https://www.foxbusiness.com/technolo...-water-bottles
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Where do they shit?
I thought they use gallon water jugs
I work at an Amazon facility and am honestly confused why anyone in a facility would feel the need to pee in a bottle, as I've never been more than maybe a 3-4 minute walk from a bathroom? The only time saved from using a bottle is the walking to-and-from time, since it's not as though you can keep working while peeing anyway. My rate has dropped a few times from taking an urgent bathroom run between breaks/lunch, but nothing that I couldn't recover from. But reading about the rural routes that drivers can end up on, I can see how they would be in a bad position if they needed a bathroom break. Also agree that dash cameras in work trucks suck - my ambulance company had those and would write people up for the dumbest things. They would say that they were "motion activated" and only reviewed for "safety violations" but then we would get a talking-to for things that had nothing to do with safety violations, so they were obviously just spying on us.
Totally agree on the haphazard management! Too many managers, not enough communication or agreement among them. Kinda disagree on the PTO complaint though. It's true that we're warned not to go throwing away our PTO because if we have an emergency, we won't have it, but like... that's fair warning? We get both paid "PTO" and what's called "UPT" or unpaid time off. We can use either of these literally whenever we want, for any reason, even in the middle of a shift (so I don't understand why he would get in trouble for leaving early?). It's only vacation time that needs to be approved ahead of time. That freedom is awesome, but can be really easy to take advantage of, especially since we actually accrue a lot of this time off. If you start leaving work early or skipping shifts whenever you feel like it, because it's so easy to use your time off, if a true emergency does comes up... if you don't have any left and go negative, you're terminated. Like I said, we get a ton of it (80 hours of UPT/40-80+ hours of PT/20-40 hours of vacation per year), so using it all up out of don't-give-a-fuckness (which I have absolutely done, not gonna lie lol) really isn't a valid reason to not have any to cover an emergency. We know when our PTO resets and when we get more hours of UPT throughout the year, so it's pretty easy to time when you can start using up time off before you get more of it - I don't think it's necessarily "discouraging" people from using it. Everyone definitely still does. You just have to be smart about it.
All in all, I have complaints about Amazon, but I haven't seen a lot of what the sensational news articles showcase in terms of horrible working conditions. My theory is that, like any national chain corporation, a lot depends on the exact location and who runs it. I used to work for a national ambulance company. Some people at some stations in some states LOVE the company. And others, like in mine, hate it with a passion. It's completely dependent on how they run things. I have a feeling Amazon is like that. And I got lucky to get a fairly good one. I've gotten the occasional talking-to about my rate when I legitimately had issues, and it always got resolved with an honest talk about why I was moving so slow that day. But overall, our bottom-level rates aren't terribly difficult to hit. The people I've seen have continuous issues, I also catch literally sleeping on carts in the middle of aisles... so... But again, I can't speak for delivery drivers. The fact that he was targeted for robbery during the holidays scares the fuck out of me. I never thought about that, but it makes sense.