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Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
Amazon may be owned by the world's richest man, but some employees at the company pee into bottles to avoid missing their targets by going to the toilet, says an author who went undercover at the firm's UK warehouse.
According to James Bloodworth, who applied for a job at Amazon's warehouses in Staffordshire to complete his book on low wages in the UK, the workers "picking" products for delivery do not go to toilet, as it is too far away.
"For those of us who worked on the top floor, the closest toilets were down four flights of stairs. People just peed in bottles because they lived in fear of being disciplined over 'idle time' and losing their jobs just because they needed the loo," Bloodworth said, as quoted by the Sun.
Source: https://www.rt.com/business/424256-amazon-workers-pee-into-bottles/
Also reported at CNET, The Verge, and Business Insider:
A separate survey found almost three-quarters of UK fulfillment-center staff members were afraid of using the toilet because of time concerns. A report released Monday with the survey's findings said 241 Amazon warehouse employees in England were interviewed.
The survey anonymously quoted one person as saying targets had "increased dramatically" and "I do not drink water because I do not have time to go to the toilet."
[...] Amazon disputed the allegations. The company said in a statement to Business Insider:
"Amazon provides a safe and positive workplace for thousands of people across the UK with competitive pay and benefits from day one. We have not been provided with confirmation that the people who completed the survey worked at Amazon and we don't recognize these allegations as an accurate portrayal of activities in our buildings.
"We have a focus on ensuring we provide a great environment for all our employees and last month Amazon was named by LinkedIn as the 7th most sought after place to work in the UK and ranked first place in the US. Amazon also offers public tours of its fulfillment centres so customers can see first-hand what happens after they click 'buy' on Amazon."
Amazon said it didn't time workers' toilet breaks and set its performance targets based on previous worker performance. The company said it provided coaching to help people improve and used "proper discretion" when it came to sick leave and absences from work.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Tuesday April 17 2018, @09:26AM (10 children)
Any factory-like environment has performance goals; they try to maximize efficiency and throughput, because that's how they make money. Breaks are strictly regulated - you don't just step off the assembly line when you need to pee. As a worker, you avoid needing to pee except during your designated breaks - this is not difficult. From the sounds of TFA, Amazon is more flexible than an assembly line: you have goals to meet, but you can go to the toilet whenever you need to.
So the real question is: are the performance goals reasonable? OTOH, the workers grousing could be simply incapable of actually doing their jobs efficiently.
In a very small way, I just experienced this today. A one-time, unusual task: I had a stack of thirty or so brochures, printed on A4 sheets. They needed stapled in the precise center and then folded neatly in half to make A5 booklets. I could do this myself, although it isn't my job, or I could pass this to the person whose job it should be. It would take me 15 minutes, or I could spend 10 minutes explaining what I want, and she would then take at least an hour, likely more, to do the work. It's not laziness, it's...incapacity. I did the brochures myself...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @11:34AM (5 children)
> It's not laziness, it's...incapacity.
My guess? You are not a very good communicator if it takes you 10 minutes to describe making a stapled brochure. I'd do one as a sample and hand the rest to the copy room "serf" -- Please make them like this, with the pages in the same order.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @01:41PM (2 children)
You've never dealt with someone impossible like that, have you? Sometimes a failure to understand is the fault of the listener.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:00PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:36PM
Try not to fail at reading comprehension next time.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday April 17 2018, @01:59PM (1 child)
I'm a teacher by profession, so I know how to explain things. Here's how it would need to go:
- Explain which way the staples go through the brochure, and exactly where they should be positioned.
- Show her how to use the special stapler, which has a setting to help get the staples in the right place.
- Show her how to fold the brochures, so that the pages don't slip, so that the corners line up neatly.
- Demonstrate the process. Then have her do one, so that I can correct what she forgets or does wrong.
If I got through that in 10 minutes, I would be doing well. This isn't her usual area of work - it's a one-off - so she really doesn't know these things. And, no, she cannot figure them out on her own. At least, not if I want this done today. She's nice enough, well-meaning, just not very fast on her mental feet.
People on Soylent are, on average, pretty smart. This is the world that most of us live in, most of the time. Working with people who have below average IQs is a completely different world.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:11PM
Amen, Brother!
(Score: 3, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday April 17 2018, @12:22PM
I tell my White House people, follow me on Twitter. @realDonaldTrump [twitter.com]. Read my tweets every morning (M-F). And you'll know whether to come to work or not. Much quicker than leaving voice mail!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:09PM
On our factory floor, employees are "encouraged" to pee on their break time - but it doesn't always work that way. I presume that you are familiar with pregnant women, women in general, and people, both male and female who just don't feel well. Or, the person who chugged a pot or two of coffee while racing to work. When a person has to go, they have to go. And, yes, it CAN BE impossible to wait another fifteen minutes, or whatever.
For that reason, our leads and layout people are required to relieve an operator whenever necessary.
If a person seems to be abusing this courtesy for an extended period of time, HR will have some words with that person. Primarily to establish whether that person has some condition that interferes with his/her job, but it can become disciplinary.
Someone says they gotta go, you better get out of the way!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by rleigh on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:50PM
Any factory-like environment which hasn't taken the basic requirements of comfort and hygiene into consideration when designing their business processes is frankly unfit to be doing business. I've worked in several factories, and I can state categorically that none of them tracked nor cared about staff going to the toilet. Production lines aren't individual efforts, they are huge team efforts, and if the whole line is vulnerable to a single individual taking a call of nature, it's understaffed by definition. In all the places I've worked, we covered for each other during those times. A 12 hour shift is far too long to be hanging around with your legs crossed, and not granting staff the opportunity to relieve themselves is hardly going to improve their work efforts. If the margins are so razor-thin that these basic considerations are denied, clearly there's a serious problem with the business.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by bussdriver on Tuesday April 17 2018, @03:40PM
Amazon's past behavior has been exposed before and it fits perfectly into this. They automate part of management so workers are tracked and measured at insane levels never possible before computers. The worker is tracked against the BEST time ever and always feels like a failure and management exploits that to make them feel at risk all the time for failing to beat the best or their personal best or a skewed average. You never meet the goals they set and when you do or exceed them, it becomes the new bar for you to fail at reaching EVERY DAY. This creates a great deal of stress which they use as motivation; they do not have to forbid bathroom breaks or go against regulation they just create the conditions so the people who do not QUIT are the ones who can be exploited the best and will get creative to avoid big failures such as taking too many bathroom breaks.
Sure, you are "free" without a manager watching you all the time-- they can spin that to sound great-- but they log and analyze everything you do all day at unprecedented levels and evaluate you from that --- automating everything but the interaction with their "motivating" managers who don't have a clue what you do except for the automated monitoring reports. Your break times are allowed but a single break may not be counted directly against you it WILL impact your attempt to be the best (which would be without breaks under the best conditions.) An Olympic athlete would fail after their 1st few days of setting records.
Just go read some of the stuff out there and you'll get a picture of how they've been trying to apply automation to everything in the whole process. Management would be gone already except that humans are so good at finding loopholes and lawsuits that the picky details would trip up software management... so they just make them more productive while trying to eliminate the underlings with robots (thereby getting rid of the lower management with them.)