Wow, I guess I never really paid attention to the details behind all the Amazon headlines I see.
"In April, Amazon announced it would reduce the amount it paid for drivers from $17.25 to $16.00 an hour, according to the letter...Weeks later, Amazon announced a series of raises for its drivers around the country as part of a public relations push following a union drive at an Amazon warehouse"
"Currently, Amazon delivery drivers are expected to deliver upwards of 400 packages a day on 10-hour routes that often extend up to 12 hours."
400 seems crazy, I wondered about UPS. According to Google "At UPS, the average driver makes about 120 deliveries per day, says Jack Levis, the shipping giant's director of process management"
A lot of corporate gains have been at a cost of squeezing on labor resources in some form or another, either time, lower comp, higher productivity, etc. or some combination of these elements. There has been some innovation in general technology making improvements for labor but a lot is really just doing more, for less, and someone else pocketing the gains. You need look no further than AWS treatment of SEs in their PIP culture to see this.
You can only squeeze people so far until they finally step away. The only reason it's being sustained is that people don't have alternative options in many cases and are esentially forced to do it. At some point people will find other options and leave you on your feet but as long as there's a steady stream of desperate people ready to be subjugated to ridiculous working conditions, this will continue.
Amazon used to deliver stuff cheap and fast, but that hasn't been true for a little while now. I haven't been happy with Amazon's delivery service for a handful of years (well before the pandemic). Not only do they offer poor delivery service (stuff like throwing packages into an empty lot near my house that I have no access to, saying a package was delivered when it wasn't, not following the delivery instructions, consistently delivering after the estimated window, etc.), their customer service does nothing about this and has outright lied to me on the few occasions I was lucky enough to get a live person on the phone.
It's made me deprioritize Amazon when it comes to my online shopping.
We're not "happy" customers, we see issues with Amazon and AWS, but we wouldn't be competitive from a price standpoint if we rolled out own infra, or hired people to do it.
This view--not that you hold it, but that it exists--frustrates the hell out of me.
"We don't like being a customer of the company that clubs baby seals but our customers would leave us if we didn't use the company that clubs baby seals so I guess we should pay up for some more clubs."
It's a pretty glaring example that "free markets" usually aren't, and often unrelated to government intervention. You have information, you have agency, and you have the thing that the other party wants (money), yet you don't feel free to move away from a supplier who you clearly view as unsuitable[0] because that supplier has gained a market position so dominant through exploiting others.
0 - If I am reading too much into your comment, I apologize and don't mean to put words into your mouth.
I may not like that my electric utility burns coal, but I like my lights to work more. You can’t sit around worrying about every single imperfection in the world and accomplish much of anything.
Not just that, the fact of the matter you and I don't have very much of an effect on these things. We can't choose how our energy is produced, and we don't use anywhere near as much energy as a company like Amazon. This is where government regulations must come into play.
Well, you can buy it from one of those 'green energy' companies... I dislike the marketing a lot (as though it isn't fungible and you are somehow getting different, greener electricity piped to you than your neighbour) but it does work in the sense that you can shift the needle by buying your (essentially just as not-green as if you paid (less to) anyone else) electricity from someone who has whatever commitment to fund green projects or buy the 'green wholesale' stuff or however it works.
It's not as doom and gloom as you think. I've worked a few companies that colocated at a datacenters, bought some refurbished hardware slapped Xen and Proxmox on it and grew their business to $50mil ARR. It's much much cheaper than you think and avoiding large AWS bills was the primary motivation for doing it.
The budget for one company I worked at's infra -- 4 full racks in two datacenters with power, network, and a dedicated site-to-site between them was $200k over five years plus $3k/mo ongoing costs. The upfront cost was tiny tiny -- they started with a router, two switches and 4 used supermicro blades. That lasted them the first 4 years of their startup. It took two FTEs to manage the full infra and provide a PaaS style thing to the developers.
There are many more things to be competitive in other than price. Plenty of business thrive outside of the Amazon/AWS economy. If you can't find a way to change your behavior on the basis of your beliefs, then the value of that behavior is more important than your beliefs. That is nothing to be embarrassed about, but don't be delusional and think that you have no other choice.
I've never worked at Amazon, but I read that as Software Engineers are subjected to progress improvement plans as a way to legally threaten firings in order to make people work extensive hours.
Yes and hence like warehouse workers not taking bathroom breaks for fear of being "off-task" Amazon drivers cut corners too. I have seen them blowing through stop signs, and one of them after blowing through a stop sign, ripped a three point turn and came within one foot of my car before my beeping stopped them.
I called Amazon and they of course speak of them like they are some completely separate affiliate that has nothing to do with them. This is despite the fact they say Amazon and deliver only Amazon packages.
> I called Amazon and they of course speak of them like they are some completely separate affiliate that has nothing to do with them. This is despite the fact they say Amazon and deliver only Amazon packages.
That's entirely the point: create a policy to cover your ass, put some schmuck under so much pressure that he's forced to violate it, then blame the schmuck when there's pushback (and try to present yourself as the good guy in the process).
>> I called Amazon and they of course speak of them like they are some completely separate affiliate that has nothing to do with them.
This by design:
Amazon has repeatedly said in court that it is not responsible for the actions of its contractors, citing agreements that require them, as one puts it, to “defend, indemnify and hold harmless Amazon.” Just last week, an operations manager for Amazon testified in Chicago that it signs such agreements with all its “delivery service partners,” who assume the liability and the responsibility for legal costs. The agreements cover “all loss or damage to personal property or bodily harm including death.”
Amazon vigilantly enforces the terms of those agreements. In New Jersey, when a contractor’s insurer failed to pay Amazon’s legal bills in a suit brought by a physician injured in a crash, Amazon sued to force the insurer to pick up the tab. In California, the company sued contractors, telling courts that any damages arising from crashes there should be billed to the delivery companies.
The whole article was pretty shocking to read. I rarely, if ever buy stuff on Amazon now that I know how they've attempted to wall themselves off from responsibility of what happens with these companies.
If you or I hire a company to ship a package, we are not generally responsible if the driver the shipper hires runs someone over. This same construct should apply at scale.
You're right in principle. This is definitely the case if I ask the company to deliver a package, for a price that they name (or negotiate), and I then hand over the package and money and let them do their thing.
The issue here is that Amazon is very strictly controlling the drivers, without (directly) employing them. By gig-economy voodoo they try to have it both ways.
It does apply at scale. If one company were to “hire [another] company to ship a package”, there would be no question that the delivery company would be liable if their driver did something negligent. If they meddled in the delivery company’s affairs, specified almost every aspect of their operations, entered into a sole-source agreement that forbids the delivery company from working for other customers, then that is an entirely different matter.
Why? Is this just an assertion that there is no difference between big and small things, and that a single mistake is the same as building your business model on mistakes?
Yes but when does it end when someone is working exclusively for your company to your exact specifications. It would be as if I opened a restaurant and my cook was a totally separate subsidiary called "My Restaurant's Cook LLC". I am sorry your food was bad or they poisoned you. They are a completely unrelated sub entity that cooks food to my specifications with my uniform exclusively for me.
So please take up any complaints with your service with them and not our restaurant.
If you hire a contractor to perform work on your house, and during their contract they happen to burn down one neighbor's house and destroy the wall of a separate neighbor's house - you will not be liable for their actions.
If you think that Amazon should be liable for the actions of their contracted drivers, you would likewise be liable for burning down and destroying your neighbor's houses.
The “homeowner” here is analogous to an outside investor in Amazon (like me) who has no operational role in the company. The entity who directs the the manner in which subcontractors work, like Amazon does with its delivery companies, is acting as the general contractor and will most surely be named in a lawsuit if anything they did or did not do plausibly contributed to the fire.
Very true. I used to commute through an area with many taxis and the amount of reckless driving and accidents I saw from them was ridiculous. I absolutely do not want a million more workers heavily incentivized to do the same.
It fits with the larger trend of corporations privitizing more profits at the expense of society as a whole.
I mean, sure, people are more likely to die in car accidents, but on the bright side Amazon can run more of their competitors out of business by driving down delivery costs! Great...
It’s another method of cost transfer. Rather than pay drivers better or in a way that allows them to slow down you incentivize them doing hints that put others at risk.
There’s a probability of an accident happening. And a probability of it causing a lawsuit and a probability of Amazon having to pay a settlement and a calculation of what that cost is compared to the savings of overtaxing drivers.
Bezos’ background at a hedge fund seems highly relevant to all this.
It's not about being disgruntled, it's about not wanting your family to go hungry because you were only able to deliver three hundred packages in ten hours by taking extra care.
There's a difference between destroying someone's stuff because you hate your job and just not caring about someone's stuff because you want your job.
That exact same argument would hold true for drug dealers, mob enforcers, and a whole variety of people that do bad things. Sure, the mob boss is a bad guy for having the enforcer break someone's shop up; but the enforcer is _also_ a bad guy for doing it.
If the mob boss holds leverage over the enforcer (first a debt with threat of violence, and later evidence of the enforcer's crimes) then the enforcer might not be such a bad person. This is a big reason that lower level criminals are offered witness protection in exchange for information
Taking actions that you know put someone else's personal property at risk _is_ malice. It's less malice than actively breaking it, but it is actively making a choice to put something that belongs to someone else in harm's way.
No, it's not. Neither is minor speeding, for example. It's a lack of care and awareness about the consequences of one's actions - hardly a desire for those consequences. You say "active" and the whole point is that it isn't.
> There's a difference between destroying someone's stuff because you hate your job and just not caring about someone's stuff because you want your job.
What is the difference, when you said you destroyed the packages in each case?
But, the results are the same in either case. People's property gets destroyed. If the results are the same, what is the actual, real-world difference?
It depends on your angle. If your looking to solve the problem, the root cause very much informs the solution. If your looking to prosecute, intention and context often inform the severity of the charge(s) and determination of guilt (ie man-slaughter v. first-degree murder).
In cities, an Amazon delivery driver might be delivering 5, 10, or 20 packages to the same building.
And in those areas where Amazon is using its own delivery network, UPS packages (non-Amazon) will be far fewer -- often just 1 or a couple or none per day.
So it's not crazy. The Amazon driver might be elivering far more packages but making fewer stops. Also, a lot of those packages are the little white-and-blue padded envelopes, almost more like large letters than packages.
There may be some sampling bias as you point out, but it is still crazy from my perspective. I would suspect that UPS and the other major carriers have optimized this task to death. With the right bundling and route optimization for a specific city or set of parcels I could see some level of improvement due to the things you mention.
But 200-300% efficiency gains over businesses that have been profitably providing this service for years? Its exceptional enough to warrant being called crazy at first glance.
From the article,
"The two Portland delivery companies are demanding a cap at 250 packages and 150 stops per 8.5 hour route"
Which seems to indicate that they realize that some bundling will occur and accept it as long as there is an upper bounds on both metrics.
> I would suspect that UPS and the other major carriers have optimized this task to death.
In the end a great deal of it comes down to volume per delivery location. If UPS is delivering 1 package per day per location, there's nothing they can do to optimize (except skip locations certain days, which nobody wants). It sucks for them.
Then Amazon comes along with 5 packages per day per location, and it changes the economics completely. By 200-300% is not unreasonable at all.
There's a fact that blew my mind when I first learned it -- that apparently UPS actually loses money delivering packages for Amazon, but makes more profit in the end because the added scale makes it even cheaper to deliver packages for other people. E.g., if it's already dropping off an Amazon package at a location, then it's suddenly much cheaper to drop off the non-Amazon package at the same time.
Agreed on your first point of volume and we're not given enough detail around 2 separate and only tangentially related metrics to make any real conclusions. That said; I did consider this briefly but even then the math to make that work still seems extreme. Are Amazon packages making up that much of our parcel these days? 3-to-1 or 5-to-1 would certainly change the economics for this to make more sense, but are they truly responsible for 75%-85% of all parcels these days? Even if we select for residential only I feel like that is super high.
Then again my monkey brain sucks at statistics and considering the last year or so of my own home usage it is probably close to 1-to-1. And we try to avoid Amazon. So probably a lot closer to those numbers above than I'm comfortable to admit.
In my apartment building in NYC, Amazon packages are absolutely at least 75% of total deliveries, no question. Everything's left in the lobby so it's easy to see.
Probably not higher than 85% though. And of the rest, the next biggest category is packages from clothing stores like J. Crew, Nike, Madewell, etc.
(Also this isn't including groceries or DoorDash, just talking about traditional packages.)
Dang. Then consider that the 400+ packages was self selected by Portland carriers as some of the worst examples, and 120 deliveries a route is a national average.. It gets murky quick trying to pull anything useful from this especially with it being Vice looking for an editorial angle.
As with most things like this, the numbers seem scary until you peel back the layers. Not a pass to Amazon as the rest of the article is damning in its own right, but a little less crazy than my initial thoughts.
The worst are large townhouse complexes without a central mail station. You double-park your van, and may need to walk for several minutes, through identical-looking units, perhaps juggling 3 or 4 boxes on your trek. Hopefully it's not raining.
Comparing packages to deliveries is apples to oranges. I don't disagree that these jobs are rough but 120 deliveries with an average of 3-4 packages per delivery paints a similar picture.
Do you have any source for this? It seems like a really weird assumption to make, especially given that Amazon will already bundle multiple orders into the same package.
I think their point is that you probably can't compare these two numbers very well because they measure different things, and in the case of Amazon if on average they have 3-4 packages per delivery then the two companies would have very similar numbers.
Sidenote, I hate "cant compare apples to oranges" because you eminently can. I'd argue it is much easier to compare things that are very similar! Apples and oranges both have sugars and acids, skins, are recognized as fruits, and are frequently interchangeable. Comparing apples to cranes is much more difficult. "comparing apples to oranges" should mean the comparison is relatively easy to make on a variety of axes!
I should clarify that comment with if you made a naïve assumption of 3-4 packages per delivery then it's a similar workload. I don't doubt that Amazon workers are treated worse than UPS workers but comparing packages to deliveries without normalizing somehow is not productive.
The 400 package number from the article is also specifically cited from this company and we have no idea whether that is a nationwide figure while the UPS comment implies that it is.
> if you made a naïve assumption of 3-4 packages per delivery then it's a similar workload
But you're still just making an assumption with 0 evidence. I would love to see a distribution of how common multi-package deliveries are, but we don't have that information, and I highly suspect that it's overwhelmingly one package per delivery.
It seems like an exceptionally bad assumption that Amazon is regularly shipping 3-4 items individually rather than bundling them up. After all, they are basically a logistics company at this point.
If we're just making assumptions here, you may as well assume that most Amazon deliveries are to apartment buildings, where the driver just leaves everything at the front desk, there are 200 packagers per delivery, and the driver is only making 2 stops per day.
I'm not making an argument one way or the other beyond that the OP conflating deliveries with packages is inaccurate and misleading. People are acting like drivers are expected to make 400 individual deliveries a day which doesn't remotely pass any sort of sniff test.
Bundling seems like a cost reduction when using a shipper like UPS who charge per package. If you control delivery chain end to end, paying per hours of delivery time, there's probably less savings.
Less savings doesn't mean no savings. It will still for the most part use additional packaging, additional sorting, additional space in trucks, additional labor in terms of locating packages, and additional risk if the driver misses 1/n packages.
How are you defining delivery? Packages going to the same address? I live in a development of ~100 unit apartment buildings. It will literally take the UPS/FedEx truck all day to go less than a thousand feet through the development, and in that time they're delivering hundreds of packages.
Also, Amazon has a large number of different warehouses that products are shipped from, and it's quite common for different items/orders to not ship together either for that reason or because some items' availability would slow down the others.
I don’t order much from Amazon but frequently I get a book and a USB drive or something else and it’s shipped in two boxes despite my preference for bundling into as few parcels as possible likely because of multiple warehouses
I wonder how prevalent those storage lockers are on a typical route … the last few places that I’ve lived have had Amazon or Luxer lockers, ranging from a couple dozen to maybe 100+ individual spaces. The 400/day seems a little more feasible if a quarter or half can be dropped in the same location, but I really have no idea how ubiquitous those lockers are.
I don't think you should be directly comparing UPS and Amazon drivers in this instance.
Amazon can pick and choose where they have contractors make deliveries (e.g. non rural areas with higher population densities). UPS serves almost everywhere. Additionally, we don't know what hours UPS drivers work in comparison to Amazon drivers.
Not justifying Amazon’s labor practices by any means, but Amazon delivery != UPS. It’s quite possible that Amazon only runs its own delivery in areas with a high enough order density that 400 packages/day is possible, and UPS doesn’t restrict itself in this way.
That’s on the order of 50¢ in wages per delivery. Drones & autonomous/semi-autonomous robots can’t compete against super low wage labor. That’s crazy cheap for a delivery driver! (Low wages hold back innovation and improvements in productivity.)
As if the high-tech solution didn't have to be maintained?
Anyway, that's what cheap labour does, it leads to stagnation. Why invest in to improve the state of the art when you can throw more bodies at the problem?
There's also the other problem: Jeff Bezos strip-mines the workforce and takes the gains to Washington. Meanwhile his underpaid employees can't invest in their own communities.
I truly believe that increasing the minimum wage (at first just to the same as the 1960s, ie about $12.20/hour, and then adjusting for productivity growth since 1969 to about $20/hour), especially if combined with policies to maintain full employment, Will lead to dramatic increases in productivity as companies are finally forced to properly value human labor. The increase in productivity well help pay for minimum wage increases, making them not purely inflationary or even just redistributionary (although it’ll be that, too… tying minimum wage to productivity growth will have the effect of reducing & limiting income inequality).
You take a statistical outlier, apply a metric like pay/productivity, and then tie that to the minimum wage, and make a moral statement that therefore, it should be at xyz level today.
That seems like tortured analysis. If you take 1989 which was 20 years after your date, the minimum wage adjusted for today would be $6.78.
And there is no reason whatsoever that pay has ever been or should be tied to productivity. Humans haven't evolved to become better or faster or more adept in a workplace. We have technology. I don't see why I should pay employees more than before because simply because I also invested in some technology that makes allows them to get more work done with less effort. I see no logic in that at all.
1969 is not a "statistical outlier." It is the high water mark in terms of policy. Lawmakers chose that in 1969 the minimum wage would be set to $12.21/hour (in current terms). We've seen eroding of the minimum wage due in part to worker-hostile politics ever since then (including in the 1980s).
"Humans haven't evolved to become better", and neither have CEOs, even though their pay has soared.
As far as "should," yeah, I think pay ought to be on that level. I think it would probably lead to faster growth.
The only tortured analysis is the idea that workers, who are trained for and use more advanced technology, should not get paid according to the productivity they bring in, but their bosses (who didn't invent that technology) should. There's no logic there, either. It's just bargaining power. And if you (as a--hypothetical?--employer) see no reason whatsoever that workers should be paid more when their productivity is higher is exactly why we need a minimum wage to require it.
"In April, Amazon announced it would reduce the amount it paid for drivers from $17.25 to $16.00 an hour, according to the letter...Weeks later, Amazon announced a series of raises for its drivers around the country as part of a public relations push following a union drive at an Amazon warehouse"
"Currently, Amazon delivery drivers are expected to deliver upwards of 400 packages a day on 10-hour routes that often extend up to 12 hours."
400 seems crazy, I wondered about UPS. According to Google "At UPS, the average driver makes about 120 deliveries per day, says Jack Levis, the shipping giant's director of process management"