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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, 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.)