Yes people like Walmart and Amazon workers need protection form maltreatment. Definitely. This should be built into the law though, not into unions.
And no because the existing unions don't really protect people. If you look at RMT, Unison and NUT they regularly pop up just to cause trouble. From a perspective of people having to consume services offered by their staff regularly, they want masses of additional pay and do not improve standards along the way at all. They are simply allowing the incompetent to be propped up by the good staff. Also, the professional minority who agree that this is the case are forced to be dragged into union ballots and vote with other staff in favour of strike action regularly in fear of retaliation from their colleagues.
Also let us not forget a much greater threat of exploitation: being forced to work with no pay under the guise of "training". This is happening a lot in the UK a the moment as the Job Centre has been pushing for people to do this by threatening to cut their benefits if they don't do it. The result is people being forced to work for no compensation and having to pay for travel expenses out of their own (literally destitute) pocket. The employers don't have to pay the staff either. The result of this is a dangled carrot of "if you do this, after 6-12 months we'll give you a permanent paid position". This inevitably results in being laid off as not needed immediately when they agreed to take you on.
There are even posters going up in Job Centres telling people "try staff for free":
Edit: Also I've spoken to some business associates (the sort who worship the fully paid up Lord Fuckwit Sugar himself) and are applauding this as a great way of building their businesses. This is simply unethical. I've been pretty much excluded for mentioning the inevitable "abhorrent slavery" point, not that I care.
> This should be built into the law though, not into unions.
But how do the low-paid and exploited workers get the kind of representation and voice that results in the law makers and policy makers hearing it?
If the workers are not valued enough to be paid well, do you think the employers themselves value the employees enough to listen?
That is the point of the union.
Some unions do indeed give the entire concept a bad rep, but the fundamentals of "workers coming together to acquire a collective voice to be heard" isn't a bad one.
The output of that voice is law. Such as equality in the workplace, safety regulations, working hour regulations, etc, etc.
Few of those laws would have come to pass without the worker being able to have a representative and voice.
I see parallels between democratic representation in society and representation against powerful employers. To some extent, given globalisation, multi-national corporations and the power of corporations in political lobbying I'm becoming more of the view that multi-national unions need to come into existence.
And not to hit the "strike" button every 10 seconds. Withdrawal of labour is a nuclear option and likely no-one will ever win when it occurs. But... to have that kind of representation and voice against corporations that increasingly cannot be held to account by sovereign governments and local lawmakers seems an important check.
We remain people. Work isn't the be-all and end-all, and people should be valued. If a business cannot sustain itself by valuing people fairly and with respect...then the business is at fault. We shouldn't create human misery, and people who work for us (entrepreneurs, leaders, decision makers in companies) do deserve a voice and representation to hold us to account and constrain us (to some extent).
Denmark has something that sort of works like this, but imo it works okay and is usually not exploitative, partly because of several differences:
1. It's not completely free to businesses or completely unpaid: the person continues to receive pay in the form of benefits from the unemployment fund, but the company kicks in 17% on top of that as a pension contribution. This is partly to ensure the company takes it seriously, and partly because making sure everyone has a funded pension is in the state's interest.
2. The job must actually provide relevant training, not just gruntwork. The company must propose a training programme and learning outcomes, and there are periodic evaluations of the company's performance in fulfilling these.
3. It's opt-in; you are never required to do it. It's an option offered to people who are deemed to be having trouble finding a job because of lack of in-demand skills. One option among several: others include vocational courses run by the municipality, going back to school for an adult masters degree, etc.
4. The benefits are at a reasonably high level, so things like paying for transit are not a problem. Minimum benefit is around $1800/mo, I think.
> This should be built into the law though, not into unions.
Who do you think is going to get these protections built into the law? Who do you think has been responsible for getting the protections we do have built into the law? It's unions. They're not perfect (no organization of people ever is), but they're a hell of a lot better than an alternative economy in which unions don't exist, all workers are atomized and disorganized and the public policy dialogue is entirely dominated by what large corporations want you to think.
This is happening a lot in the UK a the moment as the Job Centre has been pushing for people to do this by threatening to cut their benefits if they don't do it. The result is people being forced to work for no compensation and having to pay for travel expenses out of their own (literally destitute) pocket.
From the perspective of the employee/trainee, the only difference I see between this situation and actual employment is that the name on the check is different from the name of the employer. So what's the big deal?
The big deal is that JSA which is the only paid amount is £56.80 a week. For a 40 hour standard week that is £1.42 an hour.
The national minimum wage is £6.31 an hour.
Not only that, the jobs in question can be literally 20-30 miles from your residential address so travelling is not even possible.
Also, we end up paying the JSA for the business. The business sees this as another expense avoided rather than an investment in the business. This should not be promoted!!
As for the incentives on the business side, I agree with you. Rather than being private sector jobs, these should be low skill government jobs. We can even help the budget by replacing overpaid unionized govt workers with job seekers working for their benefits. But it's dishonest to claim that they are paid only 50GBP/week for their labor.
[edit: I took out the child, benefits were 187 GBP/week, ignoring council housing subsidies.]
It doesn't work like that. As someone who has been unemployed you have to deal with the following:
1. Child tax credit works on your previous year's income so it can take up to a year to get adjusted. Same with child benefit.
2. Housing benefit takes 8-12 weeks to come through. Not only that it won't cover most private rents inside the M25. The council waiting list is 3-5 years in London so you'll have to go into arrears. The only way out is to stop paying your rent and go the council and tell them you are homeless. At which point either you or your children are split up or you get wedged in what I can only describe as a "crackhead den" at best. My other half had to clean the needles away before she could wash in the morning when this happened to her (after she was made redundant and the market was suddenly saturated with her speciality).
3. You don't get JSA immediately. It takes 4-8 weeks for it to start.
You don't just clap your hands when you're unemployed and cash starts rolling in. There are other concerns.
It's a fucking rough ride and not only that you have to do the legwork and deal with government incompetence and prejudice along the way which is more than rife.
Try to pay attention. We were discussing the "problem" of people already receiving benefits being compelled to work for those benefits.
While it is a problem that the council allows crackheads into public housing, and there may be problems with government incompetence, this is a somewhat separate discussion. Tangentially, if you want to require drug tests for benefits and kick people out of council housing for antisocial behavior, I have no objection.
There is nothing wrong with receiving benefits. I actually receive low rate disability for two members of my family and child tax credit.
My point is that only the JSA covers your salary. The rest is for the care of your children and your accommodation, some of which you still have to pay from your JSA allowance.
You are likely to still receive all other benefits equally whether salaried at a low rate or on JSA so the difference is moot. This is simply a case of salaried vs JSA.
Actually people with social problems such as drug use and psychological problems need more help than most so they should probably get more money, but in a controlled way (untradeable LV's, healthcare etc).
>> That number isn't right at all. I just pretended to be a single unemployed female with one child, and they said I was entitled to this:
If you're childless and (for instance) living with family then it would be accurate. Adding child allowances into the picture is pretty much beside the point here.
They have to pay their own travel expenses, if you do the calculations then they get less than minimum wage and they are threatened with having even that withdrawn.
And the taxpayer foots the bill instead of the business, which as a societal meme can just go f*ck itself.
Exactly, far better off to have the unemployed doing something rather than sitting round watching daytime TV.
[Note that I say that as someone who actually has signed on for a bit when I was a daft kid and done some pretty ghastly manual laboring jobs in agriculture and fishing].
Mind you I think having to pay their own travelling expenses is a bit harsh (mind you the first employment I had was for 12-15 hour shifts and I had to cycle 45 minutes to get there and back.)
Doing something isn't actually necessarily possible. We've automated a big chunk of people's jobs away. There isn't necessarily a place for everyone to work now. Not only that, we're living longer. Provisions need to be made for these facts.
You could argue as the loaded cost of employing anyone is a good bit more than their salary that any employer is making a contribution. (Usual rule of thumb is ~50% of salary for fully loaded costs - and that's without any thing fancy).
Leaving aside the point about making folks pay their own traveling costs, which I agree is unfair, what would you do with these people?
[And for record I have started a company that employed a few hundred and (long) before that had been unemployed for a while and had a few rather grim laboring jobs].
Good for you. That's what we need. Been in the same situation.
That's easy as I've already done it before on several occasions.
I'd employ them for the minimum wage and pay up their travel allowance (be that oyster or season ticket). If they have any needs such as caring for relatives, which appears to be the main reason people are unemployed from what I have seen, I'd make sure their time and work location was flexible. I'd then make damn sure that:
a) they get some training and the ability to self improve.
b) they get a secure job.
People are grateful of both of these. If you make a positive contribution to their lives, they will make a contribution to your business. Everyone benefits.
The problem is that the prevailing opinion is that exploitation and bottom line are the most important things. While sipping champers at the wine bar, your slaves are turning the wheels for you. No thanks.
For ref, all of my business were fully reinvestment based. No profit was made, no investors were used and good, reliable salaries were paid. They weren't sold off for profit - they were given to the employees when I started venture+1 up. That was it.
Some of the cost of employment in the UK is employers national insurance (effectively a kind o tax that gets paid by the company before the employee even sees the pay check). This is not present here. Neither is there any question of employee rights, or employer responsibilities because there's no employment.
Of course, "people won't have to do it all" also implies "the future doesn't need us".
Currently those poor workers are cheaper than the machines that could do the same job. Once the machines become cheaper than a sustenance-wage for a human, there will be literally no jobs for those people, ever.
And than means that either by that time we drastically change our distribution of resources - where 'having a job' is not needed for living; or expect literal class warfare.
The point is the issue isn't amazon treating workers bad. Obviously they'd be even worse off if amazon got rid of them, yet that's considered perfectly acceptable. If you think it's not, then think of all the companies in the world that also don't employ people because technology makes them unnecessary (or they just don't need to in the first place) and place equal blame on them.
The problem isn't with one company, or even just the industries that hire lots of unskilled workers. The problem is our society requires people to depend on their job and the value of their labor as their only source of income. This problem becomes more and more obvious as the value of labor continues to fall with technology and competition with other countries.
>And than means that either by that time we drastically change our distribution of resources - where 'having a job' is not needed for living; or expect literal class warfare.
So? We've been due for class warfare for decades now. The sooner the better. I'm tired of seeing the entire planet's worth of societies optimized for hoarding capital. Enough!
I'm not sure if anyone should be happy about the prospects of literal class warfare, i.e., a large portion of society being so disenfranchised that they need to resort to mass violence in order to survive. There are 3 possible outcomes to that:
(a) the warfare is limited and we're back to the same decision point (how do we change society?) but lots people have suffered for no good reason;
(b) the fighting ends with 'permanently jobless' getting physically eliminated in large numbers - increasingly sophisticated military/police forces + growing drone warfare may make it a possible outcome;
(c) the fighting ends with them winning, and implementing, as I said, "drastically change our distribution of resources - where 'having a job' is not needed for living;".
Why don't we just agree on (c) and implement it without need for bloodshed?
There will be in my lifetime billions of people without a possibility for any economically viable "job", i.e., the rest of society doesn't need anything at all from them, not their labor, not their services, not their flesh. They still need resources to live. So either they'll (a) not get those resources and not live; (b) we'll simply give them those resources; or (c) they'll try to take those resources - but in the end it results in (a) or (b) anyways.
>Why don't we just agree on (c) and implement it without need for bloodshed?
Because large portions of the not-completely-disenfranchised consider (c) immoral.
Trust me, I agree on (c). I want my post-scarcity society, goddamnit. The diminishing happiness returns point on income is $70k/year USD per household or local standard-of-living equivalent, and I'm sure with further study we could find out exactly the cost of living variables behind that number. For reference, the current GDP/capita of the USA is $48k/year per person, easily enough to get over the diminishing returns point with approximately 1.5 "GDP/capita portions" per household (ie: leaving several more portions for investment, government, and other nonpersonal uses).
Or as I sometimes joke to people, the Economic Singularity, the point where our economy tips over into being definitively able to satisfy each and every citizen's fundamental needs, has long-since happened. There is no remaining moral excuse for poverty or toil.
However, the powerful elite of society now require poverty and toil for the rest of us simply because their moral code is: "He who does not work shall not eat." That is why there will be class warfare: because we have implemented a system which views mass starvation as a moral local maximum.
See my point in a sibling post. The government want to keep unemployment statistics down so they will end up forcing people into training placements and unpaid internships without a job at the end instead. This is already happening.
"Desk jockey does manual labor and his feet hurt, story at 11"
I worked the graveyard shift as a picker at Amazon back around '00. Back then Amazon was so nervous about anybody introducing a bug in the site that all software engineers were put to work either at warehouses or as customer service agents during the holidays. I worked customer service one year and picked for two years, both times during graveyard shifts. This involved flying out to the middle of nowhere from the Seattle headquarters and living out of a hotel.
Honestly, it was a lot of fun. Seeing those parts of the operation was fascinating, and Amazon encouraged you to look for inefficiencies and offer solutions or think about how you could fix things once you got back behind a keyboard.
Our shifts were exactly the same as the full time workers, but they were faster than us, especially at first. Your feet do indeed hurt and you do indeed walk a ton, but that is more because you've been sitting on your ass for 12 hours a day instead of actually using your body.
Yes, you are a mechanical turk in the strictest sense of the word, being dispatched by your hand scanner to go find something and put it in a cart, but it isn't hard work, just a bit boring. If you take it seriously and get good at troubleshooting shortages, then you start getting to do things that require a bit more problem solving, but even the really menial stations aren't terribly bad.
In short, this is just a bunch of whining that manual labor is hard work and not terribly engaging. The conditions themselves are plenty good, hard to imagine them being better while doing the same job.
They are nothing, nothing at all like the conditions any number of people work every day to manufacture your shoes, t-shirts and electronic equipment. You get to move around, you aren't on an assembly line, the work is varied in its environment.
So shut your trap and get back to picking, there's product to get out to customers.
There are some rather key differences though don't you think? I imagine as a reasonably valued software engineer you weren't likely to face disciplinary action or loss of employment for not picking fast enough, thus negating a huge cause of stress/anxiety. You also had the knowledge of a definite finite term of employment followed by more relaxing/agreeable work, another rather significant difference.
You also talk about troubleshooting shortages and getting to do things that require problem solving. It sounds from this article (and others like it over the last few years) that this kind of thing, if even still available at all, is not likely to happen to your average seasonal employee.
The fact that other people have it worse in various sweatshops around the world is hardly relevant, or particularly edifying. We are quite capable of seeing problems as a matter of degree I would hope.
Your comment comes across as a little like the CEO who spends a day on the factory floor and proclaims that he had a marvelous time and everyone treated him wonderfully. Unsurprising, but hardly enlightening...
We were definitely measured the same as everyone else and had the same targets, though obviously didn't face the same repercussions. The targets were hard at first but once you got the hang of it nothing terribly difficult.
It is manual labor, I don't really understand the arguments against. Yes, it is work, yes it is boring, but so it being a gas station attendant. The people I worked side by side with seemed happy enough.
Maybe I lack empathy, but geez, I actually did it for a while, and you and the other respondent didn't... so maybe another option is that the article is a bit sensational and it isn't as bad as it is made out?
Sore feet and that it is boring and are his primary complaints.. really? This is something to get up in arms about?
Have you ever worked manual labour? Like a real labour job?
When the recession hit, I was unemployed, but got a decent paying construction job from a friend. It involved lifting a hundred pounds at a time, working in dangerous areas (near elevator shafts, on the edge of a 45-story office tower, under cranes) in cold weather (up to minus 40 degrees celcius), and with plenty of dangerous equipment (cranes, concrete pumps, excavators, etc...). The typical work week was 70 hours of gruelling physical work, with even more hours available if you wanted them (and some people would take as many as 100 hours per week).
And that job was quite mild, compared to all the oilfield jobs people take up north, where the weather is consistently much colder, and the hours even longer.
If working at Amazon was so terrible, there wouldn't be 5000 people employed there. Or the demand for jobs there would be so low, the wages would be much higher. But let's face it, there's much worse jobs even in our western countries.
I've had menial jobs. For what they were - menial work to earn a bit of money - they were great. The bullshit on assembly lines is present, but it's different to the bullshit you get in offices.
Good employers can make this kind of menial job a great place to work for many people. Bad employers can very quickly ruin it.
> You also talk about troubleshooting shortages and getting to do things that require problem solving. It sounds from this article (and others like it over the last few years) that this kind of thing, if even still available at all, is not likely to happen to your average seasonal employee.
Yes, bad companies don't listen to their employees. When someone sits at a machine for 8 hours a day, moving a widget, pushing a button, and putting the widget in a box for someone else, that person knows a lot about that process. They can tell you about the lighting or the draft or the position of the bin or the seat or how stuff piles up too fast for them or how they're left waiting for product.
Find these people. Reward them for their insight. Apply those tweaks.
"Yes, you are a mechanical turk in the strictest sense of the word, being dispatched by your hand scanner to go find something and put it in a cart, but it isn't hard work, just a bit boring."
Would you like to be a permanent 'mechanical turk'? As in... you had zero choice in the matter and no chance to change things ever? That's not 'a bit boring'... that's soul crushing (and I mean 'soul' in a non-religious sense). Studies have shown that sort of stress causes heart disease over 'good stress' (you're manning the Very Important controls).
"If you take it seriously and get good at troubleshooting shortages, then you start getting to do things that require a bit more problem solving, but even the really menial stations aren't terribly bad."
But what if you're not very good at problem solving (quite possible if you're working in a warehouse)?... you being a human with very real needs doesn't stop because you can't 'get serious and solve problems'.
Quite honestly... from your comment, I can only deduce that you are an asshole with an inability to imagine yourself in other people's shoes.
My take on reading numerous articles on the topic is the design of processes and management style is oriented around removing all possible choices from the employees as a stereotypical primate dominance ritual. Agree, disagree?
A management style designed to make people unhappy so they leave.
I have worked at places with call centers where this was a stated goal... pay after 4 years is excellent, of course working conditions procedures and policies are specifically designed so no one lasts longer than 6 months. There is a HN blindness to this because it takes a programmer a couple months to get up to speed so managing Ruby programmers this way would be pretty idiotic, but for low skill jobs where actual training is about a day, getting rid of them before they get too expensive is a "valid" although inhumane management technique.
My gut level guess is something like they don't pay benefits of any sort for the first 90 days, so management goals and bonuses are oriented around making people so uncomfortable that almost all of them are gone by 89 days.
"The employees aren't in jail, they aren't slaves, they have choice."
Care to outline the choice they have (you forgot the "s", as belies your worldview)? What are the choices outside of jail, slavery or the work conditions described in the article?
I suspect that many of them can't get another job and they need to feed themselves or dependents like children.
"The article is sensational."
If you disagree with the article, why would you give it such a rousing review?
I flagged and downvoted both of your comments because there is absolutely no reason to resort to intentionally misunderstanding the poster's intent and petty name calling. It's not worthy of a forum where people supposedly think critically about the material presented. This isn't the comments section of some hack political blog.
Whilst I appreciate you outlining which buttons you clicked on this website, perhaps you could engage with the discussion and present your view? There are mechanical-turk computers behind the scenes to interpret your button pressing.
You can disagree, that's cool, we can have different opinions, but aren't we supposed to strive to a slightly higher level of discourse on HN?
You don't know me, so lay off the ad-hominem, this isn't the forum for it. We apparently disagree on what kinds of choices people have in the Midwest. We are coming from different places in our experience, and I happen to think I hold the edge on this particular topic.
I apologise for the name-calling. (Particularly the egregious terms I used... and it's no excuse that in my circle of friends we use them in conversation, but subtleties are lost in translation, even amongst English speakers)
My broader point is this (if you care beyond taking offence at the language I have used), people desperate for a job to feed themselves and their dependents, should not have to subjugate themselves at the feet of Amalgamated Internet Co. in order to live a fulfilling life... and saying 'it's a bit boring but suck-it-up stranger' doesn't display any empathy.
However your feelings are entitled to be respected?
I wasn't asking you to respect my feelings, I was simply asking you to engage in a discussion.
I get where you are coming from, I really do, I just don't think this is the Big Evil Megacorp (TM) you are looking for. Yes, being a full time picker wouldn't be my first choice as a job, but that goes for a lot of jobs out there, many of which I did for a time.
Not all jobs are fulfilling, not all jobs are fun, really only a tiny fraction are. As "knowledge workers" we have the incredible luxury of having jobs that have incredible flexibility and are engaging. But most jobs have to pay you because nobody would voluntarily do the work otherwise, and ya, that's called work.
The Amazon warehouses are just that, warehouses, where shit gets picked, put into boxes and shipped. To me, they seemed fine, no more or less bad than I expected. I think some people are better at coping with that kind of job than others, my brother did the same stint one year and went berzerk, for me it wasn't so bad, I found some form of fun in it.
It isn't a super amazing fulfilling job where you belch unicorn rainbows after every shift, no. But it isn't some forced labor camp either. The testament to that is that Amazon sent off its own super hippy, liberal and educated workforce to witness it year after year.
I have empathy, I'm just pointing out that an alternate reality might be that this reporter spent two weeks investing in this article and then left and had to write something.. so he did. It is a lot less interesting to write "Amazon warehouse work is boring but gives you good calf muscles" than it is to go on about mental illness.
PS. I can tell you if you cared about mental health, working as a software dev during those days was WAY more stressful than any warehouse job. Pressure cooker to the extreme.
Nobody expects work to be fun. People expect it to have reasonably short hours (ie: eight hours per day, for instance), to pay well enough to support themselves, and not to actively insult and humiliate the worker. If you can't meet that minimum standard, take your "job" and shove it.
>You can disagree, that's cool, we can have different opinions, but aren't we supposed to strive to a slightly higher level of discourse on HN?
I would prefer to strive for a slightly higher level of actual empathy and morality on HN rather than tolerate the "Fuck you, got mine" attitude you're displaying.
> Would you like to be a permanent 'mechanical turk'? As in... you had zero choice in the matter and no chance to change things ever? That's not 'a bit boring'... that's soul crushing (and I mean 'soul' in a non-religious sense). Studies have shown that sort of stress causes heart disease over 'good stress' (you're manning the Very Important controls).
You have choice. To work there or not to.
By the way, welcome to pretty much every construction job ever. And depending on your priorities in life, it's not necessarily soul-crushing. The ability to leave your job at work when you go home every evening is quite under-rated...
No. With current economic circumstances, many have the choice to work there or to not work at all.
In construction jobs you have steadily-changing tasks and work in fresh air/the sun. It might be more physically straining, but it is certainly healthier for your body and mind than working as a human robot at Amazon.
Also: Nobody is complaining that working at Amazon is not the greatest job on the planet. The scandal is that it would take so little effort on the part of Amazon to significantly improve the working experience.
We wouldn't tolerate a sweatshop operating in the western world. So why do we continue to tolerate Henry Ford style assembly line work?
"The scandal is that it would take so little effort on the part of Amazon to significantly improve the working experience."
I have observed bait n switch as a labor force management technique... lure in "good" workers by promising awful pay and benefits not, but 4 years in its pretty awesome. Then make actual conditions, procedures, and policies such that everyone is fired or quits by 6 months in.
Used to see this a lot for health insurance. Nobody gets insurance for first 90 days, coincidentally everyone is fired for cause or quits in disgust less than two months in.
A business can save a lot of money that way. Not saying its right, just explaining why a business would intentionally boost their turnover rate or refuse to make the simplest change to lower their turnover rate. Its not a bug, its a performance eval oriented bonus rewarded feature.
Which headline is more likely in the next 5-10 years?
"Amazon improves lives of 5,000 manual pickers by introducing fully automated robotic supply chain. Workers now free to find other employment."
Or
"Profit crazed Amazon to employ 5,000 android robot zombies, lays off entire human workforce."
Manual labor of this sort isn't exciting or creative for most people. You don't really have room for creativity with this sort of job unless you are iterating on the system level -- and I'm most certain they have a way for pickers to contribute ideas to that. Then again, people play Candy Crush saga for hours a day and PAY for the privilege.. At least these guys get paid and get to walk around.
Once the cost of automating people out completely is less than human labor, it will happen almost instantly.. That is the bigger social issue folks should be looking at -- what will we do when General Human Labor is more expensive than General Machine Labor? Combine this with General Artificial Intelligence and human labor becomes worth less and less.. As someone formally trained as an Urban Planner, this was the biggest issue I saw in grad school as a rapidly approaching social concern.
I worked as a picker for a few days in a large distribution facility in my home town when I was in high school; this was over 20 years ago. They had rails everywhere through the complex which seemed to do nothing; when I asked what that was, they explained that they, together with the biggest IT company in NL, made software and robots to do our work automatically. It would be put in production the next year. It hasn't still. Why are humans still doing this work? Surely this can be automated, especially as companies have been working on that idea for well over 20 years, probably more?
Given that Amazon is no stranger to technology I suspect the answer is that it simply doesn't make financial sense. I suspect the capex on a standard Amazon shipping center is probably pretty low (lease a warehouse, put in computer systems, hire a crowd of temp workers).
Take it from someone who's tried making it work : grasping is too fucking hard. It looks so simple, a baby could do it. A hand grasping objects.
Many things that many people believe robots can do are in this category. The absolute state of the art is balancing (not walking) on 2 legs (which does allow you to move, but ...), and walking on 4 legs (it's not really walking like for example a cat does, but it's better than balancing)
But the control loop for grasping arbitrary 3d objects given a camera image of the object and the hand ... such a stupid thing is a completely unsolved problem, and it's we're not anywhere near solving it.
On the problem of grasping, can you please comment on this video [1]? Instead of making a robot "hand", they have filled a balloon with ground coffee beans. "Grasping" and "ungrasping" then simply becomes sucking air out of, and pushing air into the balloon.
Is there some downside to this that I'm not seeing?
"Is there some downside to this that I'm not seeing?"
Most real world engineering problems boil down to long term reliability. Its just assumed you'll get your statics and dynamics correct and all that basic stuff, the actual brain power burned on the job is designing stuff that actually works 1M times and tolerates every component being 5% off the exact value or whatever. I think this would be a huge headache in the very long term reliability category.
What you see in that movie, the uncooked egg pickup, is becoming somewhat of a litmus test. Trying to reliably instruct a robot to put some 20 eggs from one basket into another without breaking any, and without prior knowledge of the position of the eggs and so on, that'll mean a lot.
Amazon recently purchased a company that builds warehouse robots(kiva robotics) for a quarter billion dollar. This company had sold systems for some reasonably large warehouses.
Those are pretty good signs that robots in the warehouse are about to happen in a mass scale.
Also ,there are rumors that amazon is building large amounts of robots , and will launch a service in 2015 based on those(just rumors).
And to the question why does it take so long? for many expensive technologies, 20 years from talking to industry acceptance is normal.It takes time to improve the technology in reliability , cost, performance , convince industry to use it and scale it.
Cheaper I understand, however, it doesn't seem very healthy work. I worked with people doing it full time at that time (and apparently not much has changed); most of those had damaged hips from walking the same way behind the carts they pushed for 10-15 years. And I can see why this would mentally affect you, although I must say that most of them actually liked it. I was setting up a software business and was telling about that ; they were just saying 'why not work here, no stress, it's great! never any stress and fixed paycheck'. That sounds different than the Amazon one, but you cannot really do that in NL ; you can set a 'realistic, sustainable minimum' amount of work they have to do, but that differs per person; you cannot fire or reprimand someone for not 'making the beep' if that means you have to walk faster than normal or even run for it. So everyone would be quite relaxed and yet everything gets done with the people happy. So cheaper but unhealthy maybe?
Also; I don't know much about the robots involved and what they would cost and how much prices are going to drop; seeing that humans are wasting quite a bit of space on the floor and have other issues, I'm not sure if it's cheaper? I'm sure Amazon calculates that often though , so I guess it is.
Occupied; I see that as a reason, but that's an issue anyway; we cannot keep doing it that for that reason (and they don't, but as you say). If the work can be done by machines, it will be done with machines.
>Cheaper I understand, however, it doesn't seem very healthy work.
My family works its own garden. We have a modest plot, which we push into production very comfortably, for about 8 months a year. This plot, which was once a 'pleasure-garden' around our house, replaces a family of 4's vegetable-nutrient needs at the grocery for about 6 months a year. Its a lot of work, mostly for my wife, but if I "didn't have to work elsewhere", the two of us could definitely have a much bigger yield.
The point I'm trying to make is that in fact, gardening for ones own vegetables simply has to get fashionable again. Even if you are a city-dweller, yes: garden culture has to push towards sustainable, edibles, as quickly as possible.
Which means, I predict the work is going to get easier, not harder. The false-economy of buying an Apple for 10c, which was trucked from a few thousand km's away, is really the end of it; our Pear tree gets us supplied good and plenty, and it costs nothing but a bit of rope to keep it propped up in the winds .. oh, sure, I did have to build a flame-thrower to keep the wasps away, but: that was fun!
Gardening feels healthy though. We live of our own fruit/veg almost whole year round. I think it's fun and besides my dogs, we can almost live on what we create ourselves.
>Cheaper I understand, however, it doesn't seem very healthy work.
The short-term financial gain goes to Amazon (and to a smaller degree the pickers), but the long-term costs of an unhealthy job are paid for by the healthcare system. Therefore there is an incentive to create those jobs.
I worked at an Amazon warehouse in Texas as a seasonal employee about a month ago. It was an absolutely miserable experience - and I say that as someone who has worked plenty of low-end manual jobs. I only lasted a month.
Shifts were 10 hours and had two 15 minute breaks and a 30 minute lunch. The floor is large and there is no cafeteria, so it usually was more like a 15 minute break after you walked over to the breakroom and nuked lunch.
That in and of itself was not so bad - I've had food service jobs where we had no breaks at all. But that combined with the actual job duties, combined with the conditions, combined with rigid management, and 1984 "ministry of truth" style propaganda - all that added up to an absolutely miserable experience. It's very hard for me to really communicate why it was so miserable, because I don't fully understand it myself - but I will try. But I will say that I've spent time in prison - and I would choose prison any day over returning to work at Amazon.
I applied online, went on an interview and started a month later. I had a few months free and being a long time Amazon customer and admirer I thought it would be an interesting job to check out for a little bit. I heard it was a warehouse for just books and dvd's, and that it was a brand new warehouse that was just opening up. I read a long PR piece talking about how Amazon had every year changed the design of the warehouses based on what they had learned from the warehouses built previous years. So this was a brand new design that was supposed to be more efficient and also more thoughtful of workers.
I was assigned a shift - Sunday to Wednesday 6am to 5:30 pm. I was not given an option, and when I finally found an HR contact a week before I started to ask if it was possible to change shifts I never heard back from them.
So I was like whatever and went to orientation. It was me and 6 others. By the time I left the job a month later, only 3 remained of that original group. The first to leave and the one I got to know the best was an ex-hooters girl who was my age (31) who was sick of waiting tables and wanted to work for a company she could move up in.
She left a week and a half in after having severe allergies in response to the thick coating of dust throughout the warehouse and on all the shelving we were working "stowing" product on. It turned out it wasn't just books and dvd's - in fact that was a small percentage of what I worked with. Mostly it was cheap consumer goods - the kind I despise and that is slowly killing our planet. The shelves often reeked of toiletries and chemicals and perfumes of various kinds, mixing with the dust to inspire a sickly feeling. FYI exposure to dust and chemicals are conductive to good health.
The job was simple: take some carts of newly shipped product and "stow" them on the shelves: i.e. find space on the shelving where it fits and scan it into the system so it shows up as being available and ready to ship on the online website. It was fairly easy in some ways - the problem was doing that for 10 hours with hardly any interruption, and being surrounded by all that dust and smell and crappy mindless consumer goods. I didn't feel good about what I was doing. I had 3 days off, which I thought at first was great - but it would usually take me those 3 days to just recover from what I experienced in the 4 I was at work.
(Note: if I was given some freedom as to when I did the job, or the timing or duration of breaks, or how long my shifts were - this would not have been that bad a job. I can put up with shit for a few hours - but not 10 without a real break to speak of. And that was it - it was either work within these rigid parameters or not work at all. And so I chose the latter.)
It was a mindless monotonous job, but to make matters work, all over the place Amazon had signs saying "Have fun". Every morning and afternoon after we had our group meeting they repeated this over and over again before we went off to work. Trust me, no one was having fun. Maybe a few in management, but certainly none of the direct workers. It was insulting.
I could go on, but I'm bored. I will finish with something I came across recently, which can be compared to my experience. How bad you consider the job depends on what you compare it to. If you believe that someone living is misery (or, to put it more mildly, doing uninspiring and unimproving labor) is worth it for someone else to receive at a cheap price what in many cases is an unneedful trinket, then my point is mute. But if human happiness and potential is valuable, then this is not a job worthy of human beings. John Ruskin said it much better than I:
"We have much studied and much perfected the great civilised invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. Truly speaking it is not the labour that is divided; but the men: – Divided into mere segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin.
"Only in right understanding on the part of all classes of what kinds of labor are good for men, raising them & making them happy, and by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour can this evil be met."
Prior to working there, I had begun taking seriously the treatment of the animals whose products I ate - milk products, eggs, meat ect. Part of what inspired me to work at Amazon was to see what I was supporting when I purchased from them.
Needless to say, I will never again buy a physical product from Amazon - and am trying to ween myself off their digital products. We are far past the time when such demeaning labor should be supported.
Wow ... this story reminds me of Marshall Brain's Manna story.
I don't understand how much money a company would lose if they changed the hours to 3 or 4 hours per person. Fine, they'd double or triple their workforce and have to deal with more HR/paperwork. But the costs don't increase. This makes me wonder if the reason is not cost but control. If company X is the only thing in your life, you will likely be a more "compliant" worker. This kind of stuff scares the heck out of me :(
Dude, how about this line from the OP Guardian article? It kind of is Manna...
> A handset told him what to collect and put on his trolley. It allotted him a set number of seconds to find each product and counted down. If he made a mistake the scanner beeped.
> "We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we're holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves", he said.
That's not actually better for the employees, unless they're just part-time students looking for a side job. You can't support yourself or a family on 4 hour shifts a day. Also, and I never actually directly dealt with the paperwork of hiring so I can't confirm this, but it's my understanding that it is actually more expensive to hire someone new than give a current employee more hours due to now having to provide benefits for two people.
The BBC do an article where a well respected health researcher has analyzed the software that you write the interface for, and described it as "all the bad stuff at once".
Just watched the BBC programme associated with this story. The goods pickers are treated like automatons. The work is pretty gruelling and pretty demoralising too.
Some interesting information in the programme:
- The Scottish Government gave Amazon a £6.8 million grant to persuade it to set up shop in Scotland.
- The Welsh Government gave Amazon an £8.8 million grant + £4.5 million to build a road for it's distribution centre in Swansea.
- Amazon operate a points system for their temporary workers. If you gain three points, you're sacked. A day off sick rewards you with one point penalty. In the programme, the undercover worker was late by two minutes which gave him a half point penalty.
Quote from Professor Michael Marmot (University College, London) who was featured in the programme:
"If you say to me there are always going to be menial jobs, yes of course, but we can make them better or worse and it seems to me that the demands for efficiency at the cost of an individual's health and well-being - it's got to be balanced"
A handset told him what to collect and put on his trolley. It allotted him a set
number of seconds to find each product and counted down. If he made a mistake the
scanner beeped."
"We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we're holding it, but we
might as well be plugging it into ourselves", he said.
Haven't read that one for a few years, but it always seems more and more spot-on.
The 'Australia Project' part is fanciful sci-fi, but the point is clear - the work that all humans have put in for generations is being co-opted by the few in the ownership classes. Ordinary people find themselves treated more and more as replaceable machines then are finally optimised out of the process and disenfranchised entirely.
OTOH when you look at much of the non-western world, thinking about problems with concentrated ownership in a post-scarcity society seems a million miles away from the people who still need a clean water supply and a reliable source of food.
>OTOH when you look at much of the non-western world, thinking about problems with concentrated ownership in a post-scarcity society seems a million miles away from the people who still need a clean water supply and a reliable source of food.
It's really not. The pre-capitalist world had a much more egalitarian international wealth distribution, with India, for example, making up a double-digit percentage of the world GDP. These non-Western poor countries wouldn't be nearly so poor if not for the same capitalistic process that is steadily leaving the Western working classes out in the cold (and now even the Chinese working classes, as they get to be more expensive than robots or Africans).
Fair enough, I guess it just strikes me as odd to talk about post-scarcity anything when we have poverty on such scales. I guess it can all be an outgrowth of the same phenomena.
Well let's be clear: there are lots of Indian villages who would have plenty of drinking water if some Western firm wasn't bribing the government into letting them steal all of it. There are Mexican farmers who would have a good deal more food if NAFTA hadn't ruined them. There are Argentine workers who would have much better wages and easier access to, well, everything, if the IMF had not tried to liquify their entire nation into debt-service payments.
I'm not sure I'd blame 'capitalism' outright like that, but the actions of some of the so-called* free-market evangelist nations and organisations have been despicable and made a lot of places a lot worse off, yes. But I don't think you can blame the totality of world poverty on that, not honestly.
*(I say "so-called" because it's usually "free market for you, trade barriers for us")
Alongside the platform is a railway tunnel. If you walk down it to the left you will find a bundle of disconnected wiring and a sign reading; "We are sorry to announce that due to unforseen circumstances and the state of the economy, the light at the end of the tunnel has now been switched off". If you were to walk in the other direction however there is brilliant illumination, but that is just the lights of an oncoming train.
Salvation is easy. All you have to do is decide that "good" > "bad". The perverse attraction to misery and toil I observe in people, in this fucking thread, that's what pisses me off. What's with this idolatry?
Low Wage workers need to fight for their rights and working conditions. Nobody is going to do that for them. That's class warfare, and it has never been more important than today.
Not true. The fact of the matter is, low wage jobs usually require less skill , and therefore less education. It is part of our responsibility as those who are better off, to help fight for the rights of not just ourselves, but _all_ laborers
Not exactly true. There's "requires" as in what it takes to do the job, and there's "requires" as in HR has figured out that people who were compliant at being team players with the educational-industrial complex will be more compliant as employees, and supply and demand results in some bachelor degree holders looking for anything at all just so they can eat, such as receptionist or laborer or clerk.
Those who are temporarily better off via luck, privilege, whatever, should fight for the rights of people in cruddy jobs, because its mere luck they haven't ended up there themselves like their classmates ... err, not yet anyway.
From personal experience I think hope is a big issue WRT cruddy jobs. I worked cruddy jobs while I was in school, and I didn't mind running a floor buffing machine at 2am because I knew it was probably one of the worst jobs I'll ever have, and its just for a little while. I would imagine the emotions are quite a bit different if you fully realize a cruddy job is the best job you'll ever get yet its still awful and there is utterly no chance of advancement (better off buying lotto tickets). This is also reminiscent of my experiences in the .mil, where spending my whole life doing that kind of stuff would have been pretty awful, but doing it as a kid for fun was OK.
I'd have to agree. The spec of a job can certainly lock one into certain unfavorable circumstances, even when it is an educated position. The odds are much about supply and demand which somewhat correlates with qualifications needed for the job -- like you said though, not always, just a trend of the actors in the system.
Spoken like a person of privilege, someone completely out of touch with the challenges of the poor.
Have you considered that low wage workers may be too exhausted after working two and three jobs a day to engage in "class warfare"? They worry about meeting basic needs for their families like rent and paying for medicines. Their war is survival.
Please, step out of your ivory tower and help them.
But places like Walmart and Amazon are exactly why unions should exist, to counterbalance the inhumane over-optimization and maltreatment of people.
Amazon could probably make work less toxic by hiring 10% more people, but that would make things cost a few cents more.