Amazon drivers poop in bags and pee in bottles

[The Larch]

Even more reasons to stop making Bezos richer and richer.

Leaked memo shows Amazon knows delivery drivers resort to urinating in bottles
Documents provided to the Intercept published after the company denied reports delivery workers lack access to bathrooms

Amazon caused an uproar on Thursday when it denied reports that its delivery workers have been forced to urinate in bottles due to lack of access to bathrooms, but a leaked internal memo shows the company has been aware of the problem for at least several months.

Documents provided by employees at Amazon to the Intercept showed that an email sent in May 2020 admonished workers for urinating in bottles and defecating in bags while on the job.

"This evening, an associate discovered human feces in an Amazon bag that was returned to station by a driver," the email reads. "This is the 3rd occasion in the last 2 months when bags have been returned to station with poop inside. We understand that DA's [driver associates] may have emergencies while on-road, and especially during Covid, DAs have struggled to find bathrooms while delivering. Regardless, DAs cannot, MUST NOT, return bags to station with poop inside."

The email went on to say: "We've noticed an uptick recently of all kinds of unsanitary garbage being left inside bags: used masks, gloves, bottles of urine."

Workers told the Intercept the issue was commonly referred to in internal discussions, with one former Amazon employee telling the publication that drivers are "implicitly forced to do so, otherwise we will end up losing our jobs for too many 'undelivered packages.'"

The revelation followed a combative tweet from Amazon aimed at a Wisconsin congressman, who took the company to task over working conditions. The saga unfolded amid a showdown with workers in Alabama who are trying to unionize the workplace.

It's not the first time workers at Amazon, which is known for its gruelling hours, have spoken out about the problem.

Workers have previously told the Guardian they needed to urinate inside water bottles on a daily basis for fear of missing delivery rates. A forum on Reddit dedicated to Amazon drivers, which, while impossible to vet completely for authenticity, nonetheless shows hundreds of comments from drivers claiming they frequently have to urinate in water bottles for lack of bathroom breaks while on the job, particularly as the Covid-19 pandemic increased the amount of deliveries.

Amazon saw a 37% increase in sales in one quarter alone in 2020 and executive Jeff Bezos personally saw his personal net worth increase by $70bn during the pandemic.

The bathroom controversy exposed on Thursday marks just the latest blowback surrounding how Amazon treats employees – and its delivery drivers in particular. Earlier this week, Vice reported drivers were being forced to sign "biometric consent" forms to continue working for the retailing giant.

These forms would allow AI-powered cameras to keep watch over the drivers, who number around 75,000 in the United States, while on the clock. Evan Greer, the deputy director of workers rights and privacy advocacy group Fight for the Future, said lawmakers must ban biometric surveillance entirely, because workers trying to stay afloat during precarious times cannot reasonably be expected to turn down the policy if it means losing a job.

"Forcing workers to agree to constant monitoring by racist, AI powered surveillance cameras or get fired is not how consent works," she said. "Lawmakers should act now to ban these practices entirely. No one should be forced to work in inhumane conditions, and hand over their sensitive biometric information to their boss, just to put food on the table."

Amazon did not respond to request for comment.

[Berkut]

Racist? How is a camera racist?

[Valmy]

I don't know if it is racist but it sure sucks to have your boss monitoring you with AI cameras. Ah well. The 1984 workplace of the future.

[Sheilbh]

Racist? How is a camera racist?

So there's I'd say three main ways a camera is racist - if it doesn't have the data to work with all races; if the historic data it's trained on is biased; or if it is trained to be biased. I think the issue here is particularly around the second point but I could be wrong.

There's issues with facial recognition technology, for example, that has primarily been trained on white faces not recognising the faces of black or Asian people. So if your training dataset is limited in that way (and this was a big problem with a lot of early AI) then it literally will not work for all races which is crucial if it's a gateway to services or something. But then to take that to the other extreme there's the facial recognition/surveillance technology developed by Chinese companies (who supply Western goverments and businesses too) that have been specifically trained to identify Uyghurs.

The other issue which I think is probably more relevant here is about the data used to train the AI in systems. Basically if the raw information used to train the system reflects existing discrimination and racism then the AI will re-produce results with that discrimination and racism. Except because it's by a machine or an algorithm it will have the patina of being a neutral, tech solution even though what it has learned through the input data is to re-produce human biases.

So there's loads of algorithms that can be used in recruitment for example, but you can't just train it on historic data or you're just making an electronic version of the recruitment biases that might have existed (I think Amazon tried to build something like this based on their historic hiring decisions and found the algorithm would auto-reject loads of good women applicants because there was historic bias in their recruitment).

There's a lot of thinking and potential regulation around how to do AI in a fair way when it comes to making decisions about individuals (which is restricted in Europe and other countries) and how to sort of ethically build AI to behave as we want it to - which is generally in a neutral way - rather than just reflecting pre-existing biases. One of the issues though is the lack of transparency within the algorithm that can make it difficult to understand or explain what it is doing and how it does it - this tends to be the big hurdle in Europe where you need to "meaningfully explain" automated decisions to individuals - and often, at this stage, we can't.

Also, separately, employee monitoring is very, very difficult in Europe and is creepy

[garbon]

Racist? How is a camera racist?

If it involves facial recognition software could have problematic outcomes disproportionately on non-whites.

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/how-is-face-recognition-surveillance-technology-racist/

[garbon]

Or as Sheilbh said in a verbose manner.

[Sheilbh]

Or as Sheilbh said in a verbose manner.

As is my wont   

Edit: I suppose the point is cameras aren't just cameras any more. They normally have software and often an AI sitting behind them (and this goes for almost everything now), so cameras can be racist in the same way as credit scores can be racist and for very similar reasons. Even if in theory both should be some sort of neutral way of making decisions.

[Valmy]

Also, separately, employee monitoring is very, very difficult in Europe and is creepy

Indeed.

[Berkut]

Hey, I am definitely with them on the monitoring thing. Fuck that noise.

But racist? Are they planning on only monitoring black employees?

It just sounds like that was thrown in because, well, that then makes Amazon RACIST! in addition to anything else they can to make them seem terrible.

I get that a a monitoring system *could be* racist in how it is implemented, but you would need to show that it is so, or at least reasonably show that there is a legitimate concern that it could be so, or is likely to be so.

[Sheilbh]

Indeed.

Working in privacy this is one of the biggest hurdles in working with American clients is explaining that in Europe privacy is a fundamental right so applies to everyone including employees, while in America it's primarily a function of consumer rights and ID theft/financial risk - so aside from, say, your payroll (with lots of social security numbers etc) it generally doesn't matter for employees. This is starting to shift in state laws but it's a huge philosophical gap that takes a little while to get used to.

Edit: Similarly in Europe the idea of "consent" from an employee is extremely limited because consent is meaningless if you can't refuse it and there's such a big imbalance of power that often employees can't refuse consent - so it's not impossible but it's pretty limited. Again it's a big difference in philosophy in the US.

[crazy canuck]

A story about how ill treated Amazon workers pee in bottles because they do not get sufficient work breaks.  Is striking that the labour laws would be so bare as to permit this sort of thing to occur.  But in true Languish form, a US poster objects to a throw away use of the word racist rather than discussing what the article is actually about. Perhaps this is an example of why US labour laws are so abysmal?

[DGuller]

But racist? Are they planning on only monitoring black employees?

The quote says that the cameras are racist, not that they're planning on monitoring only black employees.  It's a valid concern, though unfortunately there is a lot of nonsense being perpetuated about this issue.  As with other matters of social justice, it's impossible to have an honest objective debate, as one side is far less likely to have its bullshit challenged than the other.  You can never go wrong with saying that AI algorithms are biased, your heart is in the right place even if your reasoning isn't, but God help you if you challenge some of these concerns and it turns out that you were wrong, or enough people believed that you were wrong.

[garbon]

A story about how ill treated Amazon workers pee in bottles because they do not get sufficient work breaks.  Is striking that the labour laws would be so bare as to permit this sort of thing to occur.  But in true Languish form, a US poster objects to a throw away use of the word racist rather than discussing what the article is actually about. Perhaps this is an example of why US labour laws are so abysmal?

I would assume it's because we mostly agree the general situation is a problem... so not much to discuss there?

[The Larch]

I would like to know if these well known issues with how Amazon treats its workers has affected any of our shopping habits. Personally I've avoided Amazon like the plague since these kind of things started becoming public knowledge.

[Josquius]

Not really news that sorry we missed you was practically a documentary no?