Isn't this called having a job? How is this 'condition' unique to Amazon?

[BaiHu]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25034598


A BBC investigation into a UK-based Amazon warehouse has found conditions that a stress expert said could cause "mental and physical illness".

Prof Michael Marmot was shown secret filming of night shifts involving up to 11 miles of walking - where an undercover worker was expected to collect orders every 33 seconds.

[JV_]

I wouldn't mind having a job where I could log 11 miles during the work day.

[JodyH]

The door swings both ways.
There are plenty of guys digging up sewer lines in snowstorms or paving highways in 110 heat that would love to be in a climate controlled warehouse all day.

[Tamara]

I worked a temp gig once for a week or two at a Travelers insurance data facility in the 'burbs of ATL back in the mid '90s.

The heart of the place was a tape library underground where they did data backups every day. There were a couple of automated tape silos, but the majority of the work was feeding the magazines (and even a few superannuated 9 track units) by a bunch of kids running up and down aisles manually fetching tapes in response to the catalog numbers lighting up on billboards over each tape unit. At close of business in each time zone, these things would start spitting out numbers and lighting up like pachinko parlors and you would literally do nothing but haul butt up and down aisles, snagging tapes and feeding them into magazines until things died down for about ten minutes until the next time zone started doing their end-of-day data dumps.

I wanted to put in for full-time there, because those were the most physically fit people I'd ever worked with. They were getting paid a not-too-shabby hourly wage and decent bennies to do monster cardio while juggling long strings of alphanumerics in their heads. I was just wrecked for the first week, but by the time I got to where I could just barely hang, the temp gig was up. :(

[LittleLebowski]

Happily, Amazon is looking into robots to save these poor workers.

[BaiHu]

Happily, Amazon is looking into robots to save these poor workers.

Because humans can't hack working. More disability and government benefits on the way to save the autovoters.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

[NickA]

"They don't trust us to think for ourselves" :confused: From what I understand Amazon uses chaotic storage, so when you can beat the super computers that keep track of what you need to pull and in what order, go right ahead dude. Most of my warehouse guys can't even get it right in a warehouse 1/10th (literally) the size of an Amazon DC.
I know at the DC here they have that robotic system that brings the shelves to the picker, but I'm sure that only works for smaller-ish items.
And yeah, they didn't have any problems filling positions here. Walking 11 miles a day inside is way better than just about anything outside during the summer in south Texas.

[JV_]

Walking 11 miles a day inside is way better than just about anything outside during the summer in south Texas.
It beats sitting at my desk too.

[Tamara]

Happily, Amazon is looking into robots to save these poor workers.

If it's anything like hustling data carts was, it'll be easier to find robots capable of doing the job.

[LittleLebowski]

I wouldn't mind having a job where I could log 11 miles during the work day.

Absolutely agreed.

[NickA]

It beats sitting at my desk too.

Amen.
I really want to go check out the DC here. I'm fascinated by the logistics of it, since that's kind of my job any way. I'd even consider a holiday job there, just to see how it works.


If it's anything like hustling data carts was, it'll be easier to find robots capable of doing the job.

Testify. OTOH, trying to find stuff in my warehouse has made me very good at the "If I were an idiot, where would I have put this?" game.

[LittleLebowski]

http://www.thewire.com/technology/2012/03/meet-little-orange-robots-making-amazons-warehouses-more-humane/50094/

[SeriousStudent]

When I was 16 years old, I spent a summer working for an asphalt roofing company in Pecos, Texas. Most days in August the temps were over 110 degrees. Then you get to haul five-gallon buckets of hot asphalt up and down ladders without setting yourself on fire.

Poor, poor Amazonians.

[Tamara]

When I was 16 years old, I spent a summer working for an asphalt roofing company in Pecos, Texas. Most days in August the temps were over 110 degrees. Then you get to haul five-gallon buckets of hot asphalt up and down ladders without setting yourself on fire.

Poor, poor Amazonians.

I don't know what the pace is like at the Amazon picking centers.

I'll say this, though: The data center to which I referred was nice and air-conditioned...

...and most construction workers I know wouldn't have been able to hang.

I doubt the Amazon work is that fast paced, though, because I've seen some of the people that are doing it...

[JodyH]

...and most construction workers I know wouldn't have been able to hang.
C'mon down south and watch a non-union crew work. Might change your mind on construction workers.

[Tamara]

C'mon down south and watch a non-union crew work.

I haven't known any construction workers since I moved up north. Never met a union one.

I'm not saying the ones I knew weren't hard hard workers, but let's just say that most of them weren't the physical type for doing wind sprints 15-30min at a lick for a whole shift. :eek:

[JodyH]

You should watch a drywall crew sprint when Border Patrol cruises past the job site.

[SeriousStudent]

I don't know what the pace is like at the Amazon picking centers.

I'll say this, though: The data center to which I referred was nice and air-conditioned...

...and most construction workers I know wouldn't have been able to hang.

I doubt the Amazon work is that fast paced, though, because I've seen some of the people that are doing it...

Yup, I've worked in a data center as well. I've chased tapes to fill four on-site Matterhorn tape units, and then lugged cases of backup tapes for Iron Mountain to take offsite. My current job involves protecting silicon-based life forms from carbon-based life forms, and is much more genteel. I am perfectly content to sit in my leather chair, and do evil things to electrons.

The pay is also much, much better, and I don't get more scars when somebody spills boiling asphalt on me.

[Maple Syrup Actual]

Here are the following jobs that I have personally seen reduce people to tears of exhaustion:

Stripping forms in concrete construction

Running rebar, also for concrete construction

Laying rail on a guideway for light rail, capping and pulling anchors for rail pads


I have seen maybe half a dozen men in the fetal position, crying, from doing those jobs. I have also seen many men get hurt and one man killed doing that work, and watched one woman's leg get chopped/crushed off at the knee.

I have no doubt that these people have a job which could subject them to stress or be harmful to their health. Am I supposed to feel bad for them? That is part of many jobs for one simple reason: people will only pay you to do things they either can't or won't do themselves. Warehouse work is a job most people won't do, because it's monotonous. If you don't want to end up doing work that is only hired out because most people won't do it, learn to do things most people can't do.

The job these people have is menial and I would not like it. I did not like stripping forms, running rebar, or laying rail. I did it for the money. And conditions were much, much worse than the worst day in an Amazon warehouse. Of the roughly 1000 coworkers I had over that period of my life, I can think of about 10 offhand who are permanently physically altered either by missing parts of their body or having metal supports put in to repair bone breaks sustained on the job. And that is just the people whose names spring to mind.

If the professor mentioned in the OP watched footage of any serious construction project, pipeline, or rail work, I can only assume he'd be reduced to something akin to tear-soaked jello.

[Tamara]

Am I supposed to feel bad for them?

I don't.

They knew the conditions going in. If they don't like them, I'm sure they could look for a job more to their physical and mental tastes.

The very first paying job outside the house I had, like a lot of kids, was babysitting. If I was babysitting for somebody and found out their three young, rambunctious kids were too much of a handful, I'd tell them I couldn't sit for them anymore, not demand that they get rid of a kid.

[TR675]

I don't.

They knew the conditions going in. If they don't like them, I'm sure they could look for a job more to their physical and mental tastes.

The very first paying job outside the house I had, like a lot of kids, was babysitting. If I was babysitting for somebody and found out their three young, rambunctious kids were too much of a handful, I'd tell them I couldn't sit for them anymore, not demand that they get rid of a kid.

Maybe. But maybe it's easier to say no to a job when you have zero kids and next months rent doesn't depend on saying yes and you don't need insurance now and etc.

[Tamara]

Maybe. But maybe it's easier to say no to a job when you have zero kids and next months rent doesn't depend on saying yes and you don't need insurance now and etc.

So then one finds a job for which one is capable; one does not grab any old job and then demand it change it's requirements to suit your abilities.

Griping about endless boring running around in warehouse work is like a surgeon demanding only non-bleeding patients or a window washer protesting the dangerous heights at which his employer makes him work.

[NickA]

I'm picturing Tam as the Alec Baldwin character in Glengarry Glennross now. "Third prize is you're fired" :p

[abu fitna]

Keep in mind that this type of media coverage is typically more about influence than facts on the ground. The high street retail shops in the UK are being rapidly disintermediated by Amazon in much the same way that other sectors have been in the US, with perhaps more impact as the big box thing hadn't taken as widely there as it did here. Given the terrible shopping experiences afforded by most retail outside of Oxford Street et al (and even then...) the average consumer is voting with their wallet and clicks rather than feet.

This is causing a great deal of stress for those who have traditionally enjoyed influence and position without much effort, and thus the recent attacks on online providers. The salvo before this centered around tax issues, with the usual back and forth around the complicated issue of where profit is booked in a globally distributed company. (not to say that we are immune here in the US - as evidenced by recent sales tax on Amazon in many states, including VA...)

For all I know, this might be a truly hard job. Similar work at places like a UPS distribution hub are equally fast paced, and can be very taxing (one or two folks unloading and loading multiple 40' shipping boxes per shift, by hand, is a lot of weight to carry.) This has ever been the line positions in the logistics sector, since the Roman empire. Traditionally, these are jobs folks still fought to have, and keep (sometimes violently in the course of history) - being something that really didn't require much skill, just endurance. Not everyone sought to make a career of it, of course, but there is a difference between work you do for honest pay (as defined by the market, and its ability to substitute other bodies willing to take that pay instead of your sorry kitten); and the misguided expectation that the world owes you a nice experience throughout the day just because you are a special snowflake. The latter nice jobs require skill, talent, lots of hard work to get there, and no small dash of luck - but this is why status used to be afforded on accomplishment rather than wordsmithing (charitably, or more accurately, whining).

If this keeps up, the activist elements advocating this kind of influence campaign will find their subjects further disintermediated by robotics. And of course, they will just move on to a new campaign - while not caring a whit that the workers they hurt are back to to the dole.

[Tamara]

I'm picturing Tam as the Alec Baldwin character in Glengarry Glennross now. "Third prize is you're fired" :p

I once tacked up this Onion column (http://www.theonion.com/articles/theres-no-my-kid-has-cancer-in-team,10737/) over the schedule at work. :p

[NickA]

I once tacked up this Onion column (http://www.theonion.com/articles/theres-no-my-kid-has-cancer-in-team,10737/) over the schedule at work. :p

Aaand now I'm going to pray for forgiveness since I laughed so hard.
ETA: and I'm going to the break room to tell people to Put. That coffee. Down.