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comment by wasoxygen
wasoxygen  ·  1327 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Amazon Is Hiring an Intelligence Analyst to Track 'Labor Organizing Threats'

What were you doing at age 19?

I had a job in a lighting store, which involved a lot of time in a hot warehouse. No health benefits, and I doubt the pay was anything close to the equivalent of $15 an hour. It was pocket money and work experience, and now I can install a ceiling fan.

    now he logs in to an app every day and picks what shifts he wants. He can have all the shifts he wants. He put in almost 40 last week. He could theoretically work as much as he wants.

    Many of those shifts offer an extra $3-5 per hour.

This isn't for everyone, but it sounds like a dream job for a 19 year old. People have to make decisions for themselves, and it is not Amazon's role to decide if the opportunity they offer is the best fit from an employee's perspective.

Does Amazon care about your kid's health? Sure they do, they say so right on the benefits page!

    Amazon cares🟉 about your health and well-being, both on and off the job.

Saying they care but not really doing anything about it is the same way the rest of us care about Amazon employees.

My employer does not provide health benefits for me. He told me he doesn't want to deal with the paperwork and would rather just give me the cash value of the health plan. I wouldn't have taken the job if I couldn't get health insurance elsewhere. Employers worry about the bottom line, the total cost of employee compensation, whatever form it takes. Providing health benefits for flex employees would necessarily reduce salary, or compensation on some other dimension.

  

    🟉benefits on this page apply to regular, full-time employees




steve  ·  1327 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'm all about my kid having a tough job. And frankly, I can't believe they're paying that much to do what he does. The bizarre, and seemingly underhanded thing they're doing, is not giving scheduled workers the hours they should, but rather giving those hours to people who are on flex time.

and

    What were you doing at age 19?

that's a much longer, stranger story for another day.

wasoxygen  ·  1327 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Agreed, promising and not delivering hours is bad, and will drive workers away, just as customers will move elsewhere if they don't get their packages. I trust your kid didn't work 20-minute shifts regularly for three months before finding another option.

I looked into the Flex app for deliveries. I thought I could bring my kid along and give him a look at the "last mile", after we toured the FC. There were stories of people who reserved a work block but only got a few packages to deliver, so they got full pay for a tiny amount of work. Other stories described getting a delivery assignment that was impossible to deliver in the expected amount of time.

Predictability and regularity of work is a benefit that costs Amazon to provide, and that money has to come from somewhere. Everything is a tradeoff.

Looking forward to seeing your autobiography, once the eleven kids have grown up!