lol “our detection system can’t tell the difference between you talking on the phone and you singing so we need you to keep the data clean by not singing”
Fuuuuck you.
Amazon: “We encourage expediency in delivery, so please don’t stop to use the restroom. Just piss in this bottle.”
Also Amazon: “We need you to arrive promptly, but also we expect you to work late. The needs of the customers come first!”
Finally, Amazon: “You’re tired, you’re hungry, you desperately need to piss, but we’ve decided the biggest risk to your driving safety is your dramatic rendition of Shake It Off by Taylor Swift, as you try to get your mind off the horror of working this dead end job.”
also stop pissing in bottles, thats weird and disgusting, and no we wont give you more time.
Human conform to our half thought, low bid robot Overseer.
Amazon’s solution: install another microphone in the car so they can hear that you’re singing instead of having a conversation!!
I love how the solution is to cram people into smaller and smaller boxes instead of just I dunno not monitoring your fucking drivers like they’re fucking inmates in a maximum security prison you fascist-lite fucks
Edit: Good on 'em for quitting. Every single member of the population should refuse to work for these pricks until they get the goddamn message that we’re adult fucking humans and we expect to be fucking well treated like it. The fact that some of us have the choice between kowtowing to this or starving is a stain on our society.
Double edit: “I hope you have to drive for Amazon in your retirement” might be a contender for the most horrible thing you could wish on someone in 2024.
You should almost never quit if you expect to be fired. Make them fire you and file for unemployment, then challenge them when they try to get out of it. The government tends to err on the side of the employee in my experience when things are unclear, and “We have a knowledge gap that prevents us from confirming whether or not you were actually violating policy, but you’re fired anyway” is the kind of thing you can feel pretty confident challenging.
Make them fire you and file for unemployment, then challenge them when they try to get out of it.
I do not love the odds of a day laborer out maneuvering their professional claims denial behemoth in a court packed with pro-business Federalist Society flunkies.
Against some mom and pop porter service? Sure. But the odds of beating a company that vast and influential seems low.
Depends on the state. Some states are near impossible to get unemployment in. Others, it’s almost impossible for them to deny you unemployment outside of being violent or stealing from them. Know your state’s unemployment laws and use them to your benefit as best as you can.
My Mom managed to get unemployment in Texas against an oil company by spending about an hour total on the phone over a week.
Bonus was that the incident happened about a week before the Covid lockdown, so not only did she get unemployment, but also got the $600/week Covid unemployment bump.
These drivers are most likely contractors, not employees, so no unemployment.
If the drivers are contractors, wouldn’t this level of surveillance and dictating how they perform their job be a violation of labor law? I thought this level of micro management would indicate that the drivers are employees not contractors.
Correct! Amazon and other delivery companies are absolutely violating labor laws and they’re getting away with it because of regulatory capture.
not monitoring your fucking drivers like they’re fucking inmates in a maximum security prison you fascist-lite fucks
Weren’t you schooled in the US? Aint this exactly what they trained us for?
OBEY, PERFORM, DON’T ASK QUESTIONS OR ELSE
Weren’t you schooled in the US?
Actually, no. Is that the problem? 😂
Edit: Well, not entirely. Jokes aside, that is a difference I noticed, when I moved here.
a privilege and provides some context.
do you think that your schooling background and employment experience do not have these basic elements present with in “work culture”
do you think that your schooling background and employment experience do not have these basic elements present with in “work culture”
No, I think those elements very much reside in the way I learned to approach work, even growing up in multiple countries as I have. It’s only since I’ve hit a later stage in my career and sat back to assess the health impacts it’s had that I’ve been more willing to sit up and advocate for myself and my colleagues. I think it might have something to do with how aggressive I can be about workers’ rights haha. I recognise though that I’m privileged with a sought-after skill set and so I’m usually pretty insulated from retaliation for that, because I can’t be easily replaced.
Thankfully, my current employer is a firm believer in taking care of their people and treating their employees fairly, which is one of the reasons I’ve stuck around here. The contrast though just makes this kind of shit from larger orgs all the more infuriating, because if my tiny company can treat its employees well with such a comparatively tiny revenue stream, then FAANG can too and they just don’t. Bastards.
we’re adult fucking humans and we expect to be fucking well treated like it
Sounds expensive. You’re going to hurt company profits with that attitude. Five Demerits on your Social Credit Score.
When we eating the rich? I’m pretty hungry.
Starved even
Perhaps even peckish.
Positively famished, myself
We should keep mouth movement to a minimum so…chew the rich with your mouth closed.
Maybe we could make a fine paste. Space program style, and just squeeze it into a closed mouth.
Soylent Gold is rich people.
Eat the rich with a straw!
I will maliciously comply!
I’m sorry, that’s too much mouth movement. You are now on probation.
Well if you’re ordering food… I’d like to order one large Bezos with extra Musk, please. Wait, make that Buffet… no no, Gates. With Branson on half.
Set the goddamn table!
You dont need to wait for everyone else to say grace, you can start now.
Just make sure you’re either not driving or somehow learn how to eat without using your mouth.
They’ve got a lot more resolve than I do. I’d have walked out long before this point, but had I been told that before going out on my run, I would have literally walked out there and then.
I’ve walked out of jobs for less.
I’d have walked out long before this point
If the driver put up with everything until this point, then they probabbly didn’t have a lot of better options. It’s easy enough to say stuff like this, but not everyone has the freedom to quit when unemployment means your family goes back to the foodbank or moves into the car.
It’s not necessarily a lack of options, it’s also about the inertia of having the job and getting over the hump of deciding to look elsewhere. You know you can get another job, but doing that is work, so you have to decide if the BS of the current job is enough to warrant the effort of finding a new place.
You’re driving with a camera fine tuned on your face for the entire trip, set to trigger to your bosses when your face moves.
Not creepy at all.
I bet you could trick it with a cardboard cut out
Don’t know if I’d bet a month of paychecks on it.
Part of me wants to take a job at one of these couriers just to test it.
Part of me is ok with not knowing because that’s a lot to go through.
You wouldn’t get the job. You have to work your way up from the warehouse unless nepotism. And the warehouse is hell that might literally kill you.
This is absolutely terrible and definitely feels like an invasion of, idk, being a human?! But with that said, even though people find out stuff like this happens to drivers and workers, they still enable it by ordering from Amazon because of convenience.
Until we can pull away on our reliance on these services, the companies are just gonna keep crossing more and more lines because they know they’re getting away with it with their customers.
Until we can make crossing those lines painful for those companies, they’ll keep doing it. Unfortunately, I think convenience is always going to beat morality if you leave it to “voting with your dollar”, we need actual regulations from our governments to combat this shit.
Yeah, we should totally stop eating to show the grocery stores they can’t control their employees. /s
It’s just that most people just genuinely don’t care enough about what’s happening to other people enough to do anything beyond just saying that Amazon is bad. On top of that as Amazon starts to drive other stores out of business it does start to slowly become the only choice for getting certain things. So with those two combined expecting personal consumer choice to really make a difference is not realistic, this is the kind of thing that needs the government to intervene on to force Amazon to unionize and to potentially break it up like is being discussed with Google.
If the workforce was 100% unionized, they may realize they don’t need bosses. There’s a word for this, but I can’t think of it right now.
It’s 1964, you read this in a short story. You think its funny impossible distopia.
20 years left to go…
It might open an unwanted can of worms but maybe the drivers could claim they aren’t
signingsinging along to the radio but are vocalizing actions like Japanese train operators to ensure focus and safety.Edit: I saw the sing and it opened up my eyes
claim they aren’t signing along to the radio
I mean…if they’re signing along to the radio, I’d say that’s really dangerous and needs to be cracked down on! Can’t sign sign language with both hands on the wheel after all!
Singing should be absolutely fine though.
It’s safe to sign while driving but only if you’re blind.
Removed by mod
That’s one reason I’m glad to work in a local public service position. They will never have the money to implement such a system, let alone be able to pay anyone to maintain or monitor it. They can barely keep the wifi working.
Don’t see this happening everywhere. This is being done to save themselves from liability in an accident. They don’t have cameras watching their warehouse workers although they have rules like no earphones are allowed which are typical for safety in a warehouse or plant. I worked as an Amazon driver for a month. Everything they do or say is to cover their ass from getting sued.
They don’t have cameras watching their warehouse workers
Uhh, you sure about that?
Introduced during COVID and as far as I’m aware most never went away. Especially in warehouses at risk of unionizing.
What are the tracking now? If employees are actually working? There were no social distancing protocols but I’m assuming there are cameras to prevent theft.
Yes, cameras and security theatre at the entrance/exit that rivals airports.
Yeah singing is terrible for driving… It’s much better to be bored to sleep
We were so preoccupied with whether capitalism would replace us with robots, we didn’t stop to think if it would turn us into robots.
Maybe we should be trying to replace managers and execs with robots.
Oh. That’s basically what this is. Your boss is a machine, and the machines boss is a human that fires you when your machine boss tattles on you for slacking, or if it suspects you’re slacking.
I have a drive cam for work that dies something similar. While they don’t ding us for singing, they will for everything else like us scratching our ear because it thinks there’s an earpiece and we can’t have any electronic devices including GPS. But the camera screaming “FOLLOWING DISTANCE” every time we get cut off or a car 3 semi truck lengths away in 25 taps their brakes and forcing us to slam the brakes so we don’t get written up is perfectly safe.
Why spend all the money union busting then do shit like this. Won’t this just starts another round of unionization?
We’re not far from incurring debts from suicides that our families will have to repay.
Not sure if you think those don’t exist
That moment when you realize that dystopian future you’re imagining already exist.
I love driving. I’ve had delivery jobs and I really enjoyed them. There is absolutely no fucking way I’m working for anyone that has a fucking camera pointed at me. That is some fucking bullshit. I can’t believe anyone works for that shit hole company and puts up with that garbage. No camera, no microphone. I’ll do my job. If you don’t trust me to do my job, then it’s best for the both of us I’m not there.
I understand needing a job. I’ve been there. Don’t put up with that bullshit, unionize, or find something else. There’s jobs out there much better.
On a side note, If you drove holding the steering wheel with your middle fingers out, what kind of punishment would that be?
I’ve got a camera in my work truck. I hate it but I can’t make this much money anywhere else. I was actually sent for a drug and alcohol test a few weeks ago because I kept dozing off while I was sitting in the truck on break. I passed because I was nice and charming to the young girl giving the test. The only thing I popped on was weed anyway.
The reason I was nodding off in the truck is I was fucking exhausted from making them a shitload of money.
On a side note, If you drove holding the steering wheel with your middle fingers out, what kind of punishment would that be?
Believe it or not, straight to jail.
I wonder if anyone has ever calculated how much a driver makes per delivery. Like if I buy a pizza, the delivery guy gets like $3 from wages if they make minimum wage and then whatever I tip. I’d be shocked if an amazon driver makes even a dollar per delivery, and some (majority?) of the deliveries are much more expensive than one pizza
its much more efficient than pizza delivery though so not really a good comparison.
