Amazon bans its drivers from moving their own lips too much at work

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/should-truckers-be-allowed-to-sing-along-with-the-radio

by jmsflknr • 2 years ago

247 268 2 years ago

sparrish• 2 years ago

I'm sure there are piss-poor drivers that don't sing along and really good drivers that do.

They should drop all the restrictions on 'distracting' activity and just fire poor drivers rather than trying to make poor drivers into good ones.

cr125rider• 2 years ago

If you want to pay bottom of the barrel wages you’re gonna get employees that are at the bottom. An accident could cause many times a workers annual wage, so they’re trying to go for preventative measures.

I’m honestly surprised they can still find people who want to work for them.

ryandrake• 2 years ago

I’m honestly surprised they can still find people who want to work for them.

The slow and steady eradication of middle class jobs + the lack of a humane and dignified safety net + the need for food, clothing and shelter. I think very few people want to work as an Amazon warehouse worker or driver, as in make a career of it. It's one of the USA's many Jobs Of Last Resort.

hnlmorg3• 2 years ago

That’s easy to say when it’s someone with our level of opportunities but some people don’t have a whole lot of other options. And it’s not like Door Dash and Uber are any better.

0xB31B1B• 2 years ago

If "singing along" is a leading indicator of being in an accident, then amazon should absolutely not employ drivers that sing along. People get injured or killed in accidents, we dont need to observe them if we have sufficently strong signals that show risk (IE: driving at 100mph, driving while drunk, etc). What I don't understand is if you tell drivers "dont sing along" does that negate the predictive value of "singining along" as a signal for propensity to be involved in an accident.

teqsun• 2 years ago

I would assume they're really just trying to "catch" people talking on cell phones, and people singing are causing "too many" false positives of the detection system?

aguaviva4• 2 years ago

That's actually a reasonable explanation.

And then it seems the manager failed to articulate that point (or perhaps they did, but people are the meeting were so upset that they weren't quite listening anymore).

ffsm8• 2 years ago

How can anyone consider that reasonable?

that is an insane overreach by the employer. They should be outraged!

losvedir• 2 years ago

Yeah, with half a second's thought at the headline it should be obvious they're worried about people talking on the phone or bluetooth, which really is distracted driving. I was sort of flabbergasted at the focus in the article on "singing along to the radio" as if that's what this is about. I do get how that could be a bit of a false positive, but I doubt it's that common.

millzlane8• 2 years ago

And most drivers I see who deliver packages are always on the phone talking to themselves via bluetooth. So I get the sentiment.

It's not like amazon is making it up. Studies have shown that music can have an adverse effect on driving.

tsimionescu• 2 years ago

No, talking in a car has no measurable impact on safety. And talking on the phone is obviously even safer than talking to other people physically in the car, since you don't need to take your eyes off the road or tour hands off the wheel like you would be tempted to when talking to another person in the car.

Plus, the vast majority of people have a significant need for social contact. Working an eight hour shift alone in a car without any contact with any social contact (except a quick sign off when dropping a package), 5 days a week, is inhuman.

wahnfrieden• 2 years ago

Even if that's "really" their objective, management could be fine with the risk of punishing drivers who struggle to comply with this for unrelated reasons. There's no reason to think they will seek fairness if the result achieves what they want well enough.

The point of the article is the bluntness of the tool, not that they are trying to reduce dangerously distracting phone calls, and understanding the true objective doesn't undo that.

gopher_space• 2 years ago

Hard to tell with Amazon. None of their logistics devs have labor experience or are interested in life on the shop floor so there's a weird disconnect between their systems and the actual work people are engaged with.

ortusdux• 2 years ago

I had a USPS mailman with a walking route that used a handsfree headset to work a 2nd job. Not sure what he was selling, but I overheard him close a deal while he had me sign for a package. It never seemed to affect his productivity, and I definitely respect the hustle.

greiskul• 2 years ago

Yeah, if he is walking, who cares. But if he is driving distracted and runs over someone, it becomes a lot harder to respect the hustle.

aguaviva4• 2 years ago

Which obviously has nothing to do with the issue of people talking over headsets (and inevitably diddling their devices on occasion) while driving a large and less than nimble vehicle at high speeds.

consteval10• 2 years ago

There's also nothing wrong with talking on the phone with a hands-free device. It's equivalent to chatting with a passenger.

fragmede2• 2 years ago

a passenger in the same car can see where the car is, and stop talking because of that. the voice on the phone has no such visibility.

banannaise2• 2 years ago

Do they think that having to carefully monitor the movement of your mouth might also distract someone who is trying to drive?

Or did they not think about that at all because this is somewhere between lip service (heh) to driver safety and an abuse tactic?

chankstein38• 2 years ago

This is where my mind was too. On top of that, what is people's response when they're feeling tired on a road trip? Turn up the radio on something fun and sing along to get your energy levels back up. Chew gum to keep their mouths busy. Deep breathing?

Sure they could pull over on a road trip but when you're working for Amazon the company known for piss bottles... The option is to, I guess, fall asleep at the wheel?

egypturnash3• 2 years ago

Jesus this is some horrible panopticon shit. I hope everyone involved in building the system to do this feels horrible about it being used this way.

Really gotta remember to check back in this thread and see if there’s any new accounts claiming to be someone involved in this and talking about how they got to the point where this feels like a sensible business decision.

poikroequ2• 2 years ago

The sad truth is, most people simply don't care about anything that doesn't affect them. Yes, there are people who do care, like many of us here on Hacker News, but we are very much in the minority. And even among those who do care, very few are really willing to do anything about it, far from enough to bring about any meaningful change.

Sakos2• 2 years ago

Funny, plenty of people here in the comments are defending Amazon and are absolutely for treating humans like robots.

RGamma• 2 years ago

Unless you've been living under a rock (congrats if so!), you should have noticed the US being on the idiocracy + corporate dystopia timeline.

And no, the builders of this don't feel bad. They feel "excited" to be blessed by some 0.1%er's capital and get that FAANG experience on their CV.

Ancalagon3• 2 years ago

Stop working for and stop buying from this company

unionize, boycott, strike

bogantech• 2 years ago

Unfortunately they won't, people want their cheap crap right now no matter how much suffering it causes for the underprivileged.

nickpeterson• 2 years ago

Agreed. People used to be fine with slavery, they’re not going to cancel a useful service over poor working conditions.

cogman10• 2 years ago

I tend to try and buy direct from electronics sellers but a large number of them sell through amazon.

Which is funny because one step I've had to adopt to avoid fraud is going to the manufacturer's website to find where to buy the item. I can't trust the amazon listing that comes up on a search.

It's less about wanting cheap crap now and more about amazon having a huge market presence that makes avoiding them difficult.

mucle64• 2 years ago

If they're working there, they believe its their best option.

If you're successful at causing amazon to crumble and they lose their job, would you really feel good?

Imagine telling them they don't have job anymore because you know better than them whats good for them

Larrikin• 2 years ago

It's actually surprisingly easy to convince friends and family to cancel Prime or atleast comparison shop. Everyone has gotten some cheap crap from China they never would have bought if they could have seen it in real life and had to suffer with it or go through an increasingly annoying return process. Prime shipping is no longer two days, just a when they feel like getting it to you. Ask them why do you always give your money to a company that gives you crap?

Prices on things you'd actually want to buy, well known quality brand, are often the same price else where. With unknown brands you're usually better off paying more else where to make sure you get something that someone somewhere in the company decided wasn't totally terrible and worth selling instead of AliExpress drop seller garbage.

cortesoft3• 2 years ago

It’s because individual consumer choice is a really bad way to get companies to change their behavior.

Thousands of people have stopped buying anything from Amazon, and the only change in the world is that those people don’t get the convenience that Amazon provides; Amazon is still doing all the same things.

As an individual, your only two choices are: shop at Amazon and get the benefits and Amazon still exists exactly as it does today, or don’t shop at Amazon, don’t get the benefits, and Amazon still exists exactly as it does today. The only person that suffers if I stop shopping at Amazon is me, it doesn’t make one persons life better.

This is a Collective Action Problem, and it can’t be fixed by consumer choice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem

Ancalagon3• 2 years ago

Its on the employees then namely the managers but also the ground-level folk to organize. There's a reason companies like Amazon go after unions so hard.

But even before that, I feel like there is enough information on working at Amazon at this point that anyone with the ability to choose between Amazon and another job should pick the latter. Worker strikes are just as effective.

_DeadFred_9• 2 years ago

Amazon has hidden behind 'contractors' employing 'delivery drivers' in order to union bust up until now. However a recent court ruling might change things.

https://teamster.org/2024/08/teamsters-win-groundbreaking-jo...

dopylitty• 2 years ago

No matter how badly Amazon treats its workers, we all keep shopping there

This doesn’t have to be true. I cancelled prime and haven’t shopped at Amazon in years.

tombert• 2 years ago

I suspect most of the people frequent here still use AWS in some capacity if nothing else...

pavel_lishin• 2 years ago

Only because of work.

Zambyte3• 2 years ago

What does AWS actually offer that is useful that isn't provided elsewhere?

worik3• 2 years ago

True.

A lot of Internet services are on AWS

But I would not, personally, deal with the royalty of dark patterns

denkmoon2• 2 years ago

Why? Sure in the case of work, but as an individual AWS is incredibly expensive! Can't be paying those crazy prices for my personal things.

janalsncm3• 2 years ago

Prime is a good service. I don’t see why people should have to choose between workers being treated well and not having to deal with the hell that is shopping at a physical store.

Seriously. Drive to the store. Find parking. Walk to the general location where item should be. Item isn’t there. Try to find a clerk (there are 2 in the whole store). Get item or settle for whatever is there. Wait in line. Self checkout (we were told this would reduce wait time). Pay more because store is more expensive. Drive home. The whole thing took an hour of your time and you didn’t even get the exact thing you wanted. Also, good luck if you have kids or are busy or don’t have a car or are disabled.

The solution is labor laws. Voting with your wallet. Doesn’t. Work. It has never worked. Voting with your wallet is the solution companies want you to try because they know actual regulation would actually work.

devsda• 2 years ago

"the hell that is shopping at a physical store"

Someone may say similar words about shopping at Amazon and they wouldn't be wrong.

"the hell that is shopping at Amazon's counterfeit infested online store"

MiguelX4132• 2 years ago

Ironically I detest online shopping and opt for brick and mortar when possible.

SoftTalker2• 2 years ago

Pull in to the store that I'm passing on my way home anyway, get an item that I can be pretty sure is not counterfeit or broken, have it immediately not in a day or two or next week, it's not all bad.

Yes I sometimes shop online but these days I try to go direct to the manufacturer's own web store, or I'll buy it on a product-niche site such as bhphoto.com that isn't chock full of anonymous sellers hawking made-in-china garbage.

arp2423• 2 years ago

"Shop at Amazon" and "shop at physical store" aren't the only two options.

denkmoon2• 2 years ago

Labor laws that will never happen. Yeah, sure, you can't stop Amazon exploiting its workers by 'voting with your wallet', but you _are_ complicit in the abuse by spending there.

justin_oaks• 2 years ago

It's time to advertise ventriloquism lessons to Amazon drivers.

Or the drivers could protest by wearing masks over their mouths.

tantalor• 2 years ago

  Well, if you want to sing out, sing out
  And if you want to be free, be free
  'Cause there's a million things to be
  You know that there are

delichon• 2 years ago

No matter how badly Amazon treats its workers, we all keep shopping there.

Because they keep working there. So the workers think the conditions are worth it in exchange for their paycheck. If I disagree and shop elsewhere I'm effectively disagreeing with the workers and telling them I think they are making a bad deal and I don't want to contribute to their livelihood. But I don't actually know that they can make a better deal elsewhere.

Before I move my purchase to Newegg or whatever should I first make sure that their working conditions are better? Or just judge by how often I see each company mentioned in the media?

I think that the voluntary nature of employment is a sufficient circuit breaker. If it gets bad enough we can and do leave for better opportunities elsewhere. It wouldn't be the first, second or third time for me, and that includes minimum wage jobs. So I don't feel the duty to investigate the working conditions of each business I deal with.

thelastparadise• 2 years ago

We can all do better.

kevinventullo• 2 years ago

Slave work was also voluntary in a sense, it’s just that the alternative was your masters torturing and killing you.

Ekaros2• 2 years ago

Still is that way. You can refuse, but you will find yourself in nice tiny room with no distractions...

mucle64• 2 years ago

Everyone else in this thread frustrates me, but I understand it. Compassion is ingrained in us, while free market economics is not.

Nobody here is really thinking through what happens if they are successful at boycotting and destroying Amazon. What would they say to these people they're supposedly helping?

"I got you laid off! You don't have to work here anymore! You're free! Maybe you can't feed your family now but at least you can move your lips while you drive!"

lazyasciiart2• 2 years ago

This is silly, because you are imagining that Amazon could disappear with no other change in society.

egypturnash3• 2 years ago

Success in a boycott is not necessarily destroying Amazon. Success is making this decision cause enough financial pain to Amazon that they reverse it, and the next time some Frederick Taylor wannabe proposes something terrible along the same lines, everyone else reminds him of how much it hurt when they tried to stop the delivery drivers from singing along to music. Success is this weakening Amazon enough for their low-wage workers to unionize and demand representation on the board of directors and a bigger share of the profits.

tway_GdBRwW2• 2 years ago

I agree that boycotting Amazon is not the answer, but government action might be. And government action only happens if the politicians think enough of their constituency thinks something is a problem.

tway_GdBRwW2• 2 years ago

You're making a lot of assumptions about the availability of other work. I'm glad you've been able move between jobs, but it isn't always easy or available.

You are probably also taking for granted a lot of the labor rights which were won over the last 100 years. For example, blacklisting used to be a thing, and it certainly did prevent job mobility, that was the whole point.

You are also right that you as a CONSUMER should not have to check every company's credentials before doing business with them. But you as a CITIZEN might want to have your government do this through things such as minimum wage laws and overtime laws.

jen20• 2 years ago

If I disagree and shop elsewhere I'm effectively disagreeing with the workers and telling them I think they are making a bad deal and I don't want to contribute to their livelihood.

The fact that you can't order a product with any certainty that what you get won't be co-mingled fake trash from a third party is the best reason to stop ordering from them tbh.

zamadatix7• 2 years ago

This is just a rehash of what their source https://www.freightwaves.com/news/should-truckers-be-allowed... reports which is, itself, almost entirely a rehash of social media commentary on the sourced Reddit post https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonDSPDrivers/comments/1f2y2cp/t...

Just reading the original quoted mid article without the extra commentary it's clear the story is unrelated to listening to the radio in itself and to do with the camera mechanism monitoring for other forms of distracted driving not being able to tell the difference:

we were told that "a lot of mouth movement will set off the camera" and that we "needed to keep mouth movement to a minimum".

Still a shitty system by all counts... but a lot easier to talk about it directly than via rehashes.

thih9• 2 years ago

Laws agains this kind of workplace environments seem best long term.

Still, with the source being one “we were told” I guess we’re not sure if this is this official; this could be a manager’s threat or someone’s inaccurate understanding of what the camera is actually monitoring.

Ventriloquism, face masks or humming in the meantime then. Or quitting, like the author of the linked post - perhaps best for now.

refulgentis3• 2 years ago

Still, with the source being one “we were told”

This is not true.

It makes me very itchy to see 2 comments in a row using innuendo and deconstructing sourcing in an erroneous way.

zamadatix7• 2 years ago

I commented it elsewhere but it can be tough to balance general laws like that. E.g. right now, if an employer is aware people wear face masks so they can chat on the phone while they drive then the current set of laws allows a lot of liability to be placed on the employer when such accidents occur due to not taking safety seriously enough. Putting a general rule that an employer can't do this sort of thing then runs the risk of employers saying all sorts of things were for the workplace environment compliance, not safety negligence on their part. Putting specific rule exceptions instead becomes daunting to define, keep updated, and understand (for employees as much as employers).

I'm not saying some of this kind of thing can't be better served by some different laws, just it's probably not as easy to solve with a "quick" law or these other approaches as it might seem.

refulgentis3• 2 years ago

Rehashing, in this case, seems to mean communicating.

This isn't a random aggregator, Freight Waves is a well-known industry specific site.

A world where this wasn't rehashed by Freight Waves is a world where you have to read every Reddit board to gain knowledge.

unrelated to listening to the radio in itself

None of the links you mention, nor any comment or headline, includes the word listening.

I don't see how any of the headlines, on HN, Freight Waves, or Reddit, or content, on HN, Freight Waves, or Reddit, could be read as related to listening.

but a lot easier to talk about it directly than via rehashes.

What does this mean, exactly?

EDIT: Can't reply due to HN timeout, maybe the HN link was originally to Jalopnik saying they can't listen to the radio, and it's cached in your browser? On my end, it's always been a link to Freight Waves with the headline "Amazon bans its drivers from moving their own lips...(something something, can't see, I'm on mobile)"

zamadatix7• 2 years ago

All of this completely ignores that the current source is Jalopnik so I'm not sure if I should take that as you agreeing there but just not in the second case. I will say Freight Waves is at least a better source than Jalopnik for this, they attempt some actual direct reporting instead of talking about things like "That’s an opinion shared by many Freight Waves readers".

To be clear, I'm not saying the sites themselves are useless or not - just the wrong thing to post as a source for discussion here. From the HN guidelines: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter". Freight Waves would probably be acceptable enough for that, Jalopnik is pretty poor in this particular case.

None of the links you mention, nor any comment or headline I see, mentions listening.

Apologies, that is a slip on my part - meant singing along to the radio. A great example of why you should look at the original instead of commentary :p.

What does this mean, exactly?

When you talk about what an article which talks about what another article talks about what people talk about what someone said it becomes a lot less clear than staging a conversation around what was originally said instead.

dang• 2 years ago

Ok, we changed the URL to that from https://jalopnik.com/amazon-bans-its-drivers-from-moving-the.... Thanks!

Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

exitb• 2 years ago

You formatted your post, as if you were trying to debunk it, but nothing you said makes it better. Yes, there is technically a reason for that policy/recommendation, but it is essentially a bug in a safety system. Instead of fixing that bug, they've asked the drivers to alter their behaviour, so they don't trigger it. Asking drivers to concentrate on keeping their "mouth movement to a minimum" is actually worse for safety.

zamadatix7• 2 years ago

Debunk the distraction that is the focus being singing to the radio instead of the focus being what you pointed out here - Amazon using an unreliable safety system which places a lot of burden on drivers, regardless of the radio.

The version of the story (straight to Freight Waves instead of Jalopnik) the link was changed to at the time you made your comment was much better about getting to this point (one less layer of indirection).

m3kw9• 2 years ago

Just wear a mask and talk

jorblumesea• 2 years ago

How dystopian.

SpicyLemonZest• 2 years ago

According to Reddit users that Freight Waves cited, Amazon has begun monitoring mouth movements on its drivers through a camera in the cab of its delivery fans.

This kind of allegation really calls for a better source than "Reddit users are saying". I'm not saying it can't be true, but there's any number of ways that an anonymous commenter's report of what an unspecified person said in their morning briefing could give a false or misleading impression of Amazon policies.

andrewstuart2• 2 years ago

I notice when I get a taxi often the drivers seem to be constantly talking to someone on the phone, like they have long running low intensity conversations going for long periods of time.

matwood• 2 years ago

Yes! I wondered if I was the only one thinking that. I'm often confused if they are on the phone or not.

andrewstuart2• 2 years ago

> I'm often confused if they are on the phone or not.

Yeah cause there’s long pauses I guess.

I get the impression they’re talking to their wives.

Maybe just talking to family/buddies.

Perhaps these long running low intensity conversations are what Amazon wants to stamp out.

nemo44x• 2 years ago

Probably talking to friends/family that drive taxi as well. Just passing time while driving around town.

worik3• 2 years ago

"No matter how badly Amazon treats its workers, we all keep shopping there"

Who is "we"?

Not me.

icepat• 2 years ago

Nor I, I actually live in a country where Amazon mostly does not work. It's how most, if not all major publications talk about Amazon. I see it as part of a narrative of "oh no, anyway", and an attempt to ensure apathy to the whole situation. It's absolutely not an attempt to get us to think critically about how, and from where we consume. If the narrative that Amazon is abusive to their staff, _but we're not going to do anything about it_ like we are told, then we won't think further into other major problems in our western supply chain.

Terretta• 2 years ago

We all love data-driven decision making… until we don't.

MiguelX4132• 2 years ago

I don't recall ever doing so.

_DeadFred_9• 2 years ago

I worked with a hospital at risk of de-acreditization. They had worse outcomes than the other hospitals around them (people were way too likely to get infections at the hospital, die, etc). Turns out they had more gut knife wounds than any other hospital. All data driven decision making shutting them down would have done was make the next nearest hospital the one with worse outcomes, and so on, and so on.

Plus I'm guessing the best data driven safety change would be a reduction of package delivery load if Amazon is really doing data driven safety changes.

jmward01• 2 years ago

I had a discussion with someone recently about how tech is enabling enforcement of laws/policies/etc at a scale never before possible and how that is a bad thing. The problem is that people can't conform perfectly and the tighter we force people to conform the more likely they are to 'break' and disconnect from society. Basically, if 'acceptable' is so narrowly defined that you can't achieve it 100% of the time, why try even a little to conform? In companies there is somewhat of an off-ramp, quit (which isn't always a realistic option obviously), but these enforcement abilities are invading areas that we can't avoid and that is a real problem.

izacus3• 2 years ago

Happines in society lives in the slack - that is, having rules, but not having them too tightly enforced and with a lot of leeway and context.

The modern mindset prevents that - it's beaurocratic, rigid and extremely oppressive. Technology just helps with that, but if you look at even posts online you'll see that it's the mindset that DEMANDS punishment for any rule breaking no matter how small and how stupid it is.

morkalork• 2 years ago

It's like rolling stops at stop signs, a majority of people do it, it's socially accepted! Could we use technology to prevent it? Yes. Should we? I'd hope not.

itake4• 2 years ago

"slack" is the breeding ground for discrimination. Some races, genders, etc. will give more or less slack to each other.

immutable rules that apply to everyone reduces that discrimination (but obviously, the rules themselves can also be discriminatory)

matrix87• 2 years ago

The modern mindset prevents that - it's beaurocratic, rigid and extremely oppressive

I don't think it prevents it, the modern mindset encourages more individualism, individualism is the final frontier of slack

that DEMANDS punishment for any rule breaking no matter how small and how stupid it is

I think small and stupid is sort of the point. And I don't think there's anything modern about it. In the middle ages, people were getting burned at the stake over super niche differences in Christian doctrine

autoexec8• 2 years ago

A lot of Americans are way too into punishment. It's seriously like a fetish for them. They tend to want the most extreme and sick punishments too, at least when they want any at all. It's not consistent.

They are outraged anytime they think "the wrong kind of person" might be getting away with something, while they are mostly fine when people they view as being "higher status" somehow gets away without punishment. They feel like the poor person shoplifting should be shot on sight, but the rich CEO who commits wage theft and illegally hides money in overseas tax havens is a smart business person who deserves to get away with it. I don't know if it's a mental sickness or a moral one, but it's gross and way too common in the US.

ben_w3• 2 years ago

My current best guess, for the last decade, is that we will have to radically decriminalise things and reduce punishments for the remaining crimes.

If you catch every road traffic offence, the only people who will still have a licence will be people like me who don't have a car.

If the UK tried to fully enforce its drug laws, it would bankrupt itself with all the extra prisons it would have to build.

Even if the governments of the world don't care to use surveillance tech to catch all criminality, blackmailers will use it because it's already cheap and getting cheaper, which forces the governments to change anyway. (Though perhaps GenAI will get good enough fast enough that any image will be assumed fake by default).

But I really do mean radical decriminalisation (civil law offences are not criminal offences) not merely the illustrations of decriminalising hard drugs and reducing the penalties for speeding.

looping__lui2• 2 years ago

Or maybe not - and you just punish the people that don’t agree with your political stance. It’s a bit surprising imho to see how people get locked up in UK for 15 months over Facebook posts whereas offenses/violations/crimes that may justify actual jail time go unpunished. If everyone could get punished at any time - governments may be very picky about WHOM to punish.

smegger0013• 2 years ago

how would blackmailers have any better luck than anyone else weaponizing the laws the cops often wont even go after criminals when you hand them video evidence and the criminals location found via tracking device on the stolen property.

_DeadFred_9• 2 years ago

They invented the thing from the sci-fi story 'don't invent the thing'. In this case the 'don't invent the thing' story is Manna.

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

eureka-belief• 2 years ago

Wow thanks for sharing. The time flew by when I was reading. This is the fundamental lesson that humanity must learn. We must reject the impulse to give away our creativity to a mystical/technological sky daddy that incorporates us into its machine. And we must accept that might does not mean right.

jameskilton• 2 years ago

Justice without mercy is cruelty.

Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution.

- St. Thomas Acquinas

langcss• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror.

LeifCarrotson• 2 years ago

Scale and cost are definitely neglected aspects of these decisions.

I think this is a huge issue with respect to both enforcement of the law as well as surveillance and privacy. Sure, in the 1960s, a cop could sit on the side of the road with binoculars outside of town and watch for a half dozen blacklisted plate numbers associated with known criminal suspects. But today, automated license plate readers can do that 24/7/365 on every major road into and out of an entire city, tracking millions of people with an opex of just a couple kilowatts of compute.

When laws and norms written before computers say that certain activities are searches of private information and require warrants, while other activities are just observation of public information like your face and license plate, that implicitly granted a high probability of anonymity and privacy because of the cost of that observation and low value of the information relative to its cost. In the past couple of decades, those observations have become so much cheaper that the information can now be worth more than the cost of gathering it.

Amazon employee monitoring has a similar cost: Sure, human managers could discipline employees who were less productive; if someone has a problem with taking excessively frequent or long smoke breaks, lunch breaks, or bathroom breaks eventually an attentive manager will notice and talk to them about it, but it's not normal to track KPIs to the second. I suppose these aren't "key" performance indicators, they're barely relevant performance indicators, but when they're cheap to scale Amazon can monitor them.

Economics, not regulations, guaranteed your privacy and freedom: it was somewhere between irrational and impossible to employ an army of human observers to do what computers now do cheaply and easily. When that economic landscape changed, we should have made those regulations concrete.

looping__lui2• 2 years ago

Imho more worrisome is that governments can find easy justification to lock up or punish everyone “at will”; because HAVING data to jail someone doesn’t mean the government will uniformly ACT on it :-) they can be picky - and will be as we are seeing across Europe these days/months/years. Certain laws and offenders are rigorously enforced; others not so much…

izacus3• 2 years ago

Oh yes, we did learn this lesson in eastern Europe, didn't we? I guess our friends across the Atlantic will need to torture a generation to learn as well.

mig39• 2 years ago

Wear a facemask. For safety. Problem solved.

datadeft• 2 years ago

Amazon needs slaves or robots whichever is cheaper.

millerm• 2 years ago

Seriously, this is why people need unions. People need to be represented so that they don't get fired when trying to fight stupid things. If the camera's backend detection system is so bad wit distracted driving alerts, then they will just have to manually view all videos that are alerted.

If everyone banded together tomorrow and didn't show up for work for 1 day, these problems would be solved. But, again, you can't even attempt such things as you'd be fired on the spot.

Buttons840• 2 years ago

I'm reminded that:

The life of the American worker is inherently undignified [0]

Also, if you Google "Hacker News Undignified" you will find a bunch of posts related to work, even though there is nothing in the query that is inherently related to work.

I don't know the first thing about making documentaries, but a documentary simply titled "Undignified" that covers the bullshit workers have to go through would hit hard I think. Just give voice and documentation to the extra burdens so many workers have to endure; can you go to the bathroom when you need to? If you have a stationary job, can you sit? Or do you have to stand for 8 hours straight? Can you sing to the radio, or will a computer algorithm punish you for it? Etc. All of these burdens are optional, our society could accomplish its work without these hardships, but we choose not to. The delivery driver can both deliver packages and use a restroom, and a grocery store checker can scan items while sitting on a stool.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36264363 and https://dirt.fyi/article/2023/06/bad-waitress

crmd• 2 years ago

A workers union would never allow this. For example the ALPA in the United States where I live has strict rules about when the cockpit voice recorder can even be accessed and by whom. Even after an accident it’s virtually never released - only the radio traffic.

_DeadFred_9• 2 years ago

Amazon has used layers of 'delivery contractors' who 'employ' the delivery drivers to bust any unionizing. Recently it was ruled that Amazon is a co-employer so they won't be able to continue that tactic going forward. Amazon is a horrible company.

https://teamster.org/2024/08/teamsters-win-groundbreaking-jo...

spankalee• 2 years ago

I really dislike Amazon and already don't shop there, but am I the only one who can at least consider the idea that this isn't necessarily unreasonable?

Driving is dangerous, period. I don't think we'd object as much to Amazon trying to make sure that drivers don't text and drive. Talking and driving isn't as distracting, but it is at least somewhat distracting. I've definitely seen cab drivers chatting away, driving aggressive, and missing little cues that could have easily led to an accident.

Amazon is pretty understandably trying to limit liability and disruption here. The drivers are not on personal time in personal vehicles. They're on company time in company vehicles, and employers almost universally regulate employee behavior to some degree or another.

Now, maybe this isn't effective, or a step too far, and they should certainly improve their talking detection, but I wouldn't personally dismiss the intent and approach out-of-hand. It could realistically actually save a life.

edit, to clarify the question I have here: What behavior is reasonable for Amazon to monitor and regulate for drivers? Any? Something just less than this?

JohnMakin• 2 years ago

I kind of agree with the spirit of what you're saying but not really - at amazon's scale, even a 1% increase risk of traffic accident amongst their massive fleet means a significant number at the end of a fiscal year in terms of cost. Then, it seems like a good decision and not unreasonable. IMO the unreasonableness is that a company like Amazon is allowed to scale to a size where this kind of monitoring is deemed necessary to the bottom line - a smaller company doesn't really care as much about that small increased risk because the effect on their bottom line isn't as large compared to the cost of implementing controlling measures like this.

millzlane8• 2 years ago

Aside from their bottom line there is the human element. How many other people does the 1% of the increased risk of traffic accidents affect? We can say this is for the benefit of the company sure, but any company with a large fleet trying to reduce traffic accidents regardless of their reasoning is a net win for society.

yojo• 2 years ago

Talking on your phone while driving (hands free or otherwise) is associated with a 4x increase in likelihood of accident.[1] Correlation != causation etc, but it seems reasonable to forbid talking on the phone while driving a giant delivery van until we have concrete evidence that it is safe.

Now, the particular way Amazon is going about enforcing this is creepy as hell, and well into the “I’m not comfortable with the privacy trade-off” zone for me.

1: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199702133360701#t=...

consteval10• 2 years ago

but I wouldn't personally dismiss the intent and approach out-of-hand

I would. Every time I've seen an Amazon driver they're busting ass, sprinting across lawns. Of the drivers I've talked to it's incredibly stressful, and to make your quota you have to drive a bit more "confidently". And let's not even get into the piss bottle stuff.

If their intent was truly safety, they would probably want to start there. But they're not. Because keeping high quotas is important for the bottom line. Hiring employees, scaling vans and infrastructure is expensive. So it follows to optimize cash you squeeeeeeze each employee as far as they can go.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 2 years ago

And this is why you need GDPR or similar privacy laws.

GDPR is a bit more than just cookie notices. I'm pretty sure that this would be a textbook case and if a company tried to continue such a program after being told to stop it, they'd have a good chance of paying the 4% of global revenue max fine for it.

Labor laws in many countries would also have an opinion on such a system.

fsckboy• 2 years ago

I would rate myself as an extremely good parallel park-er, switch vehicles? no problem. However, I must shut the music off. not sure what that says about my brain.

netule• 2 years ago

Same, but I can’t do a long drive without wailing along to some tunes.

paxys• 2 years ago

Amazon can somehow successfully (1) control a driver's working conditions to the extent that they dictate how much they are allowed to move their lips and (2) argue that they aren't employees but independent contractors. What a world.

qwertyuiop_• 2 years ago

I can only imagine how this started at Amazon.

Self aggrandizing midwit (middle or upper middle management): “I need a project to demonstrate “leaders are right a lot and invent & simplify” principle come feedback time.”

Self aggrandizing midwit to their team: “Remember we have cameras in delivery vans go figure out what else we can do with them”

Shaking in the boots middle manager or IC: “Hey remember the drivers occasionally hit the curbs because they don’t have time to pee, we should look at their faces use our awesome Rekognition stack to bang this out”

Midwit: Great I will write a PRFAQ !

IC: Here it it boss, i banged out the PoC without going to the bathroom all day!

Midwit: I am glad WE ALL WORKED TO GET THIS OUT.

OptionOfT• 2 years ago

Is this about singing or being on the phone (even while on headset?)?

And the singing merely gives false positives?

I've been in Ubers where the driver was constantly on the phone. While they do it handsfree, actually calling on the phone, whether handheld or handsfree, massively increases the risk of an accident.

(I've always wondered why handsfree calling is considered safer than handheld calling when you drive an automatic).

seoulmetro• 2 years ago

This isn't about singing. This is about foreigners talking on the phone while driving. It's uncanny but nearly every foreigner I've seen doing gig work has their phone to their ear talking in their home tongue.

Nothing wrong with that unless they're driving.

1. It's distracting, truly distracting. 2. It's a possible means of working while at work.

It's actually good that Amazon didn't just record the convos and reprimand people based on an AI oversight of whether it breaks the above rules.

moltar• 2 years ago

It’s probably not for singing but for talking on the phone. Even blue tooth talking definitely distracts.

autoexec8• 2 years ago

The fact that amazon has cameras pointing at the drivers all day long is creepy enough. They force their workers to piss in bottles and then they film/watch them doing it?

fire_lake• 2 years ago

There can be no joy, only the efficient allocation of capital.

Havoc• 2 years ago

They want robots. And while we wait for ai the humans just have to pretend to be ones.

Artificial robots if you will

Amazon bans its drivers from moving their own lips too much at work

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