For that matter, the people in China who build the stuff sold at Amazon (and anywhere else) are paid a lot less and treated worse, so don’t buy anything at all.
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I’m usually prevented from leaving when my shift is over by a certain co-worker calling on the phone, wanting to interrogate me at length about some picayune detail of the gizmo I just fixed. This is arguably worse than waiting in line at a security checkpoint.
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All the employees should stop work 30 minutes earlier to stand in line. Also, how can Amazon compare walking from the parking lot (which is, granted, Amazon property) to being in the workplace proper? Workers aren’t even on the job yet.
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Oh, you’re not being serious. Use an emoticon next time, will you?
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“There never were any bricks, but I sure made a fortune in wheelbarrows!”
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Wait, in what century do people have to pick up a paycheck in person? I thought Amazon was a modern company. How come they have a 19th century way of handling money?
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I think they were just using an example that was called out in the law, not stating that their workers were required to wait in line for paychecks. However, it is entirely possible that a number of warehouse workers do not have bank accounts, and thus would not be able to use direct deposit. If you are living paycheck to paycheck and can’t even maintian a few hundred dollars minimum balance, the fees for a checking account – including ATM / withdrawl fees, overdraft fees, and so forth can actually be higher than just using one of those shady check cashing places.
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What is the current law for, say, miners who have to go thru decontamination and/or security checks? It’s quite possible that there’s existing case law which covers this situation (right or wrong).
Tho’ I agree that it’d be a lot better if the workers were able to unionize and write something into their contract.
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I don’t know your pricing model, but if you are in business for yourself and don’t have travel and other big expenses built in, you’re doing it wrong.
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It’s exactly why I stopped shopping at Amazon a few years back. The prices might be lower, but I don’t go to Wal Mart or Target for a lot of the same reasons. It’s gotten difficult to shop, but I feel like getting to know my small local bookstore has been worth the tradeoff.
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Don’t answer your phone.
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Yeah, a security check to exit the workplace should be paid time. They should put the time clock on the exit side of the security checkpoint.
On the other hand, when the time clock is rounded up or down to the quarter hour, I’ve seen employees standing around waiting until the clock ticks over to where they get an extra 15 minutes of pay.
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Are you exempt? If not, I’m pretty sure they’ve got to pay you if you have to keep working after your shift.
Your job is, I would assume, what’s called ‘exempt,’ like mine is, which means you can get a call late at night and have to go fix something, and you don’t get payed extra for it. I guarantee you that warehouse worker is not an exempt position. Among other things, exempt jobs usually pay better, generally have benefits, and involve a significant amount of autonomy about how you get your work done, such that it can’t really be quantified the way hourly work can.
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All jobs have waiting stuff like that built in, some more than others. My non-day job has the wait at the FedEx office for them to scan the Nixie watch packages into the system for delivery to far-away places. I don’t get paid to stand there while the person in front of me in line gets their box repacked.
For every bad job, there’s always a worse one that they can be glad they don’t have. Chicken dismantler for Tyson? Not too glamorous.
If it takes up the employees’ time and has value for the company then the company needs to pay for it. Why don’t they just have staggered quitting times with 1/10 of the workers leaving every 6 minutes? Then the wait should only be 3 minutes for each group.
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The point you seem to be arguing is that every employer is justified in screwing every employee to the maximum extent that employee will tolerate before they simply quit, because there’s always a worse job out there.
Have I read that wrong?
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I’m arguing that all jobs have some BS to them, some waiting, some unpleasant part, some unpaid piece of work. Schoolteachers have to spend several hours a day doing unpaid work to keep up, and they have to pony up cash to buy supplies for their students. Yet they still do it. I don’t know what it’s like to work in a warehouse, so I can’t compare it to my work (which is admittedly rather interesting, if at times frustrating).
Perhaps the workers at Amazon will find a way to collectively get their employer to improve the situation. The union-creating workers back a century ago put themselves through a lot of duress to improve their working conditions. Maybe Amazon will realize that the bad PR associated with treating their employees like cattle is going to hurt their bottom line more than hiring some extra security checkers.
You seem to be missing the point that there is a legal distinction, to keep wage slaves from being exploited (it’s still okay to exploit engineers), that prevents employers from requiring unpayed work. In you self-employed job, you clearly are making your own decisions, and if it doesn’t make enough to pay you for standing in line at the post office, you should probably reconsider what you’re doing. At your day job, if it is not exempt, then your employer is breaking the law if he sends you off to fix stuff outside of normal working hours without paying you overtime.
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