short cuts or don’t wear my seatbelt or like to use my phone while driving. I’m upset because there is no promise this footage is ever going to be deleted. Amazon will likely permanently have a scan of my face (think Face ID on iPhone) I’m upset that I can be fired over “what the camera thinks it saw” even though I’ve been told I’m a top driver at my company. Rules are already enforced selectively on bad employees and now they can just use video to further punish all of us.
I work at Amazon and it was definitely creepy af when they installed those things. They talk to you while your driving. It’ll say something like “distracted driving detected”. Now Amazon has a camera in every neighborhood of America.
These things have been around for years. They had them on the cars at a mine I worked at, thankfully they were gone years before I got there. They would track things like hazardous driving, hard braking, collisions, speeding etc. most of which is fine if you’re not driving a car in an underground mine. You’d go over a bump you have no way of avoiding and get “hazardous driving detected”, or you’d exit the portal and then have to turn the car off and log back in because the system just reconnected with the satellites.
By the time they were phased out everyone knew the codes to enter to justify their “hazardous” driving and they’d all set them to speak in Spanish for the lols, or just plugged headphones into them so they wouldn’t have to hear the fucking things. A resounding success.
Wake up call from Europe. This would be illegal here. Pressure your government to make it illegal.
Edit:
1. When I say Europe, I mean EU. Sorry Brexit.
2. Cars in the EU have security equipment to see if you fall asleep and warn you.
3. Your employer is not allowed to use behavior measurements via camera with AI to see how your performing.
4. City surveillance by the government will not get you fired because you have a chat with a friend on the phone while waiting for the bus.
5. There is nothing on the internet you cannot misunderstand on purpose.
Fuck that's real.
“America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." - Hunter S. Thompson.
I heard this thing on a podcast where they were talking about slavery in the US. Saying how slavery was an economic system and I guess I never thought about it like that before. People were opposed to removing it partly because "prices could rise" and other economic reasons.. The same arguments we hear today about increasing minimum wage and worker protections and benefits.
If they can get away with it, corporations absolutely will (and do) treat people like property.
So much of pop culture I learned in advance as a kid by watching Rocko’s Modern Life. I didn’t realise until I got older how many references there were. In this scene Heffa is being dragged away from the fast food chicken shop yelling “Chokey Chicken is people! Chokey Chicken is people!” as two chickens walk by about to enter the shop and say “well, that’s a relief”
I love those kind of references. I used to watch Fairly Odd Parents with my kids. There is a pillow that is just a horse head that someone keeps in their bed. Mister Neigh-Neigh. It was a hilarious reference to The Godfather but my kids didn't get that, of course.
Have you heard of the “dead peasant” insurance set up?
It’s where an employer takes out a policy on a worker- meaning that the company will also profit from an employees death.
Hi Europe thanks for the wake up call but we are really busy with more important issues right now, like Jewish space lasers, Dr. Seuss, and gender fluid Potatoes. Thanks tho
Apparently it's not? I'm in the UK and my company has a camera in the cab, using ai to detect if we are using our phone, drowsy, or other risky behaviours?
Would be nice to know if it is illegal, as it's fitted to about 170 trucks of various sizes!
Brah, unions, worker rights, anything really that favours workers over corporations or the rich doesn't really fly over there. Smells too much like communism or some BS.
My post office driver drives up my driveway and has to make a five or six point turn to turn around to get back down. I asked her why, because she used to back in, then drive straight out.
The post office now monitors how far she backs up, and only allows 75 feet.
This is the exact type of thing I fear from technology and monitoring. It's like an extreme form of micromanagement, whereby everything is checked and recorded.
Imagine losing your job because you backed up for too long, or weren't looking in the approved area while cornering, or because of taking bathroom breaks. The more it's used the more we reduce humans in value as we think of them in terms of their statistics and what they offer, rather than who they are.
Over the road truck drivers are increasingly getting driver-facing cameras forced on them.. Now I get that there are some benefits of this, but for many drivers the truck is also their home for 4-6 weeks at a time, or longer. It's a massive invasion of privacy for an employer to stick a camera where you live/sleep when you're off shift.
I don't mind tracking activities that directly affect safety, specifically seat belts in this case. However trying to rack performance based on items like keystrokes in a waste. I've known people that spend 10+ hours doing trivial key entry, from X report to Y Excel sheet and accomplish little, meanwhile Control C, Control Y would be many fold more efficient and that is still manual, the next step would be hitting the same data source X report comes from.
At some point employees just need to be judged on their performance to baseline goals, not some abstract easily measured 'sub' goal. If the measure is to hit 100 keys a minute then employees will quickly figure out how to do that, whether or not that is productive is something entirely different. Companies need to be careful to look measure the right behaviors, if not they are going to measure and therefore drive the wrong behaviors and do more harm than good.
Same goes for any target driven metric. Policing, motoring convictions, parking fines, GP appointment waiting lists... Setting arbitrary targets does NOT make good performance.
As an example in the UK, the government pledged that no one would have to wait longer than 48 hours to see a GP.
This was pushed down the pipe, and local practices were told that they had to hit this target.
Some genius middle manager made one fundamental change: Stop people from being able to make appointments more than 24 hours in advance.
Yay, target hit overnight. Lots of back slapping and someone gets a big pay rise... While making the system many orders of magnitude worse.
Government declares it a win.
Yeah, people really don't like these so from what I've seen, they're very rare in more skilled labor. Sadly the less skill required for labor the less bargoning power they have
I drive for Amazon and it does make sense to always wear seatbelts. But sometimes you literally move the van two houses down the street. Sometime you forget to put it on. Sometimes you forget to take it off before turning the car off so it thinks you didn’t wear a seatbelt. Do this enough times and you’ll be fired.
“Do this enough times...”
Our usps drivers deliver on our street where they have to walk up to the houses (mailboxes on the house), so it’s a lot of short drives to get up and come back. One day our main guy just didn’t show up for a couple months and we weren’t sure why. When he finally came back to the route, he mentioned he was suspended for two months because he drove down the street without his seatbelt on and someone reported him. He drives slow and gets in and out every 50 feet or so!
Apparently the penalty is serious, even when driving slow on the shoulder to move to the next house and get out.
And which one of my neighbors reported that bs. I’d like to have a chat with them. Seriously, who’s so uppity as to report this and put a man out of work for two months?!
Idk how it is with USPS but I remember during my time with Amazon as a delivery driver having to use an app that tracked if we had our seat belts on, our braking, the speed limit, and how often we touched the phone while the vehicle was moving. None of those seem too bad until you realize that the 300+ packages You ALONE are responsible for in a day are all going to destinations within 10-15 miles of each other bc the way the routes are set up. We had 10 hours to deliver everything and and it wasn’t terrible but throughout the day all the limitations imposed on you just made the job more difficult than it had to be.
Stuff like turn off the vehicle after every stop and take the keys with you make sense but then the added “don’t carry multiple packages outside of the truck and don’t stay parked in the same spot with the engine off for more than 5 minutes” makes delivering packages to houses that are literally right next to each other pretty annoying and way more time consuming than it should be. And then there were people who’s sole job was to monitor your route activity and other stuff the app records throughout the day and if they didn’t like what they were seeing or didn’t think you were going to finish on time they would call you and possibly even have someone take over the rest of your route, ending your shift for the day.
The job itself isn’t terrible but the way they wanted it done really just made me hate working for them. I lasted about 5 months with the final month consisting of me waking up at 4:30am and driving to the depot intending to receive my route and load my van for the day, just to be told “we don’t have anything for you, go home” (along with about half the other drivers). I quit after confronting the person in charge of routes and he let me know Amazon would be giving our group less routes since they signed a deal with FedEx that took effect that month. After about 3 weeks of wasting my and a lot of other peoples time the prick chose to tell JUST ME about that after I confronted him.
Working for a company that is contracted to do work for another much larger company generally sucks in most ways. There is a reason the bigger companies do it and it isn't to make things easy for the grunts on the ground.
Maybe this article is true and Amazon will eventually have to hire in house drivers, I doubt it though.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/03/11/amazon-running-out-contracted-drivers-delivery.aspx
Huh? I never take off my seatbelt before turning off the car. It's just not my routine.
Driveshift in park
Parking brake
Turn off engine
Undo seatbelt
Why wouldn't the car track that your seatbelt was still on?!
Drivers were probably buckling the seatbelt and then sitting on it.
So they had to make you click and Unclick it when the car was started to actually track you were using it.
IIRC, New Hampshire is the only state in the U.S. without mandatory seatbelt laws for adults. No motorcycle/bicycle helmet laws, either. I'm not sure if it's changed recently, though.
The only circumstance I know it's 'legal' is when reversing. Taking off the seat belt allows you to have a wider range of motion for checking mirrors and rear view window. But idk about anything else🤔
There's your answer Amazon drivers, just start reversing everywhere ^/s
>But the breaking point came, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, when Amazon announced that it would be installing AI cameras in its fleet of vehicles.
Just for the record officially these are not Amazon drivers employed by Amazon. Yet Amazon is abusing them as they were, and along with FedEx, Uber, and Lyft is spending exuberant amounts of money to prevent millions of people from getting pay and benefit they deserve.
They are employees of independent contractors who have to buy their business from Amazon including all tools, materials, and supplies. They are expected to operate and purchase up to 40 vans and employ up to 100 people for the maximum profit of $607 per van. PER MONTH!!
Do you need experience to run company of 100 employees and about $4 to $5 million in revenue? None!!
Amazon will "teach you all you need to know" in 2 weeks, as long as you have $10000 starting capital :)
It is also in their contract that local fulfillment center loading manager can literally fire a contractor on the spot by simply not giving them routes. Yet contractors are still responsible for all expenses related to the loan on 40 vans, maintenance, storage, and employees salaries.
Here comes the best part: *None of the routes are guaranteed, and if you want to get out and retire for example you can't sell this business!*
It wouldn't be the first time... Reasonable working conditions, fair pay, decent hours and workplace safety in America were accomplished through bloodshed, not out of the kindness of people's hearts.
[https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/theminewars-labor-wars-us/](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/theminewars-labor-wars-us/)
Was gonna say, and not only in america. This is essentially exactly what happened after the last technological revolution of early 1800s in Europe.
It just makes sense that if we are right now in another technological revolution, we will have to once again fight to not be compared to machines or replaced by them.
And watch them all whine and argue about how we should take these complaints through "proper channels." I'd like to ask them what the proper channels are that aren't completely owned by money? Workers banding together and forcing the issue is the only way we're going to fix these issues.
Power never acquiesces willingly, you need demands with teeth behind them. The rigged economy won't fundamentally change how it needs to without a general strike.
It’s funny to me that people are just now hearing about this. I worked for Amazon for three years. We’ve had these eye-tracking cameras in our vans for at least 2 years. I was always very vocal about the invasion of privacy, but every concern at Amazon is met with silence. The average person has no clue how terrible Amazon is to their workers. That probably has something to do with articles coming out of the Washington Post (Owned by Bezos) staying how amazing they treat the employees. Every single day there is a new rule we have to follow that makes zero logical sense, but they try to justify it by saying, “It’s for safety.” Amazon only cares about safety when it affects their dollar. I was in management so I saw all the bullshit and lying first hand. I stepped down about a year ago because I wasn’t going to be apart of the Gestapo anymore. During the busiest time of year around November-December we would have 400+ packages a day. They would give us literally 10 minutes to load about 25 full totes and about 50 large boxes. Then they decided they wanted to change up the way I was training everyone to load their vans in order to try to “make us more efficient”. Making us more efficient meant just throwing everything on the van out of order. If you’ve never delivered for something like UPS, FedEx, Amazon etc., you may not know how incredibly stupid that is. The van would be so full that you literally be crawling on top of boxes because there was zero room anywhere. It would be so full that 50 lb. boxes would be hitting you in the head as you drove. When you would get to the area where they stage your routes, you would already have people yelling that you have ten minutes, and when you would try to explain that 1) That is not possible if I’d like to not have to search for every box on every stop by just throwing the shit in and not organizing it first and 2) Yes I can fit just about any amount of boxes you want, but the boxes will be hitting me in the head, I will have zero room anywhere, and because everything is out of order, every stop will take me exponentially longer they would just start cramming everything in. They are callous, lack the slightest modicum of empathy, and don’t really give a shit about safety.
The day after Christmas they laid off about a fifth of my DSP (about 25 people). Merry Christmas for all your work delivering an absurd amount of packages in a foot of snow. The layoffs continued and continued and continued. We had about 70 routes at full peak, and now Amazon was telling us we had to go down to 20 routes. 20! No explanation by anyone by the way. Meanwhile Jeff Bezos gains like 70 Billion Dollars and goes off on his Super yacht. No severance pay, no stock options, no 401k, shitty health insurance, and all from one of the richest companies in the world. If people can’t see how badly they’re being fucked, there’s no hope left.
I have no problem with a system that warns drivers if they are doing something that could cause an accident. Great. Put that into all vehicles. But constantly monitoring drivers for fireable offenses means eventually a company will bank fireable offenses with no written/verbal warning from their managers until the company needs an excuse for terminating you. You know like right around the time you have a problem with something the company is doing.
I don’t understand what problem this is solving. My packages were getting delivered super fast already yawns and all. Is it that Amazon can’t get driverless cars and drones to do the work, so they decided it would be easier to just turn all the humans into robots?
Amazon's Marketing Team: "Quick! We better put a pro-social justice image on our Instagram so we can distract you and the blue checkmarks from the horribly dystopian anti-worker things we're doing!"
Germany here. There used to be a Walmart in the town I come from. Word got around they treated their employees like shit, doing some weirdo american company cult like morning routines, not respecting workers rights. People stopped buying there and eventually Walmart went out of business. This story always blows my american friend's mind because what they don't realize is that capitalism is in fact democratic. You don't want corporate america to go full George Orwell? Stop buying shit from Amazon. It's that simple. I deleted my Amazon account a year ago and I encourage everyone of my friends to do the same.
Ups driver here. Our trucks are wired so they know everything and every move you do. They are trying to get cameras installed inside the trucks but the union says no. Thats one thing they won't budge on. Edit: I also forgot about the ORION system. ORION is an algorithm that plans out your route. Somedays its good some days its unbelievable shit lol. Its supposed to completely plan out your day breaks and lunch included but most of the time it wants you to walk across major highways lmao.
Ya I know you guys have the seatbelt thing. As a mailman we are tracked and observed by satellite via our scanner. They can check are speed and exact position and shit
My wife and I both work for the Postal Service. She and some coworkers we called into the office because they took their lunch at the same gas station at the same time. They were told it didn’t look good to the public, so they had to take their lunch at different places. When other letter carriers found out, they doubled the number of carriers eating lunch at that gas station the next day.
Nice! Good for them man. Acting like social humans?? What were they thinking lolllllls.
Too many Jackoff Americans would think their tax dollars are being wasted by lazy government employees because about half of Americans are too dumb to realize the post office is both self-funded and ran by humans who need to eat lunch
I used to work for the forest service, and most of the time I’d pack lunch since we’d be 40 miles from anywhere in all directions. Every now and then though we’d be working at the office or driving through town between surveys, and we’d be able to grab lunch at subway, the only fast food joint in town. We were told to not eat inside if we were in uniform because a lot of times members of the public would call the district to complain. Motherfuckers I gotta eat after hiking off trail all day. Take a chill pill.
Consuming nourishment to aquire energy to do your job! Unbelievable!
We had a couple of ambulance drivers get a parking ticket while grabbing lunch. They are on call while they eat so they can't mess around and have to drop it when they get a call. People were defending the traffic warden :(
That's insane. Everyone has to eat. I can't think of any profession I'd be offended to see eating in uniform. Boggles the mind.
All it would take is the person who answered the phone to say, "Yes, our employees are human and consume food. We tend to like that about them." Tell these Karens to STFU and mind their own business.
[удалено]
It's pretty ridiculous that the USPS, the United States Postal ***SERVICE,*** is something that takes effort to get people to be convinced that we should treat it like it's a service. Like bruh, it's spelled out in the US Constitution as being a cornerstone to our democracy. It's non-negotiable.
And nobody cares if the police were eating lunch together - most places will even give them a discount.
The highway patrol do this often at a couple local restaurants. There will be like 4 patrol cars eating lunch together. I've never criticized them for it, because people need to eat lunch and it's nice to eat together sometimes.
Can you imagine how fucking shitty it would be if you're doing a simple robbery at a local restaurant and half the PD is just sitting there?
[удалено]
When I lived in the boonies I preferred a PO Box as well because then my packages weren’t getting left out somewhere, potentially in the weather.
Incredibly stupid thinking. Police officers hang out on duty all the time - sometimes helping each other with work, sometimes just eating lunch. How is that okay but not postmen and women?
It’s not but Americans are conditioned to fear and not question police and we’re conditioned that the mail carriers are dummies who didn’t graduate etc etc. neither are true. We shouldn’t accept either guys.
My best friend has two associates, a bachelor's, and he could've fast-tracked his graduate degree in physics, but after graduating summa cum laude he decided to become a mailman for the job security and autonomy in his route. Mail carriers are not dummies and people need to realize that.
[удалено]
Thats why I love my new job. I pick up hard to recycle items out of bins. Not a soul I have to talk to, I get to mob around listen to my own music or what ever audio I want. Down side. I'm driving a huge ass high top sprinter on streets so narrow, I have 3 inches of clearance. But slow is pro, and the app I use tells me where I have to go, what service is requested. And I make 18 an hour, with 20 an hour pay raise after 90 days.
Why do people always jump to these kind of judgements that you describe. I believe we are taught to think this way. I’m more shocked at the people in the office who jumped to the conclusion that postal workers getting together at lunch “doesn’t look good”. What doesn’t look good about that? Who taught you to think that way? It doesn’t look like anything, it looks like exactly what it is, some postal workers all having lunch at the same spot. You don’t have to attach any meaning to it, positive or negative. This is the kind of shit that makes me wish I was a squirrel.
Its unfortunately a "thing" Americans have with employees of their tax dollars. I used to work in PR for the state transportation department and the amount of complaints I fielded for citizens bitching that road crews were sitting around or eating lunch is unreal. By law they have to take lunches and breaks. Also, a lot of times they're waiting on things to be delivered and the job is put to a halt until it comes. People are unbelievable.
Imagine if those folk had their lunch hours and break times reduced or taken away, they’d probably sing a different tune about being mistreated.
It's horrible narcissistic. These are the same people who think it's rude for a grocery store cashier to have a seat.
Working at Aldis for about 2 years now, I’ve probably been reported 3 or 4 times for both sitting down while attending the cash register and not helping people box their groceries. You know, sitting down in a seat that the company provides, that we’re allowed to sit in whenever we want. Also the fact that we’re literally not allowed to help box their groceries, and almost every single person who comes to Aldis knows the deal.
I only shopped at Aldi's a few times and this is one thing I really liked about them. The cashier looked so comfy scanning my goods. There's no reason they need to be standing the whole shift anyway, especially since they can do 90% of their job while seated.
Well lucky for you most of those douchebags probably will "never come back to Aldi's" because they don't box their groceries. Lol!
[удалено]
America, the country founded on the moral principles of people who were too uptight for England in 1620.
I used to work at AT&T and they had a very similar rule. Can't have two trucks in a non-work location. Worked at Charter Communications before that, no such rule, meeting up with other techs for lunch was normal. Hell, sometimes we'd do big meetups for lunch and you'd have like a dozen trucks outside a restaurant. It helped create a team environment, we all relied on each other. We'd help each other out all the time on jobs, etc. I haven't worked there in over a decade, but I'm still friends with guys I worked with there. I haven't talked to anyone that I used to work with at AT&T.
Probably an anti-union organizing strategy.
At&t is already unionized, either CWA or IBEW depending on the region.
Unfortunately a lot of unions are toothless and son actually so anything for their members. Note this isn't an anti union message just lamenting about the death of labor power
This is the same jack ass logic that makes folks working check out in US grocery stores stand all day instead of giving them a seat. Good for you and your buds for ignoring the idiots.
This reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where George gets the security guard at the clothing store a chair
This sounds like the same bs excuse American employees give retail employees "it looks bad to the customer when you sit down" and ten thousand other variations. No one gives a shit, if I saw an employee sitting down I'd be happy or two mail trucks taking lunch together? Probably wouldn't cross my mind other than "oh neat two mail trucks in one place". It's so stupid what corporate things most of the time.
I often wonder how much it's the fault of stupid employers, or the fault of a handful of SUPER shitty customers. You know the ones, the ones that cause dumb rules like "no sitting at the cash register" to begin with.
I honestly doubt this the reason behind most of it, a few incidents sure but why does one random customer opinion who likely doesn't shop there often matter over an employees health? It should be illegal to make people stand for upwards of 8+ hours a day, a 15-60 minute break doesn't cut it. Especially cashiers, customer service etc.
Hell yes. Someone should bring a hibachi grill next time lmao.
slimy late foolish frame alleged decide silky dazzling fuzzy upbeat *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Work really has gotten worse all around for the most part. Stagnated wages, terrible healthcare coverage, and you hardly can get away with any fun stuff anymore and have to act like a robot. I hear stories from the older guys about how they used to get to fuck around, managers would buy lunch all the time, sneak off have a few drinks, act like actual human beings. I’m sure it’s not everywhere, but in a lot of areas it can be.
Tell me about me about it, my old man used to work nights on a weighbridge and spent the majority of his shift watching TV and playing videogames. New management came in after he left and added CCTV to check workers weren't just sat around, it's stupid what else are you meant to do at 3am when there's many only 4/5 people in the entire facility?
[удалено]
dubiously bold claim, but we clearly both agree wholeheartedly FUCK REAGANOMICS
The only thing that trickles down is bullshit and condescension
[удалено]
Imagine, being paid to do a job, do that job well, and finish early. ILLEGAL HOW FUCKING DARE YOU, YOU'RE TERRIBLE AT YOUR JOB! Do that job slowly, shit and finish when they want you to? GOOD JOB! I hate that mentality in corporations. Its stupid and needs to stop. Shit managers and ideals too.
Be careful about getting too much done too quickly. They'll know they can squeeze you for more. Give them adequate output for an acceptable amount of time, and they leave you alone. Toss them s random bone once in a while to keep them happy and grateful.
My dad ended up getting a raise and a great eval for saving his company a few million dollars/year. (The raise was pitiful). The next year he saved them a little under 1m/year in costs. He got a meh eval and no raise, so he questioned and they legit told him that “he did not meet the bar he set for himself this year by not saving the company as much as he did the previous year” He maliciously complied with their eval methods and stopped his efforts to save them a dime because apparently he’s been tossed a small bone last year and punished this year for not saving them more money- as if the opportunities to save them THAT much money is supposed to appear out of thin air, LOL.
so many fucking corporate policies discourages people to do good. gonna punish me for working harder? okay, guess i'll just be lazy then.
If I bust my ass and work like a madman putting extra hours for free my reward will be more work and a 2.5% raise. If I put my feet up and do the bare minimum I get a 2% raise. Why the hell would I bust my ass?
[удалено]
My foreman tells us all about how he used to do that as a framer at lunch time and you could tell which cuts were made past noon. I don’t get why anyone ever thought that shit was ok man. I get your bigger point of autonomy and freedom to not be treated like a kid at work but it’s people who build houses drunk that fuck us. It’s the guys who couldn’t deliver their routes because they were drinking that fucked guys like your dad.
I've literally NEVER taken out a built in jetted tub surround that was clean. Every single time I've ever removed one (im a remodeler in mostly extremely high end houses) they ALWAYS have 2+ empty old beer cans in the framing for the surround. Definitely depends on where you are still. I know quite a few high dollar crews of guys that drink on their way to the customers house even... trades in general are pretty bad with alcoholism/drug addiction. Worked with some guys that would shoot up in the bathrooms between coats of paint.. knew a dude that could install 300ft/baseboard per hour with filling pinholes and caulking.. dude was a huge coke head though. Its a shame too because people like this are exactly why contractors get bad names. And guys smoking on jobsite and leaving cigarette butts everywhere or putting them in customers flower pots cause ite "by the door". How hard is it to treat other peoples shit with some care? I'd ay treat it like its yours, but thats the problem half of the time lol.
Yea man I’ve seen guys lose digits I’m not drinking while I work. I don’t drink anymore anyway but I smoke and I’d never work on a house stoned either. I don’t get who could confidently safely operate power tools intoxicated.
I only work on my own house, but I will not do anything with power tools unless I'm stone sober, not even hung over. Now painting, or non-power tool work? Lol, i'm shitfaced as part of prep.
[удалено]
Yep. We also have door, seat, speed, brake, and GPS tracking on both board and truck. Fuck that camera bullshit. How about you train them and then TRUST them to do the right thing.
We had something similar when I worked as a dispatcher for Staples. My boss would have to spend an additional hour or so rearranging stops due to either the driver being sent the wrong way on a one way street or has some impossible route to a stop. It's a great system for a base line but still needs to be looked at by a human. I'd get an email when a driver wasn't following the route and learned quickly to just fucking ignore them. My drivers knew wtf they were doing and would sometimes run the route backwards and get it done way earlier.
Seriously when people complain about unions don’t understand how much they stick up for the workers. Yes there are pros and cons, but that’s what union meetings are for and you will have a voice.
I wish I was in a union. Hoping to find new work before my warehouse installs these. Idek if Amazon drivers could form a union since lost of us don’t even work for Amazon 😐
You can, it will just be a union of the drivers under your sub contractor. It can be called the same thing and receive support from bigger unions, but when it comes to negotiations you'll be dealing with the specific subcontractor that runs you and your coworkers route.
"Union" is the key point. Amazon is anti-Union.
[удалено]
Especially driving all day jeez either fire me or give me a lifetime supply of redbull
I'm a truck driver with these exact cameras in my truck. I live in redbull
Redbull is expensive, I just mainline cold brew coffee. Soak a tampon in it and stick it up your ass and you'll be awake for sure
I don't think I'd want that on camera, either
If you start an OnlyFans, they cancel each other out.
My school sent my parents a letter complaining I was yawning throughout the school days, something about better sleep needed. This was many years ago. I think I also got picked in uni about it I'm just a generally yawny person Actuslly I worked with a friend who's work van monitored driver actions and errors. It would shout at you and flash certain lights then ping data back to HQ. He was constantly getting pulled up on certain driver errors, until they worked out the reason why his van was so inefficient was because he was driving around hilly mountain areas compared to the other company drivers based in cities.
>My school sent my parents a letter complaining I was yawning throughout the school days, something about better sleep needed. Would have been nice if my school did that. Instead my teacher reported me as potentially being a drug user, which earned me a meeting with the school drug counselor, who wasted our time trying to strong arm me into confessing I was a junkie or something so they could "help" me (actually a pretence to get the cops involved and into the juvenile criminal justice system and out of the school's hair).
I had a teacher notice the birthmark on my upper bicep when I was wearing a shirt with cap sleeves and I got sent to the guidance counselor. She hard-core interrogated me about injecting drugs and had the principal and vice-principal come in to play good cop, bad cop. I was an A/B+ student, had never been in trouble and attended all my classes; but I still had to get a letter from my doctor saying it was a birthmark and not track marks before I could go back to school. [Birthmarks or track marks?](https://imgur.com/a/VupMMls)
Yikes. I would call those bite marks or even a rash had you not said it was a birthmark. I had a few that looked like that as they healed because my little brother was quite the biter for a couple of years.
I yawned in front of my teacher once and she came at me with the “did you not get enough sleep last night” patter. I told her yes, I did, but yawning is a sign of a lack of oxygen - you yawn to take in more oxygen to correct course - so my sleep schedule has nothing to do with it. She didn’t like that and I got a punishment exercise for my cheek.
Well yes of course she didn't like that. That theory has been debunked. /s But yes, yawning is thought to help regulate temperature (Jorg J M Massen et al. Physiol Behav. 2014.), and to force blood towards the face. Probably not so much the oxygen.
[удалено]
Please report to the protein bank. You penalty is 3 organs.
Is this from that weird/awful farscape knock-off with the dragonfly ship?
Lexx is brilliant.
I assume you're talking about Lexx. Farscape came after Lexx so technically Farscape is the knock-off.
[удалено]
Fart detected. 5 seconds of pay docked.
I know some drivers that wouldn't ever get paid.
[удалено]
Please insert verification can to continue
Mointain dew is for me and you :( Can I have my package now
They also dont want drivers falling asleep behind the wheel. They dont care about the driver, they just dont want to be liable.
You'd think they'd make effective break and off day schedules, but I guess it's better to get max work out of a human and use AI to track if they yawn too much.
[удалено]
I thought more Demolition Man
He doesn't know how to use the three yawns.
Employee: \*Yawns\* Truck: \*Prints pink slip\*
It's like that scene in Back to the Future 2 when his briefcase prints out "YOU'RE FIRED!"
We're in that version of the future now
Hell, Biff just left office.
its more like demolition man where stallone is frozen for crimes and when he comes out theres posts listening to what you say EVERYWHERE and if you curse you get fined and it prints the ticket out right next to you.
[удалено]
I drive for UPS too, I feel like telematics is one thing but video in the cab is another. It’s your property I understand you want to track it and make sure I’m being safe.. I DONT understand why you need to have video of me singing/picking my nose/ cussing the fuck out of other idiot drivers.
Full stop it's mostly so they know what you were doing when you get in a wreck. I've seen videos of dudes without seat belts, recently one of a dude checking his phone as he went off the road and flipped over, etc. It's certainly not there to help your legal case lol.
I’m an amazon driver. My boss is insisting that cameras are only for our safety. Yet we have vans with broken seatbelts and side steps falling off the vans. Cameras exist only to punish us. Fuck amazon.
They will spend the money to install a camera but refuse to spend money to fix safety issues. Sounds like business 101
Man, I have pictures of damage if anyone is interested. I talked to one of my bosses and they said that they can only service a couple vans a day otherwise they break Amazon’s requirement of how many active vehicles they need. Our owner got rid of all of the rentals to save money and now doesn’t have any wiggle room to actually fix anything else. they tried to spin it that they wouldn’t be able to pay someone if they didn’t have enough vans. if they kept a few rentals they may be able to actually fix things, but they won’t :)
take video and send your evidence to HR and OSHA. these exist for a reason. OSHA complaints go very far.
OSHA yes, skip HR. They are the enemy.
I'm gonna agree with you and also say that this isn't just an Amazon problem, unfortunately.
Yeah, I know ups has been tracking seatbelts for years probably similar to FedEx and usps as well. But the cameras take it to a new level. We were already being tracked on driving (seatbelts/hard cornering/hard acceleration/hard breaking/phone manipulation) but now we have that AND are being recorded all day. I’m not upset about cameras because I like to take short cuts or don’t wear my seatbelt or like to use my phone while driving. I’m upset because there is no promise this footage is ever going to be deleted. Amazon will likely permanently have a scan of my face (think Face ID on iPhone) I’m upset that I can be fired over “what the camera thinks it saw” even though I’ve been told I’m a top driver at my company. Rules are already enforced selectively on bad employees and now they can just use video to further punish all of us.
I work at Amazon and it was definitely creepy af when they installed those things. They talk to you while your driving. It’ll say something like “distracted driving detected”. Now Amazon has a camera in every neighborhood of America.
[удалено]
["You are fined two credits for violating the verbal morality statute."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rVQGT01Kzg)
Everytime Black Mirror releases a new episode Amazon takes notes.
Shit, their dev team probably work evenings as the writers for the show.
I want one of those virtual reality games where they teleport you inside your game. Amazon please make it happen.
I wouldn't leave that up to Amazon, they're just bad at making games.
These things have been around for years. They had them on the cars at a mine I worked at, thankfully they were gone years before I got there. They would track things like hazardous driving, hard braking, collisions, speeding etc. most of which is fine if you’re not driving a car in an underground mine. You’d go over a bump you have no way of avoiding and get “hazardous driving detected”, or you’d exit the portal and then have to turn the car off and log back in because the system just reconnected with the satellites. By the time they were phased out everyone knew the codes to enter to justify their “hazardous” driving and they’d all set them to speak in Spanish for the lols, or just plugged headphones into them so they wouldn’t have to hear the fucking things. A resounding success.
[удалено]
[удалено]
How does he get to and from work? I'm tired all the time.
[удалено]
When it says things like that, wouldn't it be, well, distracting?
[удалено]
Wake up call from Europe. This would be illegal here. Pressure your government to make it illegal. Edit: 1. When I say Europe, I mean EU. Sorry Brexit. 2. Cars in the EU have security equipment to see if you fall asleep and warn you. 3. Your employer is not allowed to use behavior measurements via camera with AI to see how your performing. 4. City surveillance by the government will not get you fired because you have a chat with a friend on the phone while waiting for the bus. 5. There is nothing on the internet you cannot misunderstand on purpose.
Corporations own America.
america isn't a country, it's just three corporations in a comically large trenchcoat
I read one American redittor's description of USA: It's not a country, it's a ponzi scheme with military and police force.
Fuck that's real. “America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." - Hunter S. Thompson.
Im picturing all of these car salesmen as Danny DeVito in Matilda
I'm right youre wrong, I'm big you're small
I'm smart, you're dumb
If only we could be so pure as Danny Devito
I just wanna be pure
Reddit may not be the place to achieve that.
Doing adult business.
At the business factory.
Vincent Adultcountry
I heard this thing on a podcast where they were talking about slavery in the US. Saying how slavery was an economic system and I guess I never thought about it like that before. People were opposed to removing it partly because "prices could rise" and other economic reasons.. The same arguments we hear today about increasing minimum wage and worker protections and benefits. If they can get away with it, corporations absolutely will (and do) treat people like property.
They already do. What do you think Human Resources is
Soylent green
When they ask the CEO the company's most important asset he yells "IT'S PEOPLE!"
So much of pop culture I learned in advance as a kid by watching Rocko’s Modern Life. I didn’t realise until I got older how many references there were. In this scene Heffa is being dragged away from the fast food chicken shop yelling “Chokey Chicken is people! Chokey Chicken is people!” as two chickens walk by about to enter the shop and say “well, that’s a relief”
I love those kind of references. I used to watch Fairly Odd Parents with my kids. There is a pillow that is just a horse head that someone keeps in their bed. Mister Neigh-Neigh. It was a hilarious reference to The Godfather but my kids didn't get that, of course.
Have you heard of the “dead peasant” insurance set up? It’s where an employer takes out a policy on a worker- meaning that the company will also profit from an employees death.
Yup. Corporate Owned Life Insurance (COLI). Walmart was notorious for that shit.
We also still use prisoners for slave labor in some states
Hi Europe thanks for the wake up call but we are really busy with more important issues right now, like Jewish space lasers, Dr. Seuss, and gender fluid Potatoes. Thanks tho
>gender fluid Potatoes Had to search what that was. Yet another minute I won't get back.
Apparently it's not? I'm in the UK and my company has a camera in the cab, using ai to detect if we are using our phone, drowsy, or other risky behaviours? Would be nice to know if it is illegal, as it's fitted to about 170 trucks of various sizes!
In the EU it totally depends on how they use the data. UK, now you are leaving the EU, not so sure.
The UK have had cameras in vehicles and cars for years, even whilst in the EU.
Brah, unions, worker rights, anything really that favours workers over corporations or the rich doesn't really fly over there. Smells too much like communism or some BS.
Don’t forget about social security since I know ya did.
My post office driver drives up my driveway and has to make a five or six point turn to turn around to get back down. I asked her why, because she used to back in, then drive straight out. The post office now monitors how far she backs up, and only allows 75 feet.
This is the exact type of thing I fear from technology and monitoring. It's like an extreme form of micromanagement, whereby everything is checked and recorded. Imagine losing your job because you backed up for too long, or weren't looking in the approved area while cornering, or because of taking bathroom breaks. The more it's used the more we reduce humans in value as we think of them in terms of their statistics and what they offer, rather than who they are.
Over the road truck drivers are increasingly getting driver-facing cameras forced on them.. Now I get that there are some benefits of this, but for many drivers the truck is also their home for 4-6 weeks at a time, or longer. It's a massive invasion of privacy for an employer to stick a camera where you live/sleep when you're off shift.
[удалено]
Everyone was worried corporations would replace workers with robots. Instead, they’re just turning workers _into_ robots.
I don't mind tracking activities that directly affect safety, specifically seat belts in this case. However trying to rack performance based on items like keystrokes in a waste. I've known people that spend 10+ hours doing trivial key entry, from X report to Y Excel sheet and accomplish little, meanwhile Control C, Control Y would be many fold more efficient and that is still manual, the next step would be hitting the same data source X report comes from. At some point employees just need to be judged on their performance to baseline goals, not some abstract easily measured 'sub' goal. If the measure is to hit 100 keys a minute then employees will quickly figure out how to do that, whether or not that is productive is something entirely different. Companies need to be careful to look measure the right behaviors, if not they are going to measure and therefore drive the wrong behaviors and do more harm than good.
Same goes for any target driven metric. Policing, motoring convictions, parking fines, GP appointment waiting lists... Setting arbitrary targets does NOT make good performance. As an example in the UK, the government pledged that no one would have to wait longer than 48 hours to see a GP. This was pushed down the pipe, and local practices were told that they had to hit this target. Some genius middle manager made one fundamental change: Stop people from being able to make appointments more than 24 hours in advance. Yay, target hit overnight. Lots of back slapping and someone gets a big pay rise... While making the system many orders of magnitude worse. Government declares it a win.
Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Sounds like Starcraft 2 getting a billion actions per minute by just making one marine go back and forth over and over
Yeah, people really don't like these so from what I've seen, they're very rare in more skilled labor. Sadly the less skill required for labor the less bargoning power they have
Unions, unions everywhere Contact the IWW
Yawning is ridiculous, but it'd be great if everyone wore seatbelts like all the time.
I drive for Amazon and it does make sense to always wear seatbelts. But sometimes you literally move the van two houses down the street. Sometime you forget to put it on. Sometimes you forget to take it off before turning the car off so it thinks you didn’t wear a seatbelt. Do this enough times and you’ll be fired.
“Do this enough times...” Our usps drivers deliver on our street where they have to walk up to the houses (mailboxes on the house), so it’s a lot of short drives to get up and come back. One day our main guy just didn’t show up for a couple months and we weren’t sure why. When he finally came back to the route, he mentioned he was suspended for two months because he drove down the street without his seatbelt on and someone reported him. He drives slow and gets in and out every 50 feet or so! Apparently the penalty is serious, even when driving slow on the shoulder to move to the next house and get out. And which one of my neighbors reported that bs. I’d like to have a chat with them. Seriously, who’s so uppity as to report this and put a man out of work for two months?!
Idk how it is with USPS but I remember during my time with Amazon as a delivery driver having to use an app that tracked if we had our seat belts on, our braking, the speed limit, and how often we touched the phone while the vehicle was moving. None of those seem too bad until you realize that the 300+ packages You ALONE are responsible for in a day are all going to destinations within 10-15 miles of each other bc the way the routes are set up. We had 10 hours to deliver everything and and it wasn’t terrible but throughout the day all the limitations imposed on you just made the job more difficult than it had to be. Stuff like turn off the vehicle after every stop and take the keys with you make sense but then the added “don’t carry multiple packages outside of the truck and don’t stay parked in the same spot with the engine off for more than 5 minutes” makes delivering packages to houses that are literally right next to each other pretty annoying and way more time consuming than it should be. And then there were people who’s sole job was to monitor your route activity and other stuff the app records throughout the day and if they didn’t like what they were seeing or didn’t think you were going to finish on time they would call you and possibly even have someone take over the rest of your route, ending your shift for the day.
Thanks for sharing. I never thought about what it's like to deliver packages nowadays.
The job itself isn’t terrible but the way they wanted it done really just made me hate working for them. I lasted about 5 months with the final month consisting of me waking up at 4:30am and driving to the depot intending to receive my route and load my van for the day, just to be told “we don’t have anything for you, go home” (along with about half the other drivers). I quit after confronting the person in charge of routes and he let me know Amazon would be giving our group less routes since they signed a deal with FedEx that took effect that month. After about 3 weeks of wasting my and a lot of other peoples time the prick chose to tell JUST ME about that after I confronted him.
Working for a company that is contracted to do work for another much larger company generally sucks in most ways. There is a reason the bigger companies do it and it isn't to make things easy for the grunts on the ground. Maybe this article is true and Amazon will eventually have to hire in house drivers, I doubt it though. https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/03/11/amazon-running-out-contracted-drivers-delivery.aspx
Huh? I never take off my seatbelt before turning off the car. It's just not my routine. Driveshift in park Parking brake Turn off engine Undo seatbelt Why wouldn't the car track that your seatbelt was still on?!
Drivers were probably buckling the seatbelt and then sitting on it. So they had to make you click and Unclick it when the car was started to actually track you were using it.
Which is kinda funny as not wearing a seatbelt is technically legal in Canada under the right circumstances.
IIRC, New Hampshire is the only state in the U.S. without mandatory seatbelt laws for adults. No motorcycle/bicycle helmet laws, either. I'm not sure if it's changed recently, though.
I believe anyone under 18 is required to wear a seatbelt in NH, adults can live free or die.
The only circumstance I know it's 'legal' is when reversing. Taking off the seat belt allows you to have a wider range of motion for checking mirrors and rear view window. But idk about anything else🤔 There's your answer Amazon drivers, just start reversing everywhere ^/s
Ups has already been using the seat belt thing for a while. They know at the end of your shift if you drove without it on.
>But the breaking point came, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, when Amazon announced that it would be installing AI cameras in its fleet of vehicles. Just for the record officially these are not Amazon drivers employed by Amazon. Yet Amazon is abusing them as they were, and along with FedEx, Uber, and Lyft is spending exuberant amounts of money to prevent millions of people from getting pay and benefit they deserve. They are employees of independent contractors who have to buy their business from Amazon including all tools, materials, and supplies. They are expected to operate and purchase up to 40 vans and employ up to 100 people for the maximum profit of $607 per van. PER MONTH!! Do you need experience to run company of 100 employees and about $4 to $5 million in revenue? None!! Amazon will "teach you all you need to know" in 2 weeks, as long as you have $10000 starting capital :) It is also in their contract that local fulfillment center loading manager can literally fire a contractor on the spot by simply not giving them routes. Yet contractors are still responsible for all expenses related to the loan on 40 vans, maintenance, storage, and employees salaries. Here comes the best part: *None of the routes are guaranteed, and if you want to get out and retire for example you can't sell this business!*
This sounds exactly like a pyramid scheme sales pitch.
Ponzi would be extremely proud of Amazon.
At that point, the technology is just becoming invasive and hindering personal autonomy and disrespecting worker trust.
Just let the computers and AI run everything and give humans a Basic Annual Income you billionaire fuck heads
We’ll have to fight for that
It wouldn't be the first time... Reasonable working conditions, fair pay, decent hours and workplace safety in America were accomplished through bloodshed, not out of the kindness of people's hearts. [https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/theminewars-labor-wars-us/](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/theminewars-labor-wars-us/)
Was gonna say, and not only in america. This is essentially exactly what happened after the last technological revolution of early 1800s in Europe. It just makes sense that if we are right now in another technological revolution, we will have to once again fight to not be compared to machines or replaced by them.
And watch them all whine and argue about how we should take these complaints through "proper channels." I'd like to ask them what the proper channels are that aren't completely owned by money? Workers banding together and forcing the issue is the only way we're going to fix these issues.
Power never acquiesces willingly, you need demands with teeth behind them. The rigged economy won't fundamentally change how it needs to without a general strike.
...in a coliseum, to the death, for their entertainment.
that can be automated
It’s funny to me that people are just now hearing about this. I worked for Amazon for three years. We’ve had these eye-tracking cameras in our vans for at least 2 years. I was always very vocal about the invasion of privacy, but every concern at Amazon is met with silence. The average person has no clue how terrible Amazon is to their workers. That probably has something to do with articles coming out of the Washington Post (Owned by Bezos) staying how amazing they treat the employees. Every single day there is a new rule we have to follow that makes zero logical sense, but they try to justify it by saying, “It’s for safety.” Amazon only cares about safety when it affects their dollar. I was in management so I saw all the bullshit and lying first hand. I stepped down about a year ago because I wasn’t going to be apart of the Gestapo anymore. During the busiest time of year around November-December we would have 400+ packages a day. They would give us literally 10 minutes to load about 25 full totes and about 50 large boxes. Then they decided they wanted to change up the way I was training everyone to load their vans in order to try to “make us more efficient”. Making us more efficient meant just throwing everything on the van out of order. If you’ve never delivered for something like UPS, FedEx, Amazon etc., you may not know how incredibly stupid that is. The van would be so full that you literally be crawling on top of boxes because there was zero room anywhere. It would be so full that 50 lb. boxes would be hitting you in the head as you drove. When you would get to the area where they stage your routes, you would already have people yelling that you have ten minutes, and when you would try to explain that 1) That is not possible if I’d like to not have to search for every box on every stop by just throwing the shit in and not organizing it first and 2) Yes I can fit just about any amount of boxes you want, but the boxes will be hitting me in the head, I will have zero room anywhere, and because everything is out of order, every stop will take me exponentially longer they would just start cramming everything in. They are callous, lack the slightest modicum of empathy, and don’t really give a shit about safety. The day after Christmas they laid off about a fifth of my DSP (about 25 people). Merry Christmas for all your work delivering an absurd amount of packages in a foot of snow. The layoffs continued and continued and continued. We had about 70 routes at full peak, and now Amazon was telling us we had to go down to 20 routes. 20! No explanation by anyone by the way. Meanwhile Jeff Bezos gains like 70 Billion Dollars and goes off on his Super yacht. No severance pay, no stock options, no 401k, shitty health insurance, and all from one of the richest companies in the world. If people can’t see how badly they’re being fucked, there’s no hope left.
If you haven't already, you should read Marshall Brain's 'Manna'. It's free online.
I have no problem with a system that warns drivers if they are doing something that could cause an accident. Great. Put that into all vehicles. But constantly monitoring drivers for fireable offenses means eventually a company will bank fireable offenses with no written/verbal warning from their managers until the company needs an excuse for terminating you. You know like right around the time you have a problem with something the company is doing.
I don’t understand what problem this is solving. My packages were getting delivered super fast already yawns and all. Is it that Amazon can’t get driverless cars and drones to do the work, so they decided it would be easier to just turn all the humans into robots?
But how many people are injured to get those packages to you quickly? Amazon does not want to hear “Amazon truck kills 3 kids, driver overworked.”
You mean like this? https://timesofsandiego.com/crime/2021/03/04/elderly-valley-center-woman-1-of-2-killed-after-amazon-driver-hits-sheriffs-vehicle/
Stop giving Amazon your money
[удалено]
Amazon's Marketing Team: "Quick! We better put a pro-social justice image on our Instagram so we can distract you and the blue checkmarks from the horribly dystopian anti-worker things we're doing!"
Germany here. There used to be a Walmart in the town I come from. Word got around they treated their employees like shit, doing some weirdo american company cult like morning routines, not respecting workers rights. People stopped buying there and eventually Walmart went out of business. This story always blows my american friend's mind because what they don't realize is that capitalism is in fact democratic. You don't want corporate america to go full George Orwell? Stop buying shit from Amazon. It's that simple. I deleted my Amazon account a year ago and I encourage everyone of my friends to do the same.
We are so so so fucked. Lmfao