There’s one in every group. :smack: 
This is a good point . . . these shit systems work because some percentage of the workforce is content enough being treated like shit, and/or believe in the system.
I have a friend who works for a major retailer who was recently relaying a story about how no one was allowed vacation or sick days on certain days of the year, no exceptions.
Take a sick day and get written up, and maybe fired. “We’ve even had people show up in their wedding outfits.”
Want to inspire me to put the minimum amount of effort into my job? Threaten to fire me if I take my wedding day off work.
But for some people, this just feels like “the way things are” I guess. “The man” makes rules, and you complain and gripe all you want, but “the man” is “the man” after all; what do you expect?
Again one of those true statements ------ but not quite. It isn’t a matter of liking it so much as not minding it. And accepting that any day you show up your badge may not work at the turnstile; that is how we’re usually told we’re fired. If you are doing it as a temporary gig or you are like me and doing it partly for a lark, cool beans! Our “vacancy” light is always on and you are welcome. If you need the check or are thinking in terms of a career it sucks. And for us peasants its a lot better than it is for the bosses. Our site, like most, has its track record of broken marriages and suicides and we’re just talking in 5 years. Ask someone again 20 years from now.
A few of us started joking about “Siberian Box Mines Local 419” and like all good jokes there is a grain of truth in it. It is a lot like the stories Grampap told about the hard-coal operations when he first got here. Heck, some people would say even with the unions and all there are times like that today. Why didn’t he find another place to work? It was convenient, it fit his life, and while he didn’t like it much he didn’t hate it either. Its much the same with some of us.
I wish we had one of our “camper patrols” on the Dope. These are retired folks who basically traveling from place to place and working at the Local Jungle while there. Heck, they have even made up their own songs about the experience. They are always careful not to spread them much; the talking to media is what will probably get the strikers canned. But they do OK and have a little fun along with the work.
And I guess that brings another point I never really thought of; us old folks tend to tolerate it more than the kids do. Not just the abuse but also the work. We’re more willing to do it as we’re told and not how we think it should be done. From basics like how to pick up a box to big things like which one to pick up and what to do with it. I tell you with a certain pride that I can outwork people a third my age and do so on a daily basis. I don’t think I could say the same thing on a ditch crew or replacing roofs. But here? Damn betcha! And there is some value in that to me even as a 60-something academic.
It’s Amazon. Don’t the robots start beeping or buzzing loudly and angrily if they become idle because their carbon-based inter-blob isn’t processing orders fast enough?
This is not OK. Not in any way shape or form. This is the kind of shit that made unions so important. Tolerating or justifying this type of environment is the kind of brainwashed shit that leads to black lung and mass deaths in fires.
Taking “pride” in being able to tolerate this. Happily comparing it to boot camp. You’re part of the problem. When your coworker commits suicide because he’s not doing the job “on a lark”, he needs it to survive. If you can barely meet the minimum quota when everything, including things outside you control, go perfect, and your coworker has some bad luck that leads to him totally giving up on life…that’s just the way things are?
Seriously man, this is fucking sick.
This is B-school tripe. 80% of white collar jobs have no “incentive” programs using your definition and they tend to excel and retain people. Motivation is always, always better than short term incentives. Anyone that tells you different should give back their degree because they learned the wrong lesson.
Sounds terrible.
Amazon’s system is rather ingenious. About a dozen years ago there was a company called Kiva that invented a system where all the products were stored on portable shelving units, and robots like little footstools would pick up the shelves and bring them to the pickers. So, rather than walk around a warehouse grabbing things and putting them on a cart, a picker would stand still and just grab things off the shelves as they passed by his station. Amazon was one of the retailers who bought that system from Kiva. They liked it so much they bought the whole company, stopped selling it to their competitors, and renamed it Amazon Robotics.
I work with at least a dozen ex-Kiva and AR folks.
And dogs and cats living together and the end of civilization as we know it. Yeah, I’ve heard it all before. And the difference between this and the average small business or dysfunctional-family operated business is what exactly? Other than number of employees? Heck - I can name a dozen people who work for their families, not totally by choice, who would tell you Da Jungle is indeed a lark. Some of our best leadership arrived with the company for just that reason. And unions themselves can be snake pits; ask anyone who was around FASH or the USW in the 70s. Heck, dig up Jimmy Hoffa and ask him.
Like our sites, a place is only as good or bad as the people in charge and the side benefit with us is that list is ever changing.
No offense, but you kind of sound a bit like a “battered housewife” in your posts.
There is a difference between working in an environment that is highly competitive and stressful because that is the nature of the work and one that is abusive to its employees.
The Marines create a challenging environment because they have an important and potentially highly dangerous mission defending our country and enforcing US foreign policy overseas. It sounds like you are just moving boxes around some distribution center so…what? People get their packages a bit faster?
A lot of companies apply similar techniques used by the military and religious cults to create environments that are often abusive to their employees. Early in my career, I worked at a technology consulting firm that was very cult like. They were actually quite upfront about it. We were issued business books on creating a “cult-like culture” and told how they want people to “drink the cool aid”.
It’s pretty simple really. You create an environment where people feel like they are lucky just to be there (tell them they are changing the world or some such shit). You set absurdly high expectations and celebrate people who go above and beyond to achieve them. But here’s the creepy part. The more you can do to isolate the employees from the outside world, the better. “Perks” like free food, expensed meals, dry cleaning service, sleep pods, lots of team events outside of normal business hours, anything that removes outside distractions. Then you actively discourage outside activities like marriage, kids, getting a haircut on your lunch break on a Saturday. You isolate the employees and let peer pressure do most of the work. Eventually it even creates this “esprit de corps” where employees will celebrate how many all nighters they pulled or weekends worked.
None taken. I’m more an observer of human behavior. Trained by the late Dr James Holland as a matter of fact a few epochs ago. Yeah, I could kill time almost anywhere ------ but this place is more fascinating in terms of behaviorism than Walden II. I don’t see any real touches on Skinnerism but it has some of the same goals.
As for importance – another time and place and we could debate that. We (me and my fellow workers) do now and then over beers. For people in rural and/or isolated situations Da Jungle has brought in some of the biggest changes since the development of the mail-order catalogue in general. It is the Anything Store - from porn and anal lube to inflatable kayaks (this PDs large seller from what I saw) and groceries all under one banner from someone who tries sometimes to actually deserve your trust. When we fold (and someday it will happen) it will probably be an even bigger ripple than the brick-and-mortar places closing.
As for the rest I got a few more 12 hour days left to do and we’re drifting. So I’ll see you again in a future thread.
I see. So in your world sales is not a white collar job? And no one in your white collar world gets rewarded for meeting internal and/or external Service Level Agreements? Those are just 2 quick examples I can think of that disprove your assertion.
I think it’s a difference between creating a long-term culture of high achievement vs short term rewards for measurable successes. The problem with any short term incentive is that a) it tends to reward people for just doing their job and b) it tends to create unintended consequences as people adapt their behavior to maximize the reward. For example, paying QA engineers by the defect found is a great way to introduce a lot of defects.
Another way to think of it is this - would you be more willing to work long hours if you felt that the work you are doing is interesting and important or if you get a token bonus and a Starbucks card for your overtime?
Make it profit share. No motivator like skin in the game.
Which is why I said, in my first post in this thread, “First of all, make sure that the behaviors your are incenting are those that drive the success of the business”. It boggles my mind how many businesses incent behaviors that don’t drive the success of the business and, in many cases, actually end up being reverse incentives that damage the business.
Sales is the 20%. And no, the only rewards most employees get are salaries and if you’re lucky revenue sharing in the form of options or bonuses, things which are part of the normal comp. In fact, based on your definitions most sales folks don’t get “incentives” either since their comp model is basically their normal, albeit variable, salary. Spiffs, which you call incentives, are not used all that often except for with very entry-level positions like biz dev and support call centers. Companies that pay highly competitive salaries are certainly not giving out pizza parties, gift cards and parking spots for short term objectives, skilled workers are too valuable and hard to replace to risk burnout for short sighted shit like that.
We obviously work in different worlds. All of the sales people I work with have incentives built in to their jobs. And bonuses are NOT part of “normal comp”. In fact, in most cases bonuses fall into 2 categories - STIP and LTIP. STIP is Short Term Incentive Plan and is usually based on annual, company wide goals. LTIP is Long Term Incentive Plan and is based on 5-10 year goals. STIP and LTIP are not guaranteed, they are truly incentives based on how well the company does. Have a bad year, no one gets a STIP bonus, have a great year and everyone gets the max.
ETA: STIP and LTIP are not generally used in sales organizations. Their incentives are usually based on sales goals and are usually monthly or quarterly. STIP and LTIP are unusually for white collar managers.
Systems like these are a fun optimization problem. I like the Kiva robot solution (in the “goods to man” category), but it’s interesting to analyze the pros and cons of these types of solutions.
Some good things:
Picking walk distance is eliminated (which is wasted money)
Small incremental cost (can add robots individually)
Physical arrangement is more flexible (easier to adjust) than conveyor systems or sorters+asrs’s (see below)
Some challenges:
Seasonal variation in volumes (e.g. xmas peak volumes) means that you need to invest in enough capacity (robots) to meet peak demand, which means you have a much larger investment in robots than is required for most of the year. With humans you can flex by adding temp workers.
Here’s another solution in this same category, it’s called an ASRS system and brings the units to humans on the exterior of the system where they pick the units and then it returns the remaining items. In the installed versions I’ve seen it’s a huge self contained box with humans at stations on the outside where the goods show up out of a tunnel and then return inside:
This has a similar problem as the robot (or any fully automated portion of a system), you need to buy enough capacity to meet peak demands, which means most of the capacity is idle until xmas.
Kiva (now Amazon) systems have a small incremental cost to add capacity, but a big startup cost to get the systems installed and running in the first place. When Amazon made that technology exclusive to their own distribution centers, it opened a market for robotic picking systems at non-Amazon sites. That’s who I work for now; we make warehouse/picking robots, although quite different from the way Amazon’s work.
We do have discussions about how difficult the jobs in distribution centers are. There’s not a lot we do in terms of offering incentives, but we hope that we make the jobs a bit better, at least.
It sounds like people need appropriate bathroom break time, but it sounds monstrous to tell people that they only get sufficient bathroom breaks as a reward for performance.
Another employee complaint is unpredictable schedules. They could reward their highest performers with a set schedule for a week or two.
That’s just intellectual spitballing; in reality I think Amazon needs to be incentivized to allow their employees latitude to eat, drink, take a piss, and have predictable shifts for 2-4 weeks at a time. My incentive would be to do that or go to jail until you figure out how to do it.