Amazon has used tricks, algorithms, and surveillance to discourage warehouse employees from unionizing, according to a paper published in the journal Socius.
AI is just the wall these asshole stand behind to be cruel and lawless. It doesn’t absolve you from blame, it’s not intelligent it’s a tool, like a gun and if you point it at people and it hurts them you should be jailed.
Amazon doesn’t sell anything you can’t buy somewhere else for the same price. You have no excuse to keep using Amazon. Correction, I’m sure people who buy from Amazon have excuses, but they aren’t good ones.
This is not true. Many of the parts I buy off of Amazon are not only cheaper, but I can get them faster as well. I wish this were not true, but I cannot spend half of my week driving for hours on end to pick up equipment at a higher price.
This is not true. Many of the parts I buy off of Amazon are not only cheaper, but I can get them faster as well.
Only the faster part is true, and only if you use prime, else you can buy from everywhere else and have the same price and delivery time.
Cheapest only if you buy a rip-off, buying some item of a certain brand have the same price on Amazon then the brand shop (if not higher on Amazon sometimes)
You can often find it cheaper than what the price is on Amazon
I disagree. I am in no way a fan of Amazon. But there are some niche products that are only sold through the platform by the supplying vendor or are so specialized that there’s really no other retailer that is going to make an effort to list it for sale.
There was a “don’t use Amazon for a week” boycott thing at the beginning of March. It shocked me how quickly I lost the urge to just go order stuff the moment I thought of it. After the week was over I just kept not ordering stuff (with the exception of a subscription that came through).
Definitely at least helped me cut back.
“Accused”? It couldn’t be more obvious.
It’s nothing new; I worked in a call center 15 years ago where the algorithms were designed to work them as hard as possible and steal commissions because they were too tired to pay attention. I should know because they told me to do that, I refused, and was fired for it.
Same old trick in a new venue. This has been happening for a long time in Asian warehousing, but has hopped the pond this last decade or so. Worker’s efficiency is set to a certain rate of efficiency, then they’re reprimanded/fired for failing to meet it. The catch is that it’s a challenging pace to begin with, and the window for successful completion almost-imperceptibly narrows, eventually becoming so ludicrously small that they must injure or maim themselves trying to beat it or even match the pace. Once they quit or cripple themselves, the company simply slides in a new candidate who doesn’t yet understand just how Hellacious the work is.
I worked in a British Amazon during the pandemic, the minimum pick rate for one order type was 59 items per hour….its achievable, yeah, if the stars line up. But your minimum is more or less the maximum, if you get me?
Amazon 101 work them until they break.
This is what every big company does just sometimes without the algo. This is why we need unions
Not just unions, but also a functional Dept of Justice that hands out criminal charges for these criminal offenses.
Paying a fine is NOT adequate. The historical alternative was workers pulling the executives out of their houses in the night and burning down the factory.
