Amazon Contractors can't even sing in their cars now. Unions protect against this micromanagement.
Amazon Contractors can't even sing in their cars now. Unions protect against this micromanagement.
lol “our detection system can’t tell the difference between you talking on the phone and you singing so we need you to keep the data clean by not singing”
Fuuuuck you.
Amazon: "We encourage expediency in delivery, so please don't stop to use the restroom. Just piss in this bottle."
Also Amazon: "We need you to arrive promptly, but also we expect you to work late. The needs of the customers come first!"
Finally, Amazon: "You're tired, you're hungry, you desperately need to piss, but we've decided the biggest risk to your driving safety is your dramatic rendition of Shake It Off by Taylor Swift, as you try to get your mind off the horror of working this dead end job."
Human conform to our half thought, low bid robot Overseer.
Amazon's solution: install another microphone in the car so they can hear that you're singing instead of having a conversation!!
I love that the solution to their shit detection is to make sure that there is nothing to detect.
Hey US, how's it going?
Jesus fucking christ...
How does that freedom taste?
Tastes like a boot on our necks.
Freedom is the guns they dangle in front of their faces like carrots
The only way to actually get freedom is to aim at the owner class.
When we eating the rich? I'm pretty hungry.
Set the goddamn table!
After years of this sentiment being passed around online it's clear that shit isn't going to happen until we have a military draft/Vietnam War level incident. The pot is boiling too slowly for most of us to jump out. And even if we do try to organize a strike or civil disobedience, the government has gotten good at assasinating leaders that threaten the system.
Well if you're ordering food... I'd like to order one large Bezos with extra Musk, please. Wait, make that Buffet... no no, Gates. With Branson on half.
I'm sorry, that's too much mouth movement. You are now on probation.
You dont need to wait for everyone else to say grace, you can start now.
Just make sure you're either not driving or somehow learn how to eat without using your mouth.
Boof the rich
Never. Amazon institutes slavery-like conditions, while people keep taking those jobs voluntarily. The same people then buy into BS propaganda about unions bad, so they don't even have a union in that voluntarily concentration camp.
Some techies who work from home, or walk dogs for living, or take money from parents, or whatever, then constantly circle-jerk on lemmy/reddit/(formerly)twitter about how they'll eat the rich. While virtually doing absolutely utterly nothing.
So the answer is never.
[Btw, posting trump bad memes 5 times a day on a platform that probably votes dems 99.9% isn't doing anything]
You wanna know what it means to be doing something? Read Lenin's biography.
If you're not in exile like Snowden, not dead like Navalny, not rotting in prison like Assange, you're not doing enough.
Only when everyone will be ready to go to jail for their vision of the better tomorrow will they not be able to jail you individually and instead will have to change the system.
So, start a local riot group, prepare for two years, kidnap Bezos, sign him up as an Amazon contractor and with a gun pointed to his head make him work the job for 5 weeks.
In the meantime, I will be living in a functioning developed country with a democratically elected government that has long time ago instituted a minimum wage high enough for you to comfortably live off it. I don't need to eat the rich. I just wish less people would vote far right.
I love how the solution is to cram people into smaller and smaller boxes instead of just I dunno not monitoring your fucking drivers like they're fucking inmates in a maximum security prison you fascist-lite fucks
Edit: Good on 'em for quitting. Every single member of the population should refuse to work for these pricks until they get the goddamn message that we're adult fucking humans and we expect to be fucking well treated like it. The fact that some of us have the choice between kowtowing to this or starving is a stain on our society.
Double edit: "I hope you have to drive for Amazon in your retirement" might be a contender for the most horrible thing you could wish on someone in 2024.
You should almost never quit if you expect to be fired. Make them fire you and file for unemployment, then challenge them when they try to get out of it. The government tends to err on the side of the employee in my experience when things are unclear, and "We have a knowledge gap that prevents us from confirming whether or not you were actually violating policy, but you're fired anyway" is the kind of thing you can feel pretty confident challenging.
Make them fire you and file for unemployment, then challenge them when they try to get out of it.
I do not love the odds of a day laborer out maneuvering their professional claims denial behemoth in a court packed with pro-business Federalist Society flunkies.
Against some mom and pop porter service? Sure. But the odds of beating a company that vast and influential seems low.
not monitoring your fucking drivers like they're fucking inmates in a maximum security prison you fascist-lite fucks
Weren't you schooled in the US? Aint this exactly what they trained us for?
OBEY, PERFORM, DON'T ASK QUESTIONS OR ELSE
we’re adult fucking humans and we expect to be fucking well treated like it
Sounds expensive. You're going to hurt company profits with that attitude. Five Demerits on your Social Credit Score.
Communist totalitarianism is wonderful and good and as American as apple pie as long as it's corporations doing it not governments.
I love driving. I've had delivery jobs and I really enjoyed them. There is absolutely no fucking way I'm working for anyone that has a fucking camera pointed at me. That is some fucking bullshit. I can't believe anyone works for that shit hole company and puts up with that garbage. No camera, no microphone. I'll do my job. If you don't trust me to do my job, then it's best for the both of us I'm not there.
I understand needing a job. I've been there. Don't put up with that bullshit, unionize, or find something else. There's jobs out there much better.
On a side note, If you drove holding the steering wheel with your middle fingers out, what kind of punishment would that be?
I've got a camera in my work truck. I hate it but I can't make this much money anywhere else. I was actually sent for a drug and alcohol test a few weeks ago because I kept dozing off while I was sitting in the truck on break. I passed because I was nice and charming to the young girl giving the test. The only thing I popped on was weed anyway.
The reason I was nodding off in the truck is I was fucking exhausted from making them a shitload of money.
Hey we noticed after 12 hours in the heat you seem tired. Must be drugs.
I passed because I was nice and charming to the young girl giving the test.
I'm confused. Either you passed the urinalysis because there was nothing in your system (except weed, which they apparently don't care about), or because you somehow convinced the technician to fudge the numbers of a medical test? If it's the latter then wow, that's a lot of charisma...
On a side note, If you drove holding the steering wheel with your middle fingers out, what kind of punishment would that be?
Believe it or not, straight to jail.
We have the best deliveries. Because of jail.
This is on a different similar note. I work for a big hardware store that isnt home depot. My job trusts me enough to take home keys to the store, and drive a 10 thousand pound forklift whenever I want, but I have to use the worst safety box opener I've ever seen. Makes me so mad because it just doesn't work half the time.
They've got a lot more resolve than I do. I'd have walked out long before this point, but had I been told that before going out on my run, I would have literally walked out there and then.
I've walked out of jobs for less.
I'd have walked out long before this point
If the driver put up with everything until this point, then they probabbly didn't have a lot of better options. It's easy enough to say stuff like this, but not everyone has the freedom to quit when unemployment means your family goes back to the foodbank or moves into the car.
It's not necessarily a lack of options, it's also about the inertia of having the job and getting over the hump of deciding to look elsewhere. You know you can get another job, but doing that is work, so you have to decide if the BS of the current job is enough to warrant the effort of finding a new place.
Oh no, the camera lens broke! Oh well 🤷♂️
Seriously though, as a software engineer, this is some grade A USDA choice bullshit. The solution isn’t “don’t move your mouth”. The solution is fix the fucking ML training set.
No, the solution is to throw all that machine vision micro-managing shit away. It belongs in the factory sorting goods.
Well, yeah, but I’m not here to do an RCA - I’m just calling out the fact that they’re treating the symptom, but it’s the wrong symptom that’s being treated.
Exactly! In fact ENCOURAGE singing to get a better data set for fixing the software!
If you want a robot then hire a robot!
We're trying. We aren't quite there yet. Just keep suffering for a feeew more years, then you won't have to worry about our micromanaging.
Uber's (and all the rest of the Silicon Valley illegal taxi racket) entire business model is "exploit humans until we invent Johnnycabs"
I think the only thing keeping them from going full auto right now is that humans keep accepting shittier and shittier conditions in order to keep the robopocalypse at bay.
I don't really like automated cars because I don't think they're safe, either for the passengers (who have at least accepted what they're getting into) or pedestrians (who have not), but I don't think that's ever slowed the "march of progress" before now.
They're safer than humans already. It's just you hear about every robocar crash because they're unusual, and every time one happens, the whole industry learns from it. With humans driving, it's doubtful the people involved learn from a crash, let alone anyone else, we just accept it as inevitable.
Don't forget about the people in all of the other cars on the road. For example, Tesla's have repeatedly plowed into stationary emergency vehicles.
Robot originally meaning "slave (free) labor"
They really do want them, humans are just still better at generalized tasks and finding new work for themselves but gosh darn are they gonna make us compete with to get as close to the first use of the word Robot and be unemotional perfect workers with no concept of self preservation until it can't be taken anymore.
Original Czech word "robota" refers to forced labor done by serfs. Not slaves per se. Here's a short read about the original play that introduced the term as we know it.
This is absolutely terrible and definitely feels like an invasion of, idk, being a human?! But with that said, even though people find out stuff like this happens to drivers and workers, they still enable it by ordering from Amazon because of convenience.
Until we can pull away on our reliance on these services, the companies are just gonna keep crossing more and more lines because they know they’re getting away with it with their customers.
Until we can make crossing those lines painful for those companies, they'll keep doing it. Unfortunately, I think convenience is always going to beat morality if you leave it to "voting with your dollar", we need actual regulations from our governments to combat this shit.
It's just that most people just genuinely don't care enough about what's happening to other people enough to do anything beyond just saying that Amazon is bad. On top of that as Amazon starts to drive other stores out of business it does start to slowly become the only choice for getting certain things. So with those two combined expecting personal consumer choice to really make a difference is not realistic, this is the kind of thing that needs the government to intervene on to force Amazon to unionize and to potentially break it up like is being discussed with Google.
Yeah, we should totally stop eating to show the grocery stores they can’t control their employees. /s
It might open an unwanted can of worms but maybe the drivers could claim they aren't
signingsinging along to the radio but are vocalizing actions like Japanese train operators to ensure focus and safety.Edit: I saw the sing and it opened up my eyes
claim they aren't signing along to the radio
I mean...if they're signing along to the radio, I'd say that's really dangerous and needs to be cracked down on! Can't sign sign language with both hands on the wheel after all!
Singing should be absolutely fine though.
It's safe to sign while driving but only if you're blind.
Soon to be followed by getting a write-up for breaking down crying in your vehicle due to stress and shitty wages.
It's good that Amazon is not dominant in Poland.
It's not dominant here in Estonia either, but neither is there a clear alternative. But maybe that's a good thing, you can still order your things from different online retailers rather than relying on just one
Also here in Europe our labour protection is slightly better than in the US.
So Amazon wouldn't get away with this shit as easily. I'm not saying they wouldn't, but it'd be harder.
Allegro really is much better for many things. I find myself using it much more than Amazon nowadays.
Can't restricting mouth movements be seen as a restriction on speech and people's right to talk about and form a union?
It depends on what it says when they run the video through a lip reading program.
Why spend all the money union busting then do shit like this. Won't this just starts another round of unionization?
I know it's not the point, but what happens if you wear a mask? Either a cloth mask, or a Michael Myers mask. They'll probably think "wow, this guy isn't distracted at all! employee of the month!"
Not even blinking, this guy is locked in
This gave me a genuine chuckle
Just tape a nice picture of you really focusing on the road to the camera.
Now you can even drive around hookers or be a getaway driver during a bank heist.
Welcome to the new norm, within 10 years every worker will be on camera full shift.
But we're too busy stopping literal fascism and nearly every GOP-packed court will uphold it as perfectly fine and normal for everyone making less than 150k a year.
That's one reason I'm glad to work in a local public service position. They will never have the money to implement such a system, let alone be able to pay anyone to maintain or monitor it. They can barely keep the wifi working.
But we’re too busy stopping literal fascism and nearly every GOP-packed court will uphold it as perfectly fine and normal for everyone making less than 150k a year.
"Bread and circuses"
Don’t see this happening everywhere. This is being done to save themselves from liability in an accident. They don’t have cameras watching their warehouse workers although they have rules like no earphones are allowed which are typical for safety in a warehouse or plant. I worked as an Amazon driver for a month. Everything they do or say is to cover their ass from getting sued.
They don’t have cameras watching their warehouse workers
Uhh, you sure about that?
Introduced during COVID and as far as I'm aware most never went away. Especially in warehouses at risk of unionizing.
No, it isn't. If it was just for liability, they wouldn't have to care what the driver did until someone filed an accident report or other complaint.
This is about crappy software that COULD be improved, but it is cheaper to threaten thousands of people with punishment for singing than it is to pay programmers to refine their 'distracted'-pattern recognition.
I have a drive cam for work that dies something similar. While they don't ding us for singing, they will for everything else like us scratching our ear because it thinks there's an earpiece and we can't have any electronic devices including GPS. But the camera screaming "FOLLOWING DISTANCE" every time we get cut off or a car 3 semi truck lengths away in 25 taps their brakes and forcing us to slam the brakes so we don't get written up is perfectly safe.
We were so preoccupied with whether capitalism would replace us with robots, we didn't stop to think if it would turn us into robots.
Maybe we should be trying to replace managers and execs with robots.
Oh. That's basically what this is. Your boss is a machine, and the machines boss is a human that fires you when your machine boss tattles on you for slacking, or if it suspects you're slacking.
Yeah singing is terrible for driving... It's much better to be bored to sleep
Wear a mask
No. Fight these assholes passing these policies just so they can save a few pennies on insurance.
Wear a mask printed with your own face.
"You really think you can tell me what I can do with my body?"
REPUBLICAN PARTY has entered the chat...
But the singing is how I distract myself from not having a pee break for 12 hours and my old soda bottle is almost full so I can't afford to take another piss
I wonder if anyone has ever calculated how much a driver makes per delivery. Like if I buy a pizza, the delivery guy gets like $3 from wages if they make minimum wage and then whatever I tip. I’d be shocked if an amazon driver makes even a dollar per delivery, and some (majority?) of the deliveries are much more expensive than one pizza
its much more efficient than pizza delivery though so not really a good comparison.
wears a face mask
I pray for the downfall of Amazon.
It amazes me how they go great lengths to piss off both consumers and their workers to maximize profits
Why? Theyre making gobs of money anyway. How many people car? Everyone keeps using it anyway. Just good business at this point
They are the size of a world power, and they have their hands in everything. They're not falling any time soon.
The National Labor Relations Board recently ruled that Amazon was illegally blocking delivery workers from unionizing. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/08/labor-board-confirms-amazon-drivers-are-employees-in-finding-hailed-by-union/
"What? No I wasn't singing, I just kept saying "FUCK YOU BEZOS" during my trips"
Jeff Bezos hasn't been CEO of Amazon for a few years. Now it's that bland twat Andy Jassy, who has all of the fascism but none of the intelligence of his predecessor.
I recall several cases of "copyright infringement" that this reminds me of.
One case was an auto-shop that was just playing music on their stereo system or whatever
another case was an elderly couple that liked to sing songs together
we really have to get the DMCA under control. it does way more harm than good
Amen. If we could get a community against this going, it would be a first step. Would you like to help with such a thing. Lets be the change we want to see.
Jfc.
I'll add this to the "normal in America, totally illegal in the rest of the western world" list
Definitely not normal in the US, either.
I bet this is monitored by AI software
Wow. This is some Orwellian nightmare fuel. I can see this becoming a thing in a lot of places if this is allowed
Oh man...I want labor to have a massive comeback so soon, absolutely put the screws to the corpo scum.
My nasal passages aren't properly developed or something so I have to regularly breathe through my mouth. Wonder if anyone can use that, a medical disorder, to sue after being fired.
Amazon is trying to be the government
I refuse to believe that Amazon is real anymore.
I'm going to wager this was implemented to keep drivers from talking on the phone all day and because it's using machine vision it doesn't know the difference.
Exactly what I was thinking. I wish I was an extrovert. I enjoy the occasional phone call but mostly I just wish I could hang up, even with friends.
My main USPS worker talks on the phone at all times. I see her every weekend and she is NEVER not excitedly or angrily talking on her earbuds. I bet it makes work a lot better for her but holy shit who can just talk on the phone literally all day long.
Slight clarification to the headline: it's not the employee's cars they can't sing in, it's Amazon's.
Not that it makes it better, but my first thought was, "how would they know...?"
Aren't the trucks independently owned, and contracted to Amazon?
They've been claiming that, but the NLRB recently found that drivers are employees and able to join the Teamsters.
This reminds me of that scene in the matrix.
Does your employer reallly have the right to fire you because you sing in his car ? Is it legal in the US ?
Everything is legal in the usa for corporations and the rich. Just a little itsy fine to pay and then you never hear about it again, even though they don't stop
Amazon is committing terrorism against themselves.
I mean Amazon started it's driving program to undercut UPS -A union shop. How is this not just scabs getting their comeuppance?
Did you really just blame the drivers for this?
The non-union drivers in cooperation with Amazon* actively undermined another established union. Sure, yeah. I'd say until they organize or shut-down, they can share some of the blame.
There is no game-changing paradigm shift to Amazons delivery driver business model. It was always simply to undercut an established middle-man that already had unionized. It's just deregulation & union-busting with an extra degree of separation. It's disappointing that so many laborers don't recognize this.
While none of us here can say for sure, I wonder if this is more forced by Amazon's fleet insurer raising rates rather than an evil directly from Amazon just because they can.
Amazon has roughly 30,000+ delivery vehicles. I don't know their accident rate. But any injury or accident lawyer can tell you that listening to music and singing and generally be-bopping down the road IS distracted driving. This will cause larger payouts per accident and also higher insurance rates. And it's low hanging fruit to go after in court. If Amazon is noticing the extra cost becoming an issue, it could well be the reason for such a draconian policy.
I'm not sayin'. I'm just sayin' it could be a driver, (pun intended), in this instance.
A company having a policy because "the insurance company makes us" is no less evil than the insurance company.
I wish I can upvotes a million times because that deflection is how we got into this evil.
That's not how insurance works. They monitor average speed, acceleration, and braking, if anything. There's no correlation between mouth movement and accidents. What if someone is chewing gum? What about adjusting dentures? What about drinking coffee while parked?
Show me an actuarial table that includes "mouth movement" as a variable or admit this is just a middle manager trying something stupid.
