Hacker News Reader

Comment by bredren | Hacker News Reader

Another option was sending it to media, which I presumed would have gotten attention. I thought the person had a better chance of holding on to the job if it was handled without publicity.

I don't have a lab, so I can't determine if it was pee. And I can't imagine you'd get to hold on to a job at Target if you poured pee out in the parking lot in front of customers.

Our friend with the USPS said "[at USPS] we’re allowed to travel as far as we need to find a restroom so no need to do it."

If this is the case at Amazon, then there shouldn't be a need to pee in bottles.

However, if this is not the case at Amazon, then what was apparently Bezos' tweet [1] was not reflective of the situation on the ground. I've written him directly before, and depending on the response, I may do it in this instance because he's not seeing what I'm seeing.

[1] https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1374911222361956359

View on HN

> Another option was sending it to media, which I presumed would have gotten attention. I thought the person had a better chance of holding on to the job if it was handled without publicity.

Your faith in Amazon to do right is impressive - perhaps even naive. Amazon official policy is not for drivers to pee in bottles, however, it strongly incentivizes this behavior. Had the driver asked to use your bathroom, he likely would have lost precious time and have been indirectly penalized for it.

Considering all this, you took a photo that embarrasses Amazon and sent it to Amazon and asked them to "do something"? Amazon's will already assume you sent it to the press and will circle the wagons - the answer will be it was a rogue employee and he has been let go (or disciplined, if he's lucky).

> the answer will be it was a rogue employee and he has been let go (or disciplined, if he's lucky

Rogue contractor.

Rogue contractor who has had sexual misconduct charges leveled at them for urinating in public - and let that be a lesson to all you other contractors to stay in line.

Hooray dystopias.

stay in line - as in: bring more than one bottle to piss in so you don't have to hastily dump and re-use it? Ick...

I think stay in line - at least the way I'm thinking of it, is a lot more negative than just bring an extra bottle. It's a demand for employees to skirt the rules or else they'll be punished and if they're caught skirting the rules they'll also be punished - oh and since you're a contractor you lack any rights normally afforded employees.

Basically, sit down, shut up and take it - we've got the power and if you try and object we'll can you and replace you faster than you can blink. And we might even find a way to make sure you can't qualify for unemployment.

> Had the driver asked to use your bathroom, he likely would have lost precious time and have been indirectly penalized for it.

What's the alternative? No matter how reasonable the expectations are, there will always be drivers who would rather pee in a bottle and end their shift 10 minutes early than spend 10 minutes finding a bathroom.

That's assuming that their scheduling makes it so that they could actually ever end their shift early. Given how wide-spread this issue is I think it's more fair to assume that taking a 10 minute break would be penalized by Amazon.

Um... I do not agree that there will always be drivers who prefer to pee in a bottle. I do not believe that there are office/home workers who always prefer to pee in bottles. The alternative is access to bathrooms.

There are a lot of solutions to this problem. The same type of solutions any company that employees drivers have had for years.

> I do not agree that there will always be drivers who prefer to pee in a bottle

Nonsense. I know people who would rather pee in a bottle than wait for the next gas station on the I5. I personally have pissed on the sides of roads in lots of places on long car trips.

Dumping urine in an urban environment is pretty rude. But if I could save myself 10 mins a day by pissing in a bottle rather than some creepy gas station bathroom, why not? It's just piss.

Do you work in a job where you can't stop the clock for 10 minutes to take care of bodily functions? The only choices here are between getting penalized for lateness, pissing in a bottle, or finding a new job, and they amount to the same thing - bottle or new job. Plus it's absolutely disgusting. I think if it were personal choice alone, people would be more discreet. This story implies they're so pressed for time they can't even toss the bottle in the trash because they have to refill it... I can't even begin to imagine how that becomes a normal everyday activity at a company without somebody questioning how things got this way.

You have no idea what was in the mind of the driver, but you're passing pretty strong judgement.

> Plus it's absolutely disgusting.

This is what it really comes down to - your victorian sensibilities about bodily fluids can't possibly imagine that anyone would gasp OMG pee in a bottle! unless the alternative is starvation or whippings.

There are plenty of people who don't feel this way. Hell, I'm sitting outside with a flush toilet less than 100 ft from me and I just pissed on a tree instead. It's just piss.

If I was a driver constantly on the move I'd probably pee in a bottle on occasion too. I can be lazy and I don't believe that peeing in places outside of a toilet is necessarily gross, so I could see it happening if I was working in a residential suburban area with no proper restrooms at hand. If work conditions were otherwise good I wouldn't feel dehumanized or exploited for it.

I'm not saying Amazon's practices don't incentivize this or that they shouldn't be examined, but as is common these days many people take a paternalistic and dogmatic view that will not accept under any circumstance that some people may be doing this freely.

Uhm. Why do you limit your reasoning to people doing this to stop their shift early?

A non-hellish non-dystopia where it would be presumed people need to urinate somewhere within their fixed 8 hour shift and maybe even more than once if they chose to work overtime?

Another option would've been not to do anything. If a dog peed on the street would you be upset about it and report it? How about if a bird defecated on the street? Why is human urine so much worse?

It strikes me as cruel to report and make trouble for a man who is already so overworked as to need to pee in a bottle.

Can you share the email you sent them? Almost certain you got them fired in a pandemic.

Jeff Bezos is always saying things that are obviously not the facts on the ground. He didn't know this, Amazon couldn't have known that, meanwhile they're always caught covering something up or responding to the same complaints internally.

Amazon's drivers are contractors if anyone is pushing them to pee in bottles, it's themselves. So there's no actual answer to this issue. Are they not being paid enough, such that they can't pee, or are they making an reasonable decision to pee in a bottle in order to save 15 minutes and make more money. Considering they keep taking the contracts one has to assume that they're profitable, at least usually.

> I can't imagine you'd get to hold on to a job at Target if you poured pee out in the parking lot in front of customers.

No, nor should anyone want you to. Even beyond any hygiene and smell issues, it's bad PR and that's not what you're paid for.

There's a rash of blaming companies for being reasonable. Including one of a CVS manager being threatened with doxxing for calling the police on a thief. This concern for the driver seems more like a larger narrative of pro-unionism.

Most people in this thread are intentionally misrepresenting the issue, using the words 'job', and 'living wage'. These are contractors and if they don't make money today they can courier for another company tomorrow. If they don't it's because they voted with their wallets.

The issue with blaming contractors in this case is that they can't afford to lose the job. It probably pays well enough but their options are 1. get fired because they couldn't meet target deadlines, 2. pee in a bottle and risk getting caught.

Given those two options, it's no surprise they pick option 2. Amazon knows this yet they continue to set unrealistic targets.

How do you know they are setting “unrealistic targets”? What if only some employees pee in bottles because they’re bad at their job/unproductive? Why would it be Amazon’s fault if a driver who’s falling behind uses this as a hack to appear productive when they really should just get a different job?

We have reports from the workers stating so. We also have a denial from Amazon saying they don't have workers peeing in bottles. Seems that denial hasn't held up too well.

We have anecdotal reports from a few workers saying so. We also have leaked documents saying that Amazon does not allow peeing in bottles as policy. If a random employee does not follow the policy and pees in a bottle, that seems like the employee's fault. If the employee is doing so to make up lost time so they can appear more productive, it seems like that's an issue of under performance that they're hiding by peeing in a bottle. Either way, it isn't clear to me that this is either widespread among Amazon's employees or the fault of the company instead of the individual.

As for the denial - I am unclear on if they're talking about employees as a separate group from their drivers (who may be contractors according to other comments here?). Either way, I think it's reasonable for a company to make such a statement if peeing in a bottle is not a standard practice that is allowed by their policy and if it is only done rarely or by very few people (not reflective of general practice). If the delivery targets are such that most drivers have to do this, I might think differently, but so far I haven't seen evidence of this.

> it seems like that's an issue of under performance that they're hiding by peeing in a bottle.

It seems equally as likely that it is an issue of over-expecting what a worker can reasonably perform. Why is under performance the more likely scenario in your mind?

>it isn't clear to me that this is either widespread

If this were the only occurrence of "Amazon Contractor" and some combination of "pee", "bottle", "no time for bathroom breaks", etc. I would be more inclined to take the route of "a few bad workers". However, these stories have consistently made news since at least 2018.

Additional factors, which not conclusive themselves, that lead me to doubt the Amazon narrative include such things like 74% of respondents to a survey conducted by Organise reporting that they avoid using the washroom for fear of missing targets[1] - indicating that perhaps at least some fault lies with Amazon for setting unrealistic and unnecessarily burdensome targets.

[1]https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a3af3e22aeba594ad56d...

> It seems equally as likely that it is an issue of over-expecting what a worker can reasonably perform. Why is under performance the more likely scenario in your mind?

If other employees can meet the quota but you can't, why would you assume that the quota is wrong? Maybe it's the wrong job for you.

> I would be more inclined to take the route of "a few bad workers". However, these stories have consistently made news since at least 2018

Perhaps it has something to do with the attempts to unionize?

> like 74% of respondents to a survey conducted by Organise reporting that they avoid using the washroom for fear

Is there a cost for saying that? If this didn't rise to the level of fear, but only apprehension, would they be censured for overreaching rhetoric? If not, how trustworthy is it? And it still leaves 25% comfortably hitting quota showing that the quota itself is fine.

>These are contractors and if they don't make money today they can courier for another company tomorrow.

Spoken like someone who has lived a full and blessed life.

I have heard similar complains from bus drivers that don't have time to have a toilet break, see: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&u=https:/...

If you're wondering why this is getting buried, educate yourself on how Amazon "contracting" works. It's just a scheme to cut costs and shift all responsibility elsewhere.

It's getting buried because people downvote what they can't argue. Amazon isn't doing anything different than any other company, or anything that has been a problem before now.

Unionists are lying, conflating contractors and employees, and everyone here is buying it - probably because it fits an existing narrative. I'm being told, by privileged SF types, that I need to educate myself, when they've apparently never worked a day as a contractor, or perhaps never even worked a real job (ie, uncomfortable) in their life.

The pee bottle is being used as an excuse to unionize, even though it's something contractors choose to do in all driving jobs.

Also, when I say "drive for another company tomorrow", that's the ground reality. If you show up sober and well-dressed at any courier company you'll have a magnetic sign on your car and a load of packages right away. (And couriering is generally to offices with a ton of washrooms so you can weigh that in the calculation.)

People also downvote what they find stupid, boss. I made in a bottle in a car before; I wouldn’t do it again for $4 or whatever. Guess I don’t have what it takes to do contract work.

> Guess I don’t have what it takes to do contract work.

No, that's what some rich guy would say. Oh, I wouldn't do "some mildly distasteful thing" for money, I guess I have high standards, haha. No, you wouldn't last that long. I doubt you'd make it through the first early morning. If you did you'd learn that pissing in a bottle isn't a problem at all compared to hours out of your life.

The adults you're talking about, denigrating because they aren't as discerning as you, are making this decision for themselves. They'd rather make wee-wee uncomfortably and see their family again sooner. For them that $4, or $15, matters more than it does for you.

> People also downvote what they find stupid

Also, stupid people vote. So ... proposition undecided.

> boss.

Somehow I don't think you've ever non-ironically called anyone that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com