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.
You mean “buy nothing day”? Cuz that’s my plan.
I can’t help but think that, just maybe, the idea is to volunteer for extra shifts.
Yes, perhaps Amazon is just terrible, I think it’s also possible this article is painting an inaccurate picture to make things seem worse than they are.
salaried emps don’t have “shifts”. the safe thing is to assume amazon is doing the profitable thing and that means exploitation.
I highly doubt that Amazon is dumb enough to ask people to volunteer their time for free. There are way tooany ways that ends in lawsuits. HR and the lawyers would put a stop to that faster than you can say “wage theft”.
I’ve worked jobs where, at times of peak business, office staff were asked to volunteer for paid shifts rather than hire more people for a very short time. It’s not weird or malicious, it’s fairly normal.
“Volunteer” doesn’t always imply “work for free”.
you don’t understand how exempt salaried employment works in the US.
Exempt employees are are not entitled to overtime pay or minimum wage protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act. It is supposed to be limited to those who work in professional, administrative, executive, outside sales, or computer-related roles.
Asking a salaried employee to do something like this as a one off isn’t going to revoke their exempt status.
I’ve worked jobs where, at times of peak business, office staff were asked to volunteer for paid shifts
You’ve worked some shit jobs.
when a multi-billion dollar corp asks for volunteers you’d better believe it’s because it benefits the corp. the owners of amazon are trash.
How about paying your staff for the work they should do?
How much money does Bezos make per hour? Ah yes, about 7,9 billion USD. (2023).
Stop making rich people richer.
Surely that maths is wrong and/or we have different meanings of the word “make”.
Pretty sure they mean million.
Any time a corporation uses the term “volunteer”, something very fishy is likely going on.
Look at all these volunteers! Why should I pay people?
The funniest thing about this is that Prime day is a “holiday” of their own making. It’s not like it’s the Christmas push caused by consumers.
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.
Does anyone actually care about Prime Day? Isn’t it a bunch of cheap crap that’s marked up then “down”?
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.
4K 34-inch OLED Alienware monitor for $550 on Prime Day. Originally $1100. Only thing I care for.
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.
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.
That’s until the Amazon robots take the jobs and staff are downsized https://www.wsj.com/tech/amazon-warehouse-robots-automation-942b814f
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.
I’ll volunteer some more work if you volunteer some more pay
“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.
Um, no dude. You hired me to code your cloud infrastructure. You have an army of delivery people. Leave me alone.
What kind of brainwashed loser would fall for this
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.
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.
