Community Chat

[foundinlv]

Amazon is paying $18 - $25 per hr to deliver packages.  Seattle is currently up and running with this program and soon other cities will be too such as NY, Baltimore, Miami, Dallas, Austin, Chicago, Indianapolis, Atlanta and Portland.

http://www.komando.com/happening-now/327717/soon-you-could-earn-cash-delivering-amazon-packages?utm_...

[KingstonsMom]

Great info for those in those areas!

Kudos to you for posting this info!

[hopi]

Amazon treats "ordinary people" extemely rough with no benefits or future for young people.

As at Walmart, Amazon achieves this with a regime of workplace pressure, in which targets for the unpacking, movement, and repackaging of goods are relentlessly increased to levels where employees have to struggle to meet their targets and where older and less dextrous employees will begin to fail. As at Walmart, there is a pervasive “three strikes and you’re out” culture, and when these marginal employees acquire too many demerits (“points”), they are fired.

Amazon’s system of employee monitoring is the most oppressive I have ever come across and combines state-of-the-art surveillance technology with the system of “functional foreman,” introduced by Taylor in the workshops of the Pennsylvania machine-tool industry in the 1890s. In a fine piece of investigative reporting for the London Financial Times, economics correspondent Sarah O’Connor describes how, at Amazon’s center at Rugeley, England, Amazon tags its employees with personal sat-nav (satellite navigation) computers that tell them the route they must travel to shelve consignments of goods, but also set target times for their warehouse journeys and then measure whether targets are met.

All this information is available to management in real time, and if an employee is behind schedule she will receive a text message pointing this out and telling her to reach her targets or suffer the consequences. At Amazon’s depot in Allentown, Pennsylvania (of which more later), Kate Salasky worked shifts of up to eleven hours a day, mostly spent walking the length and breadth of the warehouse. In March 2011 she received a warning message from her manager, saying that she had been found unproductive during several minutes of her shift, and she was eventually fired. This employee tagging is now in operation at Amazon centers worldwide.

[Mz iMac]

"To drive with Flex you'll need to grab an Android phone"

That leaves me out!

[blackhole99]

If people know from the get go that the job has no benefits and no future and the hourly pay is high I don't see what the harm is. I worked my butt off when I was a kid for a fraction of that hourly rate and no benefits,people think they are entitled today.

[Plaid Pants2]

Yeah, how silly of people to want to be treated as human, and not like slaves.

[foundinlv]

One would have to contact Amazon to find out if benefits are included.  Sheesh! 

[blackhole99]

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@Plaid Pants2 wrote:

Yeah, how silly of people to want to be treated as human, and not like slaves.

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Slaves don't get paid high hourly rates, to me the Amazon hourly rate is high for what the work is and I can see why production is required. I don't want to say young people are lazy today, but if I were 10 years younger I'd consider the job.

[beadaholic]

I live near a huge Amazon hub & they are always advertising for help. I've known a few 20 something people who have worked there & ultimately quit. They say that they are not treated very nicely, & they have mandatory overtime a lot.

[Plaid Pants2]

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@beadaholic wrote:

I live near a huge Amazon hub & they are always advertising for help. I've known a few 20 something people who have worked there & ultimately quit. They say that they are not treated very nicely, & they have mandatory overtime a lot.

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And I bet they aren't "lazy".