Amazon Accused Of “Intolerable Conditions” At Scottish Warehouse

Megalith

Megalith

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Now we’ve got complaints of how Amazon employees are paid so little they live in tents to escape commute costs, and those who take sick days are getting punished. Former workers have complained of being worked like robots, with overtime being mandatory and holidays banned during busy months.

…tents near the site…were being lived in by Amazon workers. It said at least three tents were pitched close to the warehouse by the M90 in Dunfermline and that a man living in one of them had said he was an employee who usually lives in Perth. A Sunday Times investigation found that temporary workers at the warehouse were being penalised for taking time off sick and put under pressure to hit targets for picking orders. It also claimed that although workers could walk up to 10 miles a day doing their jobs, water dispensers were regularly empty.
 
Might explain why I ended up with a cooling fan after I bought and paid for an OCZ 400A 1TB, M.2 PCIe SSD. Had to fight with customer service to send me my SSD!
 
This is the company run by ultra-"progressive" Jeff Bezos right? The one who bought the Washington Post and assigned a 20 person team of reporters to bring down Trump, isn't that right?

Another member of the globalist elite who wants to see Americans work in conditions like the Chinese we're forced to compete with.
 
So not only do Big Tech Corps go to Ireland and surrounding countries to evade taxes, they get cheap labour as well. Didn't we just read in an article recently about how these tech companies empathize with their employees so well. http://theempathybusiness.co.uk/empathy-brand-index/ Facebook ranks No1 and Amazon ranks 84 out of 170.
 
GlowingGhoul said:
This is the company run by ultra-"progressive" Jeff Bezos right? The one who bought the Washington Post and assigned a 20 person team of reporters to bring down Trump, isn't that right?

Another member of the globalist elite who wants to see Americans work in conditions like the Chinese we're forced to compete with.
Click to expand...

I'm sure Trump will make it easier not harder, overtime pay is already off the table and the age of retirement is supposed to go up from 67 to 69 if all goes "well" last I read.

The opposition was due to other factors, but regardless, Amazon can't pull that abusive BS off as easily on the other continent, better keep those policies local.
 
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Workers are not Amazon, they are third party contract work....Again. The people in tents claimed to be workers, no proof was provided. They said nothing about being paid to little, only that they camped there to save on commute costs as the contractor they worked for provided a bus to work, but it had a fee. I work long hours, make good money, but I can spend it well past my means if I wanted to and end up living in a tent, it does not mean I am paid to little. Does this really count as journalism today?

Best part of the article is that workers were "put under pressure to hit targets for picking orders", sooo...You mean an employer has performance goals it wants people it is paying to meet? WOW! Color me shocked, how DARE they expect something like that from workers.

1. Make assumptions

2. Call contract labor from a 3rd party "Amazon employees"

3. Call performance expectations "intolerable working conditions"

4. State Amazon punishes for taking sick days, but then at the end state that it was actually "periods of absence" that were punished and not days off or sick days, periods of absence means no call no show.

5. Profit from click bait.
 
BlueFireIce said:
Workers are not Amazon, they are third party contract work....Again. The people in tents claimed to be workers, no proof was provided. They said nothing about being paid to little, only that they camped there to save on commute costs as the contractor they worked for provided a bus to work, but it had a fee. I work long hours, make good money, but I can spend it well past my means if I wanted to and end up living in a tent, it does not mean I am paid to little. Does this really count as journalism today?

Best part of the article is that workers were "put under pressure to hit targets for picking orders", sooo...You mean an employer has performance goals it wants people it is paying to meet? WOW! Color me shocked, how DARE they expect something like that from workers.

1. Make assumptions

2. Call contract labor from a 3rd party "Amazon employees"

3. Call performance expectations "intolerable working conditions"

4. State Amazon punishes for taking sick days, but then at the end state that it was actually "periods of absence" that were punished and not days off or sick days, periods of absence means no call no show.

5. Profit from click bait.
Click to expand...

100% agree..

Also like to say that here in the states there are places where if you call off you can be "punished" even if you have time, certain days you cannot call off baring extreme emergency and if you do you can be fired on the spot...

i'll make an assumption.. most of these workers are probably temp workers and if you boil it down, most are probably greatful to have jobs let alone sick days to go along with their temporary employment.


Complaining to complain
 
Sounds like the 7 years I worked retail. Nothing new. All the retail places did that, and for good reason: the work needed to get done because the holidays are the busiest time and the labor is cheap because anyone could do it and it doesn't require any special skills. Welcome to the human race. Of you want better treatment and pay, get better skills.
 
I walked up to 21 miles a day getting carts in a Walmart parking lot. I had plenty of water though.
 
Reminds me of working at activision. They hire a mass of testers at ten dollars an hour, then pay them time and half for anything over eight hours a day or over forty hours in a week, double time for over ten hours and over I think it was fifty hours a week. Your were not supposed to clock in early or late, and while we had two hundred extra people working the soda machines where switched to coin operated. I think they did that to cover the extra costs of more deliverers since the soda cans were not that expensive, and maybe to cut down on bathroom breaks. But when you have all those extra people half of them are not doing what they are supposed to, others are trying to get other people to do their work for them. I kept scratching my head I was getting paid to find problems with the game and people were getting bored playing, while being paid to play. The bug report forms were tedious to fill out correctly but you might play through a level twenty five or thirty times before you noticed something not quite right, then you would have to play through trying to figure out what caused it. I remember one time I found a hole in the building mesh or bounding box that I could call in the air strike on a boss inside the building. A lot of people said there is no way that happened. But my lead had me reproduce it and record it for the developers. Who laughed and fixed it.

The interesting thing is one if they are earning a living wage then it should cover the bus fare so that when you get there you are ready to work not being exhausted from walking through the cold. That said I have to agree they should have made sure they were even people who worked for amazon first. But really a fulliment center should be able to say you only earn money when you are there and you are late by a few minutes you don't get paid for not being there, you either work those extra minutes at the end if another shift is not coming on or your simply don't get paid for time not working. I understand if you need a set of hands to move the package from a truck loading ramp to place where it is stored and document where in a computer and on paper, then have another pair of hands move when the next truck comes to move it. If you don't have the warm bodies that can see what they are moving and use common sense to say it says package number 213423452394802 and number john smith and when they look at the package it has the right number but the package below has the right name to call a supervisor over to check the numbers from orders. That is something you simply have to pay a person to do but to keep costs down you can not pay those people that much. So the odds are they are wasting money by hiring people and working them too hard. It is smarter to train a person to get good at it, and simply pay them during down time or you are training your competition for free. A bean counter will ten you there is ten beans in the jar, an accountant will tell you there is ten beans in the jar where they came from how often you get new beans. They need to either train their bean counters better or get more of the second kind of money person. Hire people for the rush but you get them there you feed them a sticky bun or donut they have to wash their hands and dry them off no matter if they chose to before hand or not, and coffe or fountain soda. A little sugar and carbs, then start trusting them to think while working. Even if there are no mistake simply having even a fake mistake will drive the employees to feel if they are making a difference. Feeling warm and as if they are making a difference not that they are disposable cogs in the machine they will work harder and longer. Having food on site for lunch and using the messy food they end up washing their hands and wearing the cloth gloves while working the packages show less sign of wear and the employees are less likely to get dry paper cut hands. It is the little things that cost but by focusing on the goal that needs to happen not if you save a few cents here and there but use some common sense instead, you get more productivity from the same group of people. Work them twelve hours feed them before they go home and let them take left over home and make sure their is enough for left overs and it is minor increase in cost but you go from employees that are grumbling about paying a few dollars each way and getting sick and worn out to employees that line up at the bus stop to go to work and will do almost anything to avoid taking time off.

I really don't understand why more companies don't do this. The numbers and productivity always goes up when this is used. The only downside is people start expecting it as part of working there.
 
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