> "You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us."
The more you unpack this statement, the worse it is.
1) It's a lie.
2) It's tells you 'you're dumb if you believe [the truth].'
3) The problem they're lying about is a really awful one.
4) They seem to not even know what it's like to do this role (but that doesn't prevent them from confidently making things up).
5) It shows a worldview that's super, well, privileged. Whoever wrote that probably couldn't imagine not having the option to just walk away from a job.
6) Whoever wrote that apparently doesn't believe that anyone doesn't have the option to just walk away from a job.
They seem so incredibly disconnected from this part of their workforce, that I couldn't imagine them making good calls about what these workers should be doing.
I live in London and the lack of public toilets is just beyond belief. Most of them were shut years ago by councils trying to save money.
And the results is rather abysmal: the public now have to rely on the businesses to provide such facilities,which isn't the end of the world in central parts of the city,where there are cafés after cafes,but what about further out to suburbs? If it's bad to the general public, it's 10 times worse for the drivers of delivery vans, lorries,or even bus drivers. Literally nobody in the country is thinking about such infrastructure, nobody wants to initiate it, because,well,you know, it's not as popular and vote winning as 'more pressing issues'. This is also one of the reasons why there are so few women in the logistics sector, because you can't just pull it out behind a bush.
I had to visit my country's consulate in Manchester couple months ago in the middle of lockdown, and in city centre there was NOWHERE to pee. Zero. I went literally from business to business begging to use their facilities and nope, due to covid customers are not allowed in. Nope nope and nope. Went through several places and ended up going in some back alley. Absolutely ridiculous and I have no idea how people manage day to day.
In the US many businesses are required to have bathrooms but they can and do make them for customers only. That combined with a lack of public bathrooms (not just a lack - they effectively do not exist here) leaves many workers with no other option.
That isn’t the Amazon driver problem. Their issue is that the drivers get a nearly inhuman work quota with automated enforcement and no recourse. UPS drivers work their butts off, but don’t get fired for taking a dump.
End of the day, it’s bad management on Amazon’s part. They’ve built out a distribution network very quickly, but being dependent on desperation on the part of a miserable workforce has pretty obvious drawbacks.
Even in central London when I've worked for many years I've had situations where me and my 2 year old son were asked to leave an establishment right after I stated we have a bathroom emergency and I just need 3 minutes to deal with it.
TBH I don't blame private businesses. It's not like they are obligated to share their facilities with non-paying customers. It's just a shame London became like that.
Needing to pee while on the road isn’t totally unique to Amazon drivers; and decades of anti-homeless policies mean there are very few places in many cities where you can just run in to use the bathroom. Many of these drivers operate in the suburbs, where door codes aren’t as common on bathrooms, but it still made me think.
(Obviously these drivers are being put under time crunches, hence the bottles, and that is a separate issue)
> First, the tweet was incorrect. It did not contemplate our large driver population and instead wrongly focused only on our fulfillment centers.
Nowhere in the tweet did it mention fulfillment centers:
> 1/2 You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us. The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do, and have great wages and health care from day one.
And WOW. At the end of the blog post, there are tweets of people saying it's not just Amazon. So, "we're sorry, but it's not just me, so it's not that bad."
My dad has been a letter carrier for over 40 years. I'm very aware that drivers very openly talk to one another about peeing in the back of their trucks into bottles. Like with Amazon, the only policy is that you'll get a good talking to (not formal reprimand) if you accidentally leave a bottle of piss in the truck for the next person who drives the truck. Nobody wants to drive a car after a bottle of piss has been baking in hot Florida temperatures for 24 hours with the windows closed.
But, all that ignores a few things:
1) Look at that original tweet. So dismissive of the POSSIBILITY that anybody would EVER do such a thing. "Amazon is such a great place to work! Who could ever believe such an absurd claim!" The people who work in corporate clearly are so disconnected from the lives of their drivers that they have no idea how this is a weekly occurrence for a large percentage of drivers. Imagine what being so disconnected means in terms of setting policy for those drivers! Now apply that to a million other policies. People who do office work have no idea what it's like to do the job.
2) There were level of managers out in the field that were very aware of this. The official policy, if you read the emails, was (a) stop pooping in the Amazon bags, they'll trace you if you do, and (b) don't leave your piss bottles behind for other drivers to find. This is related to the first point, but what does it say about communication that something so commonplace didn't spread up the chain of command as a problem?
3) Amazon is saying they don't know the solution, but they'll try to come up with one. This scares me. The most likely scenario is a crackdown on drivers, as opposed to giving paid time for this purpose. Keep in mind, it could be that a driver is half an hour from a public restroom. This is expensive to solve. But what's not expensive is a crackdown on drivers. Look out for "zero tolerance" policies for those who get caught. It won't have an effect on occurrences of it happening, but could at least stop people from leaving their piss bottles behind as frequently.
Amazon didn't start this spat though, so I'm gonna give them more leeway than you apparently want to.
It's pretty ridiculous that all the journos/politicians are only focusing on Amazon "doing this" when it's literally (by your own admission) done by anyone who drives all day long.
It is also probable that the drivers are unable to find public restrooms to use, even if they had time to have bathroom breaks.
For example, I live in a very big city, at the city center but there are not any public restrooms nearby. People with emergencies are have to do their business in the public.
It's a technology company. My assumption is that they're going to look for a way to "disrupt" peeing in bottles. Perhaps some kind of easy to install Amazon branded micro bathroom for the delivery trucks.
What exactly is wrong with peeing in a bottle? It's a practical solution to a very easily solved biological need. Hygienically, peeing is very different from pooing, and can be dealt with much more easily. If anything, having to beg some business to let you pee in their flushing ceramic bowl seems pretty ridiculous.
This seems more like social hangups making our lives more difficult.
If you spend a bit of time travelling/living in a van, or maybe camping in sub zero temperatures, you'll quickly come to appreciate the humble pee-bottle.
Having a job / working environment that pressures you into not taking breaks is obviously wrong though.
Are the bottles sanitary? Are they washing their hands before returning to public contact work? Do they carry the bottles around or leave them somewhere? What if they don't have a bottle or suddenly need another? What about the #2 issue? Is the lack of bathrooms more difficult for women, older workers, or some other protected class?
It's shameful that our society tolerates such an anti-human behavior from an organization.
The people making decisions about this policy should have to adhere to it themselves.
I keep 2 to 3 empty water bottles in the car just for the purpose of peeing -- they're very practical and convenient. Then they get tossed in the bin a the next gas station. Much more convenient and sanitary than finding and using a filthy public space.
Ignorant question: Is it as easy for women to do as men? I would imagine not, but I don't have the equipment to say from experience. If you set the bar too high, does that mean it's only achievable by men peeing in bottles?
> "We know that drivers can and do have trouble finding restrooms because of traffic or sometimes rural routes, and this has been especially the case during Covid when many public restrooms have been closed."
"We are sorry that everything except our impossible scheduling algo enforced by AI-backed driver surveillance causes employees to pee in bottles."
But having met drivers (taxi, truck, etc) from around in world and in different countries. This is quite common.
Again, not great.
But a fairly "standard" thing in the transportation industry.
I remember seeing bottles in New York City yellow cabs and wondered why they always had empty bottles beside their seats -- until one day a friend told me.
I was grossed out. But then I noticed it more and more and more.
One day I was driving from Portland, Maine to New York City and I had to go, but the next rest stop was miles away, and this was a place in Connecticut that literally had no place to even pull over. It was that, or...
I looked around and there was a bottle, and I did it. Hehe.
Not sure if it's a turning point for unionisation, but it's definitely a turning point for talking about biological needs.
In Sweden, the equivalent of the US presidential debate takes 3 hours, including pre-greating and post-interview. As a man, supposedly gifted with a larger bladder, I would need a lot of planning to be 100% sure not to need a toilet break for 3 hours.
I can't help wonder: Is Sweden selecting the prime minister based on leadership skills or bladder size?
I can't help but comment rudely here that one of the world's largest manufacturers of devices designed to help discretely in this situation, Tena, is Swedish -- maybe that is your answer! ;-) [1].
I wouldn't put it past them that some politicians are so power hungry and sociopathic that they would use a pee bag in order to show that they are stronger than their opponent.
Most of these complaints are not from/about truckers (though they probably pee in bottles too), it's about the delivery van drivers. The issue is that the route schedules they are given are so tight that there is no time to stop at a bathroom.
It is true that a lot of public toilets have been closed for the past year but these complaints go back to long before that happened.
Every week, I see a report on how company 'X' cannot meet need 'Y' and how we need more of infrastructure 'Z'. The investigation always stops at this exact point.
Peek a little deeper and the reasons are clear. The American philosophy of urban design is broken at its core.
Public infrastructure enables low cost amenities by distributing costs over the number of intended users, ie. residents of said geographic plot. 'Density' is a non negotiable prerequisite for quality infrastructure that won't spiral a nation into debt.
A public restroom can only be maintained if the users/restroom is high. The exact same logic applies to literally everything. There is an inflection point (Mumbai, my home town, being an excellent example of excess density), but no American city comes anywhere close to it.
________
I am usually cautious about boiling down complex problems to single causes. But, this one I feel confident about.
Over the long run, nothing has (and will continue to) hurt the US more than the galaxy brained American dream of an R1 zoned car centric town.
I think this article is trying to change the narrative focus of public access to restrooms, instead of the real issues around time to attend to personal needs that I gather Amazon's driver work conditions help to create. I would be good to keep the focus on that.
> Amazon said in its blog post, adding that its previous response only referred to staff at its warehouses or fulfillment centers.
So... I would be willing to bet it would not be too hard to find workers at warehouses/fulfillment centers who have peed in bottles too. They seem to be setting themselves up again to me...
I mean, this is just me googling, finding this story from 2018..
Aha, and this story has a reddit post of a picture from a driver claiming he found a pee bottle accidentally left in a tote put on his truck "I've found piss bottles from other drivers, but now from the warehouse too" https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7amyn/amazon-denies-workers...
There is an obvious fix for this, which is to allow drivers the time to find and use a bathroom, even if it is far from their route.
There is an obvious reason driver-employing companies don’t do this, which is that it would raise costs and increase delivery times, two things that all customers (both shippers and receivers) absolutely hate. The shipper that implements this unilaterally will instantly become uncompetitive vs shippers that maintain the status quo.
Honestly this is a classic case for top-down regulation. Because it forces all companies to solve the problem simultaneously, it should have little effect on the competitive balance. And companies with unhappy customers could blame the government. That also makes it hard to get regulation done. Voters essentially would have to support raising their own prices in order to help truck drivers.
Yes, and it really hit home with me. As a cloud engineer and someone who really likes AWS, that article made me take a step back and think. I'm not saying I'm ditching AWS tomorrow, but it's really the first time I've really considered other solutions. And it's over something as simple as lying. Not features or even bugs, simple dishonesty.
I’m curious, has anyone actually tried urinating in a bottle here while on the road?
I tried it once, and found it so convenient I’ve done it multiple times now. These Amazon workers may be onto something. All those times I had to urinate so badly while stuck in traffic, I never realized a bottle could be so easy to use. I imagine if you’re in a delivery truck where you could stand up walk into the back it would be even easier, almost trivial. So what’s the big deal?
To discard the urine, I will typically pull over to the side of the road and open the door slightly to empty the bottle discretely. I’m trying to think what the best bottle to keep in the car for this purpose could be. Something made of glass and with a long neck is ideal, to avoid spills. A wide mouth is also helpful. Maybe something like a yellow hydroflask.
From now on, when I do a long road trip, urination will no longer be a reason for me to have to stop and pull over. If this saves me time, I imagine it would save an Amazon driver time AND money.
I already commented on the underlying issue but I’ll also add, separately, that this is a great example of the dangers of a “hit ‘em back” PR strategy.
Often it is senior execs who are advocating for this approach (saw rumors it was Bezos himself pushing for it at Amazon), and at some point it becomes impossible for the PR team to say “no” to their boss. Someone has to do the dumb thing anyway and see what happens, or resign.
I bet this case study gets pulled out by the PR team within Amazon for years and years whenever someone asks them to “be more aggressive” or whatever.
EDIT: Oh, I guess is it illegal in the USA to install a paid bathroom facility. I think that's dumb.
Ignoring the startup cost, if you have a paid bathroom in a relatively public area, and it costs say, 1 dollar for a usage, conservatively with 2 minute usage time that's about 30 bucks an hour.
Surely 30 bucks an hour revenue minus expenses to have someone refill water/pump out waste/occasional clean would make this a decent business similar to like a vending machine biz?
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|5 years ago|reply
The more you unpack this statement, the worse it is.
1) It's a lie.
2) It's tells you 'you're dumb if you believe [the truth].'
3) The problem they're lying about is a really awful one.
4) They seem to not even know what it's like to do this role (but that doesn't prevent them from confidently making things up).
5) It shows a worldview that's super, well, privileged. Whoever wrote that probably couldn't imagine not having the option to just walk away from a job.
6) Whoever wrote that apparently doesn't believe that anyone doesn't have the option to just walk away from a job.
They seem so incredibly disconnected from this part of their workforce, that I couldn't imagine them making good calls about what these workers should be doing.
[+] [-] cosmodisk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gambiting|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattacular|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|5 years ago|reply
End of the day, it’s bad management on Amazon’s part. They’ve built out a distribution network very quickly, but being dependent on desperation on the part of a miserable workforce has pretty obvious drawbacks.
[+] [-] bitcharmer|5 years ago|reply
TBH I don't blame private businesses. It's not like they are obligated to share their facilities with non-paying customers. It's just a shame London became like that.
[+] [-] amelius|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kilotaras|5 years ago|reply
Now in London, and whenever I see men urinating on trees I cannot help but think "put the fricking urinals on the streets"
[0] https://www.travelblog.org/Photos/642355
[+] [-] cmckn|5 years ago|reply
(Obviously these drivers are being put under time crunches, hence the bottles, and that is a separate issue)
[+] [-] colejohnson66|5 years ago|reply
> First, the tweet was incorrect. It did not contemplate our large driver population and instead wrongly focused only on our fulfillment centers.
Nowhere in the tweet did it mention fulfillment centers:
> 1/2 You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us. The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do, and have great wages and health care from day one.
And WOW. At the end of the blog post, there are tweets of people saying it's not just Amazon. So, "we're sorry, but it's not just me, so it's not that bad."
[0]: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/our-recen...
[+] [-] quonn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k__|5 years ago|reply
I didn't even know Amazon emoloyed delivery drivers.
[+] [-] elicash|5 years ago|reply
But, all that ignores a few things:
1) Look at that original tweet. So dismissive of the POSSIBILITY that anybody would EVER do such a thing. "Amazon is such a great place to work! Who could ever believe such an absurd claim!" The people who work in corporate clearly are so disconnected from the lives of their drivers that they have no idea how this is a weekly occurrence for a large percentage of drivers. Imagine what being so disconnected means in terms of setting policy for those drivers! Now apply that to a million other policies. People who do office work have no idea what it's like to do the job.
2) There were level of managers out in the field that were very aware of this. The official policy, if you read the emails, was (a) stop pooping in the Amazon bags, they'll trace you if you do, and (b) don't leave your piss bottles behind for other drivers to find. This is related to the first point, but what does it say about communication that something so commonplace didn't spread up the chain of command as a problem?
3) Amazon is saying they don't know the solution, but they'll try to come up with one. This scares me. The most likely scenario is a crackdown on drivers, as opposed to giving paid time for this purpose. Keep in mind, it could be that a driver is half an hour from a public restroom. This is expensive to solve. But what's not expensive is a crackdown on drivers. Look out for "zero tolerance" policies for those who get caught. It won't have an effect on occurrences of it happening, but could at least stop people from leaving their piss bottles behind as frequently.
[+] [-] fastball|5 years ago|reply
It's pretty ridiculous that all the journos/politicians are only focusing on Amazon "doing this" when it's literally (by your own admission) done by anyone who drives all day long.
[+] [-] csunbird|5 years ago|reply
For example, I live in a very big city, at the city center but there are not any public restrooms nearby. People with emergencies are have to do their business in the public.
[+] [-] shadowgovt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johtso|5 years ago|reply
This seems more like social hangups making our lives more difficult.
If you spend a bit of time travelling/living in a van, or maybe camping in sub zero temperatures, you'll quickly come to appreciate the humble pee-bottle.
Having a job / working environment that pressures you into not taking breaks is obviously wrong though.
[+] [-] mLuby|5 years ago|reply
It's shameful that our society tolerates such an anti-human behavior from an organization.
The people making decisions about this policy should have to adhere to it themselves.
[+] [-] akira2501|5 years ago|reply
It's practical for half the population.
> This seems more like social hangups making our lives more difficult.
I wouldn't consider "sanitary conditions" a "social hangup" or taking an appropriate bathroom break "making life difficult."
> or maybe camping in sub zero temperatures, you'll quickly come to appreciate the humble pee-bottle.
I have never urinated in a bottle while camping, even in extreme weather.
> Having a job / working environment that pressures you into not taking breaks is obviously wrong though.
Hiring people and then failing to plan an appropriate amount of time for them to take a break is wrong, and should be illegal.
[+] [-] eplanit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jancsika|5 years ago|reply
"We are sorry that everything except our impossible scheduling algo enforced by AI-backed driver surveillance causes employees to pee in bottles."
[+] [-] eric4smith|5 years ago|reply
But having met drivers (taxi, truck, etc) from around in world and in different countries. This is quite common.
Again, not great.
But a fairly "standard" thing in the transportation industry.
I remember seeing bottles in New York City yellow cabs and wondered why they always had empty bottles beside their seats -- until one day a friend told me.
I was grossed out. But then I noticed it more and more and more.
One day I was driving from Portland, Maine to New York City and I had to go, but the next rest stop was miles away, and this was a place in Connecticut that literally had no place to even pull over. It was that, or...
I looked around and there was a bottle, and I did it. Hehe.
[+] [-] anticristi|5 years ago|reply
In Sweden, the equivalent of the US presidential debate takes 3 hours, including pre-greating and post-interview. As a man, supposedly gifted with a larger bladder, I would need a lot of planning to be 100% sure not to need a toilet break for 3 hours.
I can't help wonder: Is Sweden selecting the prime minister based on leadership skills or bladder size?
[+] [-] azalemeth|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.tena.nu/vardpersonal/produkter/slip-allt-i-ett-i...
[+] [-] sschueller|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cush|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] opencl|5 years ago|reply
It is true that a lot of public toilets have been closed for the past year but these complaints go back to long before that happened.
[+] [-] Trav5|5 years ago|reply
Note: I would not want to be forced to do that by my employer.
[+] [-] refurb|5 years ago|reply
You can find bottles filled with yellow liquid all along major highways.
[+] [-] madengr|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] screye|5 years ago|reply
Peek a little deeper and the reasons are clear. The American philosophy of urban design is broken at its core.
Public infrastructure enables low cost amenities by distributing costs over the number of intended users, ie. residents of said geographic plot. 'Density' is a non negotiable prerequisite for quality infrastructure that won't spiral a nation into debt.
A public restroom can only be maintained if the users/restroom is high. The exact same logic applies to literally everything. There is an inflection point (Mumbai, my home town, being an excellent example of excess density), but no American city comes anywhere close to it.
________
I am usually cautious about boiling down complex problems to single causes. But, this one I feel confident about.
Over the long run, nothing has (and will continue to) hurt the US more than the galaxy brained American dream of an R1 zoned car centric town.
[+] [-] whimsicalism|5 years ago|reply
I am curious what others think of the veracity of that statement, it leaves me scratching my head a bit. Agreed on the last sentence though.
[+] [-] trinsic1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrochkind1|5 years ago|reply
So... I would be willing to bet it would not be too hard to find workers at warehouses/fulfillment centers who have peed in bottles too. They seem to be setting themselves up again to me...
I mean, this is just me googling, finding this story from 2018..
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-workers-hav...
Aha, and this story has a reddit post of a picture from a driver claiming he found a pee bottle accidentally left in a tote put on his truck "I've found piss bottles from other drivers, but now from the warehouse too" https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7amyn/amazon-denies-workers...
[+] [-] snowwrestler|5 years ago|reply
There is an obvious reason driver-employing companies don’t do this, which is that it would raise costs and increase delivery times, two things that all customers (both shippers and receivers) absolutely hate. The shipper that implements this unilaterally will instantly become uncompetitive vs shippers that maintain the status quo.
Honestly this is a classic case for top-down regulation. Because it forces all companies to solve the problem simultaneously, it should have little effect on the competitive balance. And companies with unhappy customers could blame the government. That also makes it hard to get regulation done. Voters essentially would have to support raising their own prices in order to help truck drivers.
[+] [-] macintux|5 years ago|reply
https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/you-cant-trust-amazon-whe...
[+] [-] Corrado|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blibble|5 years ago|reply
oh dear
[+] [-] xwdv|5 years ago|reply
I tried it once, and found it so convenient I’ve done it multiple times now. These Amazon workers may be onto something. All those times I had to urinate so badly while stuck in traffic, I never realized a bottle could be so easy to use. I imagine if you’re in a delivery truck where you could stand up walk into the back it would be even easier, almost trivial. So what’s the big deal?
To discard the urine, I will typically pull over to the side of the road and open the door slightly to empty the bottle discretely. I’m trying to think what the best bottle to keep in the car for this purpose could be. Something made of glass and with a long neck is ideal, to avoid spills. A wide mouth is also helpful. Maybe something like a yellow hydroflask.
From now on, when I do a long road trip, urination will no longer be a reason for me to have to stop and pull over. If this saves me time, I imagine it would save an Amazon driver time AND money.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] snowwrestler|5 years ago|reply
Often it is senior execs who are advocating for this approach (saw rumors it was Bezos himself pushing for it at Amazon), and at some point it becomes impossible for the PR team to say “no” to their boss. Someone has to do the dumb thing anyway and see what happens, or resign.
I bet this case study gets pulled out by the PR team within Amazon for years and years whenever someone asks them to “be more aggressive” or whatever.
[+] [-] endisneigh|5 years ago|reply
EDIT: Oh, I guess is it illegal in the USA to install a paid bathroom facility. I think that's dumb.
Ignoring the startup cost, if you have a paid bathroom in a relatively public area, and it costs say, 1 dollar for a usage, conservatively with 2 minute usage time that's about 30 bucks an hour.
Surely 30 bucks an hour revenue minus expenses to have someone refill water/pump out waste/occasional clean would make this a decent business similar to like a vending machine biz?