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Joined 14 years ago
Joined 14 years ago
I think people pissing in bottles probably does happen in Amazon's vast network, but as a very, very rare exception. It makes for good public propaganda, but it's not the issue most salient to warehouse workers.
There's a constant grind that Amazon puts on your body and brain. The work is monotonous. Your joints slowly break down from RSI. You get aches that you learn to compensate for or ignore. You learn to manage the pressure of the little screen at your work station that shows you the rate you've been packing at over the past ten minutes. You learn to manage the pressure of your co-workers at the next step in the process, who have their own little screens, and need you to work faster so they can work faster.
The pay is better than most shit jobs, the benefits are good, the work rules are clear and the managers largely aren't abusive. The trade-off you make is that the physical and psychological demand is intense. There's a reason that the average Amazon FC worker lasts six months—I reckon Amazon's done the math and decided that high turnover is worth the extra productivity they can squeeze out of workers while they're there.
In that sense, it's a bit of a shame that reporters and politicians focus so much on pee in bottles, because working at Amazon is still pretty ghoulish without it. I'm rooting for the workers at Bessemer. It will be very hard to build up the union density needed to really have negotiating leverage over Amazon, but you have to start somewhere!
I agree with this! However, it would be very nice if Amazon engineers were organized as well. I know CWA has an ongoing effort to organize tech workers. They're a pretty good union--still what I'd call a "business union," but one of the better ones that understands their power comes from being organized enough to shove the boss around a little.
Organizing a union is also fairly hard, and staff of established unions are more likely to have the skill set to teach you how to have convincing conversations with your co-workers, make sure they stick together, keep everybody from freaking out when the boss starts threatening to fire people, etc. It's also good to have them around to provide financial/legal support if the boss follows through on those threats.
It's also a clever way for tech companies to externalize a lot of their R&D costs—because academic labs often rely on private grant funding more than the state, corporations can determine research priorities by extending grants, and then have the costs of that research partially subsidized by tuition-paying students!
This is an interesting talk on the subject. Haven't listened to it in a while but it really shaped my thinking about the university while I was a student: https://wearemany.org/a/2014/06/fall-of-faculty
https://gothamist.com/news/bh-photo-workers-strike-on-may-da...