https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/2/22465357/amazon-industrial...

> Amazon tells its warehouse employees to think of themselves not as overworked cogs in an enormous, soul-crushing machine, but as “industrial athletes,” and to prepare their bodies for that experience like someone training for a sporting event, according to a pamphlet obtained by Motherboard. The comparison is a troubling euphemism for a company whose workers have almost double the amount of serious injuries as the rest of the warehousing industry and who reportedly are often unable to take bathroom breaks.

> The pamphlet tells employees that some of them will walk up to 13 miles throughout the course of the day, burning an average of 400 calories an hour. It also suggests all sorts of ways to help workers prepare for the athlete life, including changes to their diets and sleep schedules and making sure they’re not dehydrated throughout the day by keeping an eye on the color of their urine. It also suggests that employees buy shoes “at the end of the day when [their] feet are swollen” to avoid tightness and blisters — advice that will be familiar to distance runners or multi-day hikers.

I see a lot of illegal workers in the ER who get injured at work but refuse to fill out the workman's comp forms - you can guarantee that their employers have a zero rate for serious injuries using that metric

[Edit - If you're looking to really improve conditions, maybe focus on the workers who don't show up in the official numbers? Reminds me of the old story about the drunk guy looking for his lost keys by the lamppost, not where he dropped them "because the light is better here"]

We are full on into an unopposed neoliberal world order. The pendulum has swung so far in this direction that an alternative or an opposition to this philosophy simply does not exist anymore in the public sphere.

Amazon isn’t obligated to provide my morbidly obese friend with a job, and he knows that, and he’s doing his best to keep on without destroying his body.

Example: Some routes between Harvard Yard and Long Wharf take you through residential and nightlife areas where a lot of people life, past biotechs, MIT, a few FAANG outposts, over a bridge with great views, across the Esplanade park, past at least a major hospital, financial district, through North End (Italian restaurants), tourist area, and to harbor walk, to sit on Long Wharf and watch the boats and airplanes.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Harvard+Yard,+Massachusetts+...

(Separate from walking, a lot of people bicycle here, and you'll see heavy bikes on some streets during commuter hours, but don't beware that bicyclist safety is so-so here. If you decide to bike instead of walk, watch out for car doors opening into your path, trucks making turns, negligent car drivers, other bikers ignoring road rules, mild resentment of bicyclists, etc. Personally, I just walk, and know that there's a good chance that a driver even going through the busiest Central Square intersection is looking at their phone. :)

Put it this way: Don't eat a 250 cal chocolate bar or take a 60 minute walk? Same impact.

Incidentally I have walked 103 miles in the last 24 days...

Maybe a crappy way if you are obese.

But AFAIK over years walking will strongly help maintain a good weight and keep you healthy. It certainly does help reduce weight and improve fitness compared to just potatoing. You can do more, but as a minimum starting point it is pretty bloody good.

One observation: people are generally not obese in central London and part of the reason is the few km walking per day to get to and from work via the tube.

Deuterated water studies back this up. Humans burn roughly the same amount of calories active or passive. The body only shunts the available calories around.

Now, exercise has lots of documented benefits. Weight loss just isn't one of them.

This really isn't that much. The average Disneyland visitor probably walks 5 miles per day. A nurse might walk 4 miles in a shift. I'd expect most people who aren't overweight would be able go adapt to 5 miles per day pretty quickly, and 10 is fairly doable.

What a bizarre comparison. Most people are pretty tired after visiting Disneyland. You also don’t do that 300 times a year.

Well into obese (but less than 300) and it’s really not an issue at all — walking is a very light activity (and far easier than standing). Also notably, this habit has not lead to any weight-loss, or perhaps I eat to make up for it.

Ask me to run however and I’m dying in short order.

One example was dog food stored under a low platform so people needed to Cary 50lb bags while bent over. It’s possible to do that safely, but when you’re tired and in a hurry it’s easy to hurt yourself doing that.

Lifting heavy objects, or having heavy objects fall on you is apparently common.

So, just to add another opinion

I've seen only positive comments (sample size around 3) about working in Amazon's warehouse in Poland

There needs to be naming and shaming of those that perpetuate this practice. I know retailers (Tractor Supply) for cashiers.

If you're doing warehouse work, you are part of the logistics backbone, you deserve not to have your chain jerked around. Arguably, no one should be getting their chain jerked around, but I'll call it a win to purge this pathological HR hacking from another business layer.

Suppose the benefits cost the company the equivalent of $3/hour. Then at the same cost they can either offer a job that pays $15/hour without benefits or a job that pays $12/hour with benefits. They're not idiots; they're going to offer the one that best allows them hire and retain workers.

That it happens to be the one with the higher pay should be telling us something -- that some workers value the money over the benefits.

Which makes a lot of sense. Many people have a family health plan from their spouse's job. They may value the flexibility of choosing when to take unpaid time off instead of working for $12/hour with paid time off, which is a monetary loss equivalent to more than 10 weeks of unpaid time off when working at $15/hour instead. They simply get less from the benefits than they get from being paid the money it costs the employer to provide them.

Stop requiring employers to provide "benefits" that many employees don't want and people wouldn't have to voluntarily work around it like this, at the cost of being unable to work 40 hours a week even if you want to.

But that's not the case today in the US. My point is that the government mandating that full-time jobs provide benefits (which is the case today in the US) doesn't fix the adverse selection problem. All it does is lead to a bunch of jobs right under the cutoff for full-time.

If as an employer you just can't get a break on the rates it costs to insure you, that's a really strong signal you have something wrong. Doing it through the government in theory gives people freedom of moving from employer to employer, but I guarantee you there is some juju that needs characterization in wresting some of the incentive shaping powers of insurers and vesting them in Government.

It's probably easier to name and promote the few places that don't do the "39.5hr week".

Government, by tieing things that should be universal to mandates to employers who employ a person for a certain number of hours in a week. Which, in addition to promoting this kind of behavior as a cost/utility optimization, encourages a feudal lord-servant relationship between employers and employees rather than a capitalist market-exchange relationship, and necessarily (even ignoring the effect of the optimization incentives) assures that what should be universal is instead limited to a narrower fully-employed class.

If the government provides the benefit universally and taxes to cover the costs, the perverse incentives to limit employment and further narrow access to the intended general benefit is eliminated.

Naming and shaming the people who follow the incentives government creates is pointless; name and shame the government for setting up the broken system of incentives. Any other target is just a perpetual game of whack-a-mole.