Maybe someone already posted it and I missed it, but here is the original complaint. Pretty awful, including drivers having to crap into bags in the van. And drivers getting reprimanded for using bathrooms at the wrong time or location when they needed menstrual sanitary products..
If drivers are paid by the route, then why not just not time the route? If one driver does a route in 10 hours, and another (who takes more breaks) does an equivalent route in 11 hours, they’re still doing equivalent amounts of work.
I’m not sure what you’re saying. Employees expect to be paid for the time they work.
Piecework is a valid basis for pay. Hourly is another.
But unless the productivity standard is regulated, there’s nothing to prevent them from putting 13 hours of packages and driving on the truck and telling the worker it’s a 10 hour job.
Piecework isn’t employee work, is it?
I don’t know, but I doubt it. Might well be legal someplace in the USA.
1099 contractors it’s OK. Gig workers too.
I guess I’m not following what’s being said, then. If they’re not employees and are gig workers, then they can take bathroom breaks whenever they want. Maybe we’re agreeing?
I don’t know exactly for Amazon DSP drivers, but I believe for the Flex drivers, the quality of the route they get, and whether they get called at all, can depend on how fast they’ve worked prior routes. Too slow, and you might not get an early choice of routes, and are left with unprofitable ones, which you might not even bother to take.
Think of it like passing on getting a ride with a 2 star Uber driver.
In all of this, a very important thing to remember is that Amazon is highly optimized on routing around and through labor laws to get the maximum amount of work for the least amount of pay. (Sure, all employers do this to some degree, but the decline of unions means this has greatly increased in the last 50 years, and Amazon is at the forefront of worker exploitation.)
My guess is that most owners won’t care about 2-3 delivery drivers a day using their restrooms - the issue would be how to keep a hundred other non-customers a day from using their restrooms. I worked at a fast food restaurant on a busy street near a subway station and a few bus stops - within six months we had to lock the restrooms to restrict them to customers only because so many non-cutomers came in. Which means that it takes up an employee’s time to let delivery drivers in. Also , depending on the jurisdiction, there may be few restaurants that are required to have restrooms for patrons to begin with For example, in NYC , only restaurants with more than 20 seats that opened after 1977 are required to provide restrooms for customers. ( I can’t figure out if it depends on that particular restaurant opening after 1977, or if the relevant date is when the space was first used as a restaurant.) Customers are not permitted to walk through a kitchen or food preparation area to get to the restroom. ( which I’ve seen in other places) This means in my neighborhood there are about three places that are required to have customer restrooms - there’s a Wendy’s and a McDonald’s and I think one actual sit down . The rest is tiny places that mostly do takeout business, like pizzerias, Chinese restaurants and donut shops - none of them have more than 20 seats.
There’s a chance- but I don’t know that it’s a good chance. Does it pay well enough for a driver to be able to spend a few dollars every time they need a toilet?
Gas stations and convenience stores in my area almost never have restrooms. And Amazon drivers probably can’t do what I did when I had government jobs that required work in the field - I knew where every police station, firehouse and library was in my territory. When I had an office job we let people who were delivering to us use the restrooms of course and also the bus drivers whose route ended next to the building - but that’s not going to help the driver in a residential area. But I do have a couple odf ideas idea of what Amazon can do to help at least some drivers First, Amazon has pick-up locations at stores and they could make arrangements with those stores to let the drivers use the restroom. Second, they could give drivers a set area ( which I don’t think they currently do ) Because if Joe’s Hardware gets every Amazon delivery from the same driver they might feel more comfortable letting him use their restroom than someone they never saw before.
I’m surprised that so many people are willing to do this for a straight hourly rate, and not be paid for mileage.
I am currently reading this book, by an ad executive who lost his job during (but not because of) COVID, and he took a job with USPS because he needed the health insurance, having just been diagnosed with low-grade prostate cancer. It’s quite a colorful story.
I worked in a place, many years ago, that was not only piecework for most of the employees (the sewers) but they were union employees. Clothing manufacturing.
It took me way too long to realize that you meant people who sew rather than waste removal pipes.
I’ve been reading about Amazon delivery delivers in “independent” DSP locations and it’s really bad. Amazon exhibits a terrifying amount of control over the workers while denying them any of the benefits or labor protections of employees. They control the exact specs of the delivery vans, how they must be outfitted, including surveillance equipment to monitor employees at all times down to their eye movement. When it got out that drivers were pissing in bottles because they didn’t have time to use the bathroom, Amazon required DSP locations to search vehicles and fire offenders. Amazon also instructed said locations to fire employees who tried to unionize, which would be illegal but Amazon continues to hide behind this fig leaf that they aren’t the real employers because it’s all done through an app. So they can dictate literally everything the employee does but then claim they aren’t the employer.
It’s fucking obscene.
(If you want to be really pissed off at big tech companies for a long, long time, I highly recommend Corey Doctorow’s new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.)