I'd say Amazon treats a good portion of its customers like shit too. Though I imagine that at this point Amazon workers are the ones bearing the brunt of Amazon's abuse.
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So, this Amazon union vote crap.
- Thread starter Eacaraxe
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Indeed this very much would have been the case with BHM1. Amazon's fulfillment network is designed in such a way any given FC, with some exceptions, can basically be pulled or cut out of the supply chain and/or shut down immediately with little impact to overall operations, save increased workload on FC's still in the network. For example, in 2017, hurricanes Harvey and Irma knocked out a large number of FC's in the south, and inventory flow was pretty seamlessly rerouted to other FC's including mine.
And by "seamlessly" I mean "we ended up with about seven or eight months of consecutive mandatory overtime, in the middle of which was one ************ of a peak season".
Amazon's turnover rate is the second-worst of any corporation in the country, behind Massachusetts Mutual, with an average turnover rate of twelve months. That was before COVID. If I remember the tenure numbers right, being there two years (the point at which waged employees' RSU's used to vest before Amazon removed that benefit) put you in the top 20% of Amazon employees by tenure, and I was either in the top 10% or 5% when I hit the four-year mark.
Moreover, Amazon has forced attrition rates. Meaning, managers are required to discipline and fire a certain percentage of their workforce regardless of whether they're actually meeting goals. It doesn't actually matter if you're making rate, if you're a bottom 5% performer you're still getting progressive disciplinary action taken against you.
The "hard time filling positions" part is one of Amazon's dirty little secrets. Like I said, they import labor like a mother fucker. But beyond that, a lot of warehouse workers simply end up going back to Amazon because they have little to no choice. Getting fired or quitting is pretty much a joke and in some cases not considered more than a 60-90 day unpaid vacation with a seniority reset, unless you take the buyout or get fired for something like workplace violence or theft.
Basically what happened, is Amazon built warehouse hubs in economically-depressed areas where they can extract maximal concessions from municipal, county, and state governments. That goes hand in hand with red states and extensive anti-worker labor laws. That means a largely captive labor force, likely for whom Amazon employment (as shitty as it is) is a big deal. Ergo, a lot of people get fired or quit, then come back because they just can't find anything else.
I know people who have been and out of Amazon warehouses five or six times.
No, that's representative of every warehouse, and really the difference between warehouses lies with management. Good site management, it's not bad; bad site management, you're going to have a rough time. But the difference isn't so much "peeing in bottles", so much as it is "dropping trou, shitting in a tote, and throwing it on the line because you're afraid of TOT". Or, "standing there with a wastebin to barf into because you're sick and can't leave your work station".
And before you ask, yes I have seen both. The former so often that while I was there, my friends and I started referring to it shorthand as "code schwifty". Piss bottles are like, Tuesday.
I mean if you want to hear stories about dumbass employees doing stupid shift, feel free to ask me about employees getting caught fucking in gaylords. Or the time a woman was literally turning tricks on her shift, and got fired...not for turning tricks, but for the TOT she acquired while turning tricks.
...right.
In the time it took some of you to argue what is or isn't Capitalism, Bezos made more than you'll make in your lifetime.
This reminds me of a friend of mine, who used to be a project manager in game software.
One company, he had a good productive team, then after a takeover a new senior managerial team came in and told him he should fire the least productive team member every month. He protested - his team was good, the project was on track, they all knew their jobs, no-one was slacking, and this would wreck morale. But they insisted, and over the course of the next six months the team duly disintegrated as a load of them quit and moved to other jobs (including my friend).
Didn't I hear something about this proposed union being somewhat politically active one rather than a more worker centric one and that potentially putting people off. Though admittedly that could all be Amazon PR spin I'm hearing.
That's Amazon's MO -- terrify everyone into working beyond their limits, turn employees against each other, hand pick people and harass them until they quit. Literally, it's their policy. Internally, I can put this in no terms accessible to nerds than to say they're a late-stage capitalist Sith empire.
First, you have forced attrition which I just described. To that I'll add, employees are incentivized to snitch on each other, or simply make shit up if they have nothing negative to say about their peers. When "problem" employees (read, scapegoats or sacrificial lambs) are identified, they're put on dev list, an open internal database that documents employee infractions, and being on dev list blocks internal transfers and excludes employees from certain benefits.
Dev list is the cue for managers and peers to start the shark attack. Everything an employee does wrong (or "wrong") is documented, and the next step after dev list is called Pivot now if I remember right. Pivot basically entails one of three choices on the employee's part: go on PIP, appeal, or take severance and leave. 99% (that's the actual internal figure) of employees who go on PIP quit or are termed, and PIP is basically just Amazon's cue to start creating as hostile a work environment as possible to force a voluntary termination -- to dodge severance and unemployment insurance claims. Appeal is an HR kangaroo court/struggle session, and I can't remember their internal numbers but appeals are basically never upheld.
They literally offer severance as part of Pivot, because PIP's and appeals are so labor intensive (read, expensive) it's cheaper to just let them voluntarily term with a payout. The more insidious reason, is Amazon faces so many ULP, wrongful termination, and hostile work environment suits per year with which they have to settle to protect their reputation, it's cheaper for them to preemptively settle before the suit is filed. Amazon employees already know dev list and PIP together constitute the corporation's hit list and the process by which they build cases to terminate with cause, and that recovery from those states is basically impossible.
I read an article today on a little-remarked upon part of the agriculture industry: knackers. These are people who go round and collect the carcasses of animals that die on the farm for disposal and - if necessary - also often kill the sick and injured ones. Depressing stuff. As the article noted, the livestock farmers can kill these sick animals as they've got the licence and tools, but they often don't because it's just such a miserable task that many can't bear to do it.
If the masses weren't so idle and feckless, the heroic entrepreneurs that drive society towards a successful future wouldn't have to work so hard to whip them into shape.
Hyper centralization and excessive amounts of power leads to terrible corruption. And all of this in the process of brick and mortar stores closing up and the masses cheering for their fall. Oh humanity and your lack of foresight and memory.
There are two anecdotes I can tell about this from my past experience as an Amazon employee, equally disturbing and amusing. The first is, with regards to tier 3 waged employees and 4-5 management, when it comes to tier 1 employees looking to advance there are two schools of thought.
One is puffing the job(s) up and using the development and promotion of that employee as a success story to get your own promotion in turn. Amazon focuses exclusively on STAR method for employment and advancement, which means success stories are the second-most important key to getting hired or promoted. Developing a subordinate who then gets promoted is one of the most appealing success stories a prospect can bring to an interview, so an inordinate amount of time and attention gets devoted towards identifying subordinates to develop.
It doesn't matter how well the (former) subordinate does once they're in the job, it just matters they get it. So "development" means hand picking someone most likely to interview well, refining their interview technique, and making sure they get opportunities to create success stories in turn while denying them to likely competitors. In other words, the Peter principle isn't just a funny phenomenon for Amazon, it's policy. So, predictably, the most important key to getting hired or promoted is schmoozing...pretty typical for American workplaces, sure, but entirely contrary to Amazon's image as a "data-driven company".
The second school of thought is what the good managers and supervisors adhere to: telling people who want to advance, in hopes of getting better jobs, they really don't want to because each successive job is shittier than the last. The only real perk other than higher compensation is having people beneath you to throw under the bus when you can't meet increasingly unrealistic work standards.
The second anecdote is when I learned all of the above firsthand, when I was identified and selected by my department's leadership as someone to fast track for promotion. The PA, AM, and OM in question were damned good at their jobs, stuck to Amazon leadership principles, maintained a data-driven approach to the job, and worked to get to know and develop subordinates' strengths and weaknesses. So, I actually got brought in for KPI and Kaizen meetings, was approached for feedback and had my feedback taken seriously, was encouraged to be proactive and bring action items to management, and was given a slew of success story opportunities that most peers eager to promote would kill to have.
When he was developing me, I wanted to focus on preparing for the job I was eventually going to apply for: learning the responsibilities of the job, the processes, the tools used for those processes, and best practices for that job. So that when I applied and interviewed, I could cater my interview responses specifically to the expectations of the job and identify myself on a data- and merit-driven basis as the ideal candidate for the position. This manager, the one who actually held all that stuff in highest regard, told me to my face none of it actually mattered.
Not even as a "you need to get the job first" preamble, but as a general "how well you do your job doesn't even matter because anyone who gets anywhere at Amazon learns how to cook the books and identify scapegoats; it's all down to whether you stay on your manager's good side, and what actually matters is learning how to say the right things at the right times".
What got me in the door wasn't even anything related to job performance to begin with. My ops manager and I had shared interests, and we spent a lot of time shooting the shit about them. All of the sudden, all this shit I wanted to do -- not even to promote, but because I was genuinely interested in how Amazon operated -- but had been previously kept from doing by supervisors and managers in other departments, opened up and I basically got to do whatever the hell I wanted for six months as long as I could bring a case and the data that what I was doing met business need and/or was best practice.
Then, that OM left, the AM was put on PIP by the new OM, that AM quit, and the new OM's hand-picked replacement didn't like me. Suddenly, that year's worth of development and the dozen or so success stories I generated during that time which saved my site millions of dollars, ceased to matter entirely because I was persona non grata.
EDIT: What's quite disturbing about any and all of the above, is Amazon as a corporation knows goddamn good and well their own business model and internal policies are their biggest impediment, and that Amazon's state of operations as such is not sustainable. That OM I mentioned showed me their own analytics and data set that proves it, so far beyond the realm of reasonable doubt the only logical conclusion that can or should be drawn from it, is every last Amazon employee from levels 8 to 12 (i.e. Jeff Bezos) needs to be summarily terminated with cause by the board and replaced with people who actually know what the fuck they're doing.
The problem with that being, who's the chairman of Amazon's board of directors?
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How is it a communist/socialist invention if socialism advocates for the ownership of factories by the workers rather than a single owner? Doesn't the fact that it is designed to work WITH the owners miss the point of the philosophy?
The rationale behind unionization is that workers acting individually to better their condition have no real power and workers acting collectively to better their condition do have some power. Individual workers that refuse the conditions demanded by the owner can be simply replaced; a union on strike can shut production down.
One can argue that giving the workers sufficient power over the means of production is a reasonable compromise with them owning it.
If we imagine that workers would take the profits in a worker-owned corporation to share amongst themselves, then the value of production goes to the workers. If the workers can pressure the owner to hand over a larger share of the revenue (e.g. as salary), it's achieving much the same function of transferring the value of production to the workers.