Drivers for agencies contracted by the internet giant told an
undercover reporter they were expected to deliver up to 200
parcels a day.
Amazon Logistics requires agency drivers to be self-employed,
and therefore not entitled to the minimum wage or employment
rights like sick pay or holiday pay.
Tonia Novitz, professor of labour law at Bristol University,
said in her opinion drivers contracted by AHC should not be
classed as self-employed, because they do not determine their
own routes, days of work or rest periods.
In a statement Amazon said: "As independent contractors of our
delivery providers, drivers deliver at their own pace, take
breaks at their discretion, and are able to choose the
suggestion route or develop their own."
So much in the name of free market goes on. If IT industry will be allowed to progress unchecked, natural monopolies will emerge and it won't be good for consumer,smaller businesses relaying on big boys, and employees. But seems like free market cool aids is being served and drunk happily by the world.
On the contrary strong labour Laws and high productivity rate in quite a few European countries is a fact ignored conveniently by power greedy moguls. If left unchecked, they will happily move us back gloomy dawn of Industrial Age when it was ok to force workers to toil to death.
Adam smith didn't dream of monopolistic and unregulated market but only one part of his capitalism theory is cherry picked.
Unregulated capitalism is a recipe for disaster.
Honestly? You are promoting a policy of the traditional left (I say traditional left because the overton window has moved) on a forum that has a significant number (if not outright majority) of right/libertarian leaning people.
In theory that shouldn't get you a downvote but it does, much like reddit where you aren't supposed to get downvoted for an on topic post but you do if people disagree with you.
There has been a lot of talk recently of self re-enforcing echo chambers, ironically enough on here which is one of them.
Bias exists in all communities with no exceptions as far as I can tell.
For what it's worth I was arguing that programmers need to either unionise or have a professional chartered body (like Accountants, Lawyers and Engineers) decades ago, the writing has been on the wall for quite a while.
Getting programmers to agree what that would look like though would be a massive exercise in "cat hearding".
Unions aren't perfect but the abscence of Unions isn't perfect either, few things are and the question has to be "broadly, what is better for most people" and I think that is either really strong labour laws or unionisation.
Historically unionisation has occurred most when there is an abscence of strong labour laws (in the US and the UK this was certainly true, the reason a 40 hour work week is considered "standard" is because of unions (and Henry T Ford arguably)).
Yeah, I'm finding it really quite interesting to watch my total karma vary by 5 to 10 points as people read my comments. Maybe I should graph it on munin, would be interesting.
In regards to a union, perhaps that or a guild would be ideal, similar to the other major unions in the US. Strong labor laws generally do not get passed in a vacuum, often its at the behest of the union that good labor laws get passed to protect workers.
I'm a very pro-Union person myself, I've seen & experienced what an employer with total power and a divided workforce can do, and you are essentially powerless. The true power of a union is the ability to organize with your coworkers to walk out and picket your employer to fight for better working conditions & proper pay, which is a powerful tool to level the playing field.
Otherwise, you are a replaceable cog in the machine to your employer, since they can generally handle a fair amount of churn, just not a work stoppage.
You know you got some seriously good thought when your karma starts to swing like that. The opposite is, all of my posts with more than 30 points are stupidly obvious stuff that nobody would miss, but were slightly funny on the context.
Sure, what I write may be good, but it is polarizing. Its much easier to get karma writing the obvious answer that OP may not know as compared to writing about controversial things like worker protections & how their destruction hurts everyone, or how Soylent is unhealthy and we know very little about nutrition overall, let alone anywhere near enough to try to engineer a product to replace food entirely.
Probably I come across like that but I am not a far left proponent. My point is that power owners have cherry picked Adam Smith's Capitalist theory and completed moulded it to their own benefit. safeguards are completely ignored in the name of free market. Yet same they do not feel any shame accepting government grants when going gets tough.
> Historically unionisation has occurred most when there is an abscence of strong labour laws
Unions generally become power centers in themselves so only strong labour law is the solution in my opinion.
Actually spend more than 5 minutes checking out the issue and you'll be surprised. Literally all public services that rely on urban networks like water, electricity, and natural gas are the definition of a natural monopoly. Unless you think it's competitive to have 20 unrelated urban gas pipelines or water services.
Private property sitting on valuable resources hard to find elsewhere. This plus economic games resulted in Standard Oil with it's owner one of the richest and most powerful men in history.
I understand your point, but I do not think the resource would become so valuable if only one company controlled this resource.
> Although Standard had 90 percent of American refining capacity in 1880, by 1911 that had shrunk to between 60 and 65 percent, due to the expansion in capacity by competitors [1]
Standard Oil did become hugely rich and powerful. It did reach massive marketshare as a result of cutting prices, but I wouldn't call it a natural monopoly. I see a monopoly as having no competitors.
That's one definition but in practice it's too weak. One company can get so dominant, esp if it fosters dependence, that it effectively has no competition. They also buy out competitors or bankrupt them by selling below cost. The dominant firm can do that longer. The biggest players pre-Antitrust used to love that technique.
How is it a load of BS, have you gone and talked to employees at Walmart, Target, Amazon and other major employers? Most feel they have no choice to comply, and if you get even a bit outside the cities on the east or west coast they are right. Where is a 50 year old in rural Wisconsin going to find work? Who is there with a job?
In many areas, there aren't a plethora of jobs, and changing jobs when living paycheck to paycheck is a massive risk, you could easily lose the roof over your head.
In reference to "coders", yes, a lot of skilled & talented developers give away their time to the companies they are employed by, and derive no significant benefit from it. Employers are in a position of power in many of those relationships, just as you get a job offer is the time at which the playing field is the closest to being level in that industry.
In the absence of unions or strong labor law, the lion's share of bargaining power rests with employers. This is a simple consequence of the great difference in resources available to an employer versus an employee. The imbalance remains even when there are several employers to choose from – there are still an order of magnitude more employees. Hence employees get screwed and can do nothing about it.
Coders who make over 85k a year are exempt from overtime rules in the State of California. Your comparison is not valid.
Knowing labor laws in the state you work in is very important. I would recommend that everyone understand what makes an employee exempt and if they qualify.
I'm sorry but just because someone can resign and get another job doesn't mean it's OK to abuse the shit out of them.
Furthermore, you're severely overestimating the mobility of this particular class of workers. For a lot of people, finding another job (or heck, just a job) is not easy.
Exactly, despite how mobile American workers are, there is a huge cost & risk associated with changing jobs, which gives the employer the upper hand when negotiating with current employees.
If a coder falls asleep at the keyboard nobody else gets harmed in the vast majority of cases. Coders also have a much wider range of jobs to pick from.
This seems to be a common trend among tech companies. Misclassify employees,pay them a less than is legal, design the program to force them violate a bunch of laws, all the while telling them not to violate laws. Then claim you can't control them because they are contractors. Maybe when you get caught pay a token fine admit no wrong doing and reclassify the employees or shut the thing down.
It's not just tech companies. The whole shielding responsibility via contractors is basically the name of the game for any large corporation. One quick example is chicken farming.
This article was about a lawsuit about chicken waste in 2010
The relevant quote from the article is a statement from Perdue Chicken "Perdue owns no factory farms," the company said. "Families that raise poultry for Perdue are independent farmers."
Nah, you don't see Uber or Lyft contractors having 15% to 30% of their hours driving go completely unpaid. They do mis-classify employees as contractors, but they don't go quite as far as Amazon and many other employers doing wage theft.
We should be enforcing our laws that make wage theft a felony, but at least in the US there is minimal funding for enforcement, so only small businesses are policed. Jeff Bezos can keep committing felonies and forcing those below him to do the same due to the lack of enforcement.
Actually, Uber and Lyft contractors are not paid for quite a bit of their working hours. If you don't have a passenger in your car, you're not getting paid. That includes time between passengers as well as however long it takes you to reach the pickup location. That can easily be 15-30% or more.
That is at least consistent with any other taxi/private hire service though, at least in the UK. I'm not aware of any taxi firms that operate on a standard hourly wage. Drivers pay a fee to the base to be registered with them, and in some cases a fee for each fare they are allocated, but the drivers themselves are self employed and the fares they collect are their own. The only difference with Uber is that Uber process the fares for them rather than the driver collecting cash.
True true, I didn't say the model wasn't messed up and that practically the same effect didn't occur, but my comment was primarily on the overt wage theft at Amazon, versus the hidden wage theft that occurs as a contractor at Uber & Lyft. The equivalent there is if you just didn't get paid for quite a few rides at all.
I am a automotive tech worker. i dont know how a lawyer determines h1b minimum wage but i get paid a lot less than Americans in my company who dont even have a masters degree. Yes its very easy to trick the laws
Talk to your state's Dept of Labor and Industry. Your state has a hotline for you to anonymously ask if what your employer is doing is legal, and if your employer has other H1B visa holders, you can likely stay anonymous during their investigation.
They won't move fast, but triple damages and a nice fine for your employer can be a sweet reward for their fraud against you.
On a sidenote, the H1B strategy is very common in the Engineering field, most consultancies figure they can get a decade of work at below American wages out of the average H1B visa holder, saving them a few hundred thousand.
Does one really have to have a masters degree to be a automotive tech? In any case at least you can change employers with reasonable ease, not like the workers on L1 visa who can either put up or pack the bags and go home.
Are we glossing over the fact that none of these drivers work for Amazon?
> A BBC reporter got a job with AHC services
I think the real issue at play here is the use of contract workers to skirt labour laws. Perhaps governments need to stop differentiating between part time and full time workers given the assumption everyone needs to make a living wage some how, even if it is through multiple "part time" jobs.
People not paying income tax and national insurance - they're classified as contractors, so technically they're responsible for their own deductions, but I'd be very surprised if many of them are actually paying anything.
Reading the article I understand that the agency who subcontract drivers for Amazon is making them "work illegal hours", not Amazon itself.
Now I am not saying that Amazon is not doing that, I am just saying that no evidence is presented on the fact that Amazon is aware of what is happening with the drivers.
It is likely that Amazon dictates terms that don't leave the agency another choice. I don't think the owners of the agency will make a lot of money either. Creating such an agency isn't too hard, so if AHC doesn't comply they'll find someone who opens up a new one and delivers the same price again.
In my opinion Amazon is at fault. A company has to know the contractors it works with. It's a similar argument as with child labor. Just because a subcontractor that produces for you exploits children doesn't mean that it's not your fault. Companies, especially at that size, have a duty to closely monitor their whole supply chain for violations of laws and ethics.
It's interesting how almost everyone here seems to be assuming that Amazon is at fault, and accepting the reporter's story as complete, accurate and unbiased...
They've probably seen more than one from a diverse set of sources that are all consistent about Amazon's exploitative practices on drivers and people in warehouses. Contracting people out to screw them is standard practice in the low-cost, shipping industry. On warehouse side, they force people to sign non-compete agreements in areas where the many warehouses are about the only decent-paying jobs they can get. Just between those two would make me default against Amazon on a story making them look bad as I already know they're scum.
I actually know someone who I think is an Amazon driver. I'll ask him about it. He's hesitant to talk about whoever he contracts for, though, since they'll fire him if they find out he was source of negative information. There's some kind of NDA or similar policy involved.
This kind of thing has been going on for years in one guise or another but the BBC has some axes to grind so lets make out it's something unique to amazon.
The BBC actually has some bogus self-employment issues of it's own but since this is just 'talent' using clever tax avoidance methods it's not a story.
If Amazon didn't already have such a long-standing terrible reputation about how it treats its employees (both warehouse and corporate), its business partners, (Hachette) etc. it wouldn't be the default reaction. Amazon's actions have consequences.
Yes... the simple observation that everybody has an agenda. I don't consider any news source to be worthy of being taken at face value. I feel we should be at least somewhat skeptical of, well, pretty much everything.
While you're right in quite a few areas, I have only had one package delivered by OnTrac. Literally everything else is USPS or UPS (and maybe one FedEx)
A great read indeed, but I don't think it explains anything. All it left me with were more questions: "why, oh my god, why???"
In the end, all those examples (except forkable?) are just glorified directories. They also do payment, which makes them so attractive for investors (finger in the real money stream, not just hoping for crumbs tossed to yet another ads service), but also comes with the responsibility to think about non-fixed cost, something that much of the startup bubble seems to have forgotten that it even exits. I hope that I'm the end, lean directory specialists, payment specialists and so on will keep the upper hand. Food delivery is not Amazon, where even if I order from marketplace I would love to forget that I'm not really dealing with Amazon. In food delivery, even if I do the transaction through an aggregator service, I'm all interested in the individual kitchen and would ideally about the aggregator service. Buying on Amazon marketplace I would prefer to get the goods from Amazon directly instead of some nameless seller, buying from a food aggregator I would prefer it if the transaction convenience would be available directly from the individual kitchen.
Nobody is forcing those drivers to work for Amazon. If there are people willing to work in described conditions, that should be nobody business except involved parties.
> If there are people willing to work in described conditions, that should be nobody business except involved parties.
Involved parties like the person who gets hit by a van driven by someone who hasn't had a break in the last 14 hours, and is paying more attention to the device telling him where the next delivery is than the road.
Why should they have laws against dangerous driving? If someone runs into someone else, that's an issue between the two of them that should be resolved with pistols at dawn, the way that gentlemen used to do it.
Is this news? They do this right in their hometown, wage theft by Amazon is an institution. They "ask" employees to come in an hour or two early for a shift, and stay a few hours late.
Unless the BBC is trying to organize Amazon workers to hit the streets and fight for better working conditions and/or a union, this isn't newsworthy or noteworthy.
I have never understood what people mean by "is this news?". Just because you know it, doesn't mean others do. I certainly had no idea about this before. Can we address the issue at hand instead of being condescending about it?
It's not a horrible place to work. I've worked at Microsoft and work for Amazon now. It's unavoidable that with a company the size of Amazon there will be some (maybe a lot) of bad areas to work and it's obvious that despite even the best hiring practices in the world, you'll find people winding up in a position for which they are not a good fit.
There's a lot of interesting work, though, and a lot of people happy working on it. I wouldn't tell anyone it's the best place to work or that it's "better" to work than another place, but I love what I do and work with hundreds of people who (more or less) feel the same. I also know people who don't feel this way and I encourage them to move on or move out because nobody should be in a job they really dislike (and I'm aware of the incredible privilege that's reflected by my ability to say that).
At least here in the states, workers rights are very poor, and Amazon will hire nearly anyone. I know that they were only offering homeless in Seattle & Bellevue nigh shift hours as a temp employee, which meant they could not live in a shelter or rehab since they would start work a few hours after the curfew. Really a great helping hand Jeff, throwin' em to the wolves!
Amazon also has some undeveloped land that they have turned over to an organization that runs homeless shelters to provide housing for the years in between when the land is developed.
But yes. Amazon is a terrible place to work and we are all just too dumb to quit. Oh, and we all hate homeless people, I guess.
Sure, they occasionally help out Mary's Place and the like, not disputing that. Many other companies do so too.
From what I've heard from Amazon workers, from drinking with them on Cap Hill, or from my own neighbors who work there, or my Cousin who was a higher up there & left, or from my friends, on average its not a great place to work. There are good teams, but compared to what I've heard from IBM or Microsoft employees it sounds worse than working at either of them, and on par with working at Adobe Seattle over in Fremont.
That is pretty good, just wish the BBC wrote a better article and ended with suggestions on who to contact regarding wage theft & how to organize to fight back against it, instead of ending the article with the Amazon contractor saying your free to quit at any time.
Ultimately the purpose of such articles, if they wish to affect change, is to get the UK courts to rule that the drivers cannot be classified as self-employed and must receive the National Minimum Wage and conform to rules on driving hours and breaks, which are fairly extensive.
There were a number of similar reports about Uber before a court recently ruled that Uber drivers are legally employees, not self-employed contractors.
