Corporate employees of Amazon were asked on Monday to volunteer their time to the company’s warehouses to assist with grocery delivery as it heads into its annual discount spree known as Prime Day.
In a Slack message reviewed by the Guardian that went to thousands of white-collar workers in the New York City area from engineers to marketers, an Amazon area manager called for corporate “volunteers to help us out with Prime Day to deliver to customers on our biggest days yet”. It is not clear how many took up the offer.
Hey, that’s socialism.
The best part of this is that with how scarce jobs are getting, these corpos are going to start incentivizing folks to do this kind of shit by “laying off” workers who won’t stand for this. Like you get brownie points for doing free work and in turn get a little more job security. Think about it, if you won’t do it - someone else will, and people need jobs. Man fuck those people.
I guess bezos had to recoup his wedding costs. Some that, for him, could be done in the time it took me to write this snark.
Does anyone actually care about Prime Day? Isn’t it a bunch of cheap crap that’s marked up then “down”?
4K 34-inch OLED Alienware monitor for $550 on Prime Day. Originally $1100. Only thing I care for.
A lot of it is, with a few discounts. I’ve never found anything useful in it though.
They do that to a degree but its uaully still discounted, just not as much as you think. I work in a store that price matches amazon and we had to resticker 20 times as many products as on a normal day.
I would never volunteer one unpaid minute for any employer. I don’t see them volunteering any money because your personal life is going through a rough patch.
One of the core rule of business is that you don’t sell what you do not have. Because that is basivally the definition of fraud (at least one of them).
If you don’t have the manpower to deliver “Prime Day”, don’t offer “Prime Day”, as simple as that.
Dude. Like half of our GDP is about selling shit that we pretend exists.
Let’s see Mr and Mrs Bezos out there volunteering first. It’s a wholesome honeymoon activity!
I’ll volunteer some more work if you volunteer some more pay
That’s until the Amazon robots take the jobs and staff are downsized https://www.wsj.com/tech/amazon-warehouse-robots-automation-942b814f
What kind of brainwashed loser would fall for this
Well we currently share this country with people that voted three times for the Trump regime. I’m just saying we don’t currently have a dearth of incredibly stupid people.
When you’re stuck working at a desk all day, every day, forever, suddenly spending a day or two checking out a big ol’ warehouse sounds pretty fun. You’re still getting paid a white collar salary and benefits, and you don’t have to worry about grinding your bones down and all that because it’s only a few days, not decades of backbreaking g work.
You’re still getting paid a white collar salary and benefits
That’s not generally what “volunteer” means. From the article,
Amazon office workers in New York requested to donate time over to Fresh delivery process during firm’s busiest time.
Your quote is from the sub-headline, which was probably written by an editor if not AI. I wouldn’t put too much trust in it without supporting details. To the contrary, the detail about being able to step into a conference room to take work calls implies that they are expected to stay connected to their normal job and not bill it as vacation/time off.
The way it works in my company (not Amazon) is that office workers will occasionally be given “volunteer” opportunities to help with a temporary workload crunch and these will be paid at your normal salary. Sometimes it’s a good deal to get a break from routine, show the boss you’re a team player, and pad out weak progress on yearly goals. Other times it may require uncomfortable work and prolonged absence from home (without overtime pay). But they’re upfront about it and participation is truly voluntary.
Plenty. If you’ve ever worked retail you’d know the answer to this question. the “lifers” will volunteer. You know the types if you’ve worked in retail. They’ll do it thinking it’ll look good to some upper manager and allow them to get promoted for simply showing loyalty to the company. The ones who believe and tell you constantly how the company can do no wrong, how great it is to work for said company, and how the company has their best interests in mind.
Um, no dude. You hired me to code your cloud infrastructure. You have an army of delivery people. Leave me alone.
This doesn’t surprise me of the USA, at all.
“No, no, they’re not slaves. They’re highly skilled workers with short-term contracts. And they even get food.”. This is how I see it.
If you work without pay that’s slavery
They’re paid a salary, which is probably significantly more than what drivers are paid.
Generally this kind of thing would be overtime, though.
Salary workers are exempt from overtime in most cases and its legal to fire them for not working extra hours voluntarily, at least in America.
Labor is labor. Stay united, comrades!
Corporate people should spend some time periodically in the trenches anyway. Otherwise, they’re totally clueless about how everything works.
Yes, but not volunteered
It’s business hours Tue-Fri. Sounds like the volunteer isn’t for unpaid work, but for volunteering to do this instead of their normal duties for the week.
Tho I’m sure they’ll get dinged on their performance review if their regular work output reduces, so I’m guessing they will end up needing to put on unpaid hours to compensate.
I volunteer for stuff like this if it gets me out of meetings. I’ve donated over a gallon of blood at work.
