NYSUT AMAZON GIFT CARD

This came in the mail today.

NYSUT is now accepting gifts for its members from Amazon, an anti-worker, anti-union company. This is a bit strange to me.

From the UK:

Amazon warehouse workers are forced to pee in bottles or forego their bathroom breaks entirely because fulfillment demands are too high, according to journalist James Bloodworth, who went undercover as an Amazon worker for his book, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. Targets have reportedly increased exponentially, workers say in a new survey revealed over the weekend, and as result, they feel pressured and stressed to meet the new goals.

Workers who pick up products for delivery at a warehouse in Staffordshire, UK use bottles instead of the actual toilet, which is located too far away, Bloodworth reported.

Here is an excerpt from a story from the Atlantic of a driver who worked Flex delivery for Amazon in the US.

There I was, wearing a bright-yellow safety vest and working for Amazon Flex, a program in which the e-commerce giant pays regular people to deliver packages from their own vehicles for $18 to $25 an hour, before expenses. I was racing to make the deliveries before I got a ticket—there are few places for drivers without commercial vehicles to park in downtown San Francisco during the day—and also battling a growing rage as I lugged parcels to offices of tech companies that offered free food and impressive salaries to their employees, who seemed to spend their days ordering stuff online. Technology was allowing these people a good life, but it was just making me stressed and cranky.

“NOT. A. GOOD. DEAL,” I scrawled in my notebook, after having walked down nine flights of stairs, sick of waiting for a freight elevator that may or may not have been broken, and returned to my car for another armful of packages.

Welcome to the future of package delivery. As people shop more online, companies like Amazon are turning to independent contractors—essentially anyone with a car—to drop parcels at homes and businesses. Flex is necessary because Amazon is growing so quickly—the company shipped 5 billion Prime items last year—that it can’t just rely on FedEx, UPS, and the Postal Service. Flex takes care of “last mile” deliveries, the most complicated part of getting goods from where they’re made to your doorstep. It also allows Amazon to meet increases in demand during the holiday season, Prime Day, and other busy times of the year, a spokeswoman told me in an email.

But Flex operates year-round, not just during the holiday season, which suggests there’s another reason for it: It’s cheap. As the larger trucking industry has discovered over the past decade, using independent contractors rather than unionized drivers saves money, because so many expenses are borne by the drivers, rather than the company.

Amazon has rolled out Flex in more than 50 cities, including New York; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Memphis, Tennessee. The company doesn’t share information about how many drivers it has, but one Seattle economist calculated that 11,262 individuals drove for Flex in California between October 2016 and March 2017, based on information Amazon shared with him to help the company defend a lawsuit about Flex drivers.

On the surface, these jobs, like many others in the gig economy, seem like a good deal. But Flex workers get no health insurance or pension, and are not guaranteed a certain number of hours or shifts a week. They are not covered by basic labor protections like minimum wage and overtime pay, and they don’t get unemployment benefits if they suddenly can’t work anymore. And when workers calculate how much they’re pulling in on a daily basis, they often don’t account for the expenses that they’ll incur doing these jobs. “A lot of these gig-type services essentially rely on people not doing the math on what it actually costs you,” Sucharita Kodali, a Forrester analyst who covers e-commerce, told me.

One Amazon Flex driver in Cleveland, Chris Miller, 63, told me that though he makes $18 an hour, he spends about 40 cents per mile he drives on expenses like gas and car repairs. He bought his car, used, with 40,000 miles on it. It now has 140,000, after driving for Flex for seven months, and Uber and Lyft before that. That means he’s incurred about $40,000 in expenses—things he didn’t think about initially, like changing the oil more frequently and replacing headlights and taillights. He made slightly less than $10 an hour driving for Uber, he told me, once he factored in these expenses; Flex pays a bit better.

A little of Amazon's anti-union record from 2014 is here.

Currently, Amazon's tactics are a big issue in the debate over the UPS unionized worker contract proposal which would create a lower tiered classification of UPS drivers in part due to competition from Amazon's new Flex delivery service.

Here is an excerpt from a piece from Huff Post on the discussion within the UPS Teamsters who are debating their contract proposal from UPS:

As parcel delivery booms, plenty of delivery companies are willing to undercut traditional operators like UPS and FedEx. Amazon, for one, relies on little-known, non-union couriers that require drivers to deliver out of their own vans for low wages and no benefits. The company is also expanding its use of Amazon Flex, a delivery service that, like Uber, relies on independent contractors with personal vehicles. These drivers take on all the costs of doing business that an employer would normally bear.

In other words, our thirst for next-day and same-day delivery is already devaluing the job of a driver. The question is how long the Teamsters can maintain the relatively high industry standards they’ve set for decades through UPS contracts. 

Here is part of a story on the white collar workers at Amazon.

While shopping on Amazon may be a warm and amiable breeze, working for Amazon is an endless and excruciating violent tempest, according to a New York Times report on conditions among the company’s beleaguered white-collar employees. The Times investigation, based on interviews with scores of professional-level workers, depicts a totalizing, overbearing workplace in which members of every department are under constant surveillance and evaluation, pitted against one another in an endless lethal endurance match.

Amazon’s demands are brutal even by tech industry standards. Where working hours are concerned, 80 is the new 40. The emails roll in well past midnight, followed by the texts asking why the emails haven’t been answered. Employees are required to make constant sacrifices to the needs of the company, with weekends and vacations regularly demanded as offerings. The company shows no mercy even in extreme cases: an employee with breast cancer was told she would be fired because her “personal life” was interfering with her duties, and another who had just given birth to a stillborn child was put on a “performance improvement plan” for her insufficient job devotion. The end result has been a state of almost-universal trauma, with one person sadly relaying that “nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

But one word is noticeably absent from the whole of the Times’s inquiry into the company’s insidious practices: union. None of the workers speak of the possibility of unionization, and the Times reporters don’t appear to have asked about it. While there are near-universal reports of misery and exploitation, quitting is the only remedy anyone can seem to come up with.

Maybe I would be better off not looking this gift horse in the mouth but shouldn't we be looking to do promotions with companies that are pro-union? There must be some out there. 

Are NYSUT Walmart gift cards next?