I think any organization that actually incentivizes employees to complete small, objectively-measurable tasks quickly will have stories like this once you've got enough employees. Unless you keep cameras on them at all times, I guess.
These stories are always framed this way as if only someone truly desperate would stoop to peeing in bottles. But to many people, peeing in a bottle is actually not a big deal and is, in fact, preferable to getting home fifteen minutes later.
Exactly. Especially this year--I put a pee bottle in the car specifically to avoid having to go into restrooms. Or long-standing stories of trucker bombs when they dispose of pee bottles on the side of the road rather than emptying them and reusing them.
If the nature of your job permits converting going-to-the-restroom time into time at home and you have adequate privacy it's a very sensible thing to do.
Yes surely if these truckers were valued more Amazon would... install bathrooms in every van? Add a series of Amazon only toilets all over the country for drivers?
Why not work with other companies that are everywhere and have toilets ? (e.g.: Fast-foods).
Of course, it will cost money, but that's better than nothing.
Heck, most Amazon Lockers are at businesses with restrooms. Negotiate with these businesses to require them to allow Amazon employee access to the restrooms. And build bio-break time into the schedule.
I was not aware of this behavior prior to reading this article, but I can absolutely understand the difficulty in finding a parking spot with an available restroom nearby. At the same time, I am surprised that the problem exists in the way that it does on a personal-level: when nature calls me, it is very difficult for me to think of doing anything else.
I can see there being a need for legislation here as this example with Amazon shows that companies will ignore basic human needs if given the chance.
In addition, the problem is possible to solve provided the delivery drivers are given adequate time to do so. Technology can definitely assist the decision-making process: finding public restrooms with available parking along the path of a delivery route and maybe altering the route as required. However, I definitely see there being a need to build additional public restroom facilities and hire staff to maintain them.
Another argument that could be made is that these delivery companies are shifting/not bearing the full burden of hiring employees. An office worker will usually have access to a restroom that is paid for by employer paying rent for their place of business.
I grew up in a rural area, and sometimes find 'city logic' amusing.
Need to urinate? Pull over, get out, and water the grass. This is older than time, and a non-issue. Really. It isn't an issue to me.
Defecation is obviously in another category.
Peeing in a bottle is also a non-issue. As far as I am concerned, if a woman can breast-feed in public, why can people not urinate into a container inside a car?
(Both are body parts with sexual, and non-sexual purposes)
And women can do so too, with the aid of such things as this;
To take a step back, are astronauts the next "put out" class? Tank drivers on patrol? Park rangers? Long haul truckers? Virtually all outdoor, in the country type jobs?
And more oddly, at first all I heard about was urination in bottles. Then massive outrage did not appear. Now defecation seems to be added?
Note: Amazon sucks donkey balls, but let's address the true suckage, not what I see as a non-issue.
It won't stop them from trying to enforce it and you ending up in court.
I know a guy who took a leak in an alley on his walk home from the bar at 1am. He's now a registered sex offender because that alley was across from a playground, even though no children were present and it was dark out.
The only thing my experiences have taught me is that the 'justice' system will do everything it can to win, even when it makes no sense. Eventually they will screw over enough people that nobody will be left to support it.
How do you fix this? Install bathrooms in trucks? I have peed in a bottle when driving just to save the 20mins it would take to pull off, look for a bathroom I’m allowed to use, maybe have to buy something, figure out how to get back on the freeway. You can pee in a bottle without even slowing down, if it was a common occurrence you could make it a very easy and efficient process.
Before I got into software I worked mostly food service and sometimes found myself in a position where it would have been literally impossible to complete the duties assigned to me in the time I was given to do them without severely compromising safety. And at other times, impossible to do them even while compromising safety.
I always wondered if firings due to those types of situations should be legal. The failure is obviously on the bean counters who demand a certain amount of work done with inadequate labor, but blame often falls on those performing the labor.
I have a question: why do drivers pee in a bottle?
A few years ago, I called an Uber and a lady showed up visually uncomfortable. We drove in silence for 2 minutes before I asked her if she would like to stop at a gas station. I knew to ask that because my previous driver have had the exact same problem and told me he had to stop. He told me that sometimes he has no choice but to use a bottle. Is Uber intentionally making drivers pee in bottles? No. But it happens by design. When a driver is matched with another rider before the current ride is over, she doesn't get a break. She can decline the next ride, but from what I learned you get penalized if you reject enough riders. Is the solution wearing a concealed pouch where the driver can relieve himself discreetly? Um, no. I think a simple button on the UI that say 10 minutes break solves it.
Riders pay the price by making the ride slightly late, but that's a damn good compromise.
So why do Amazon drivers relieve themselves in a bottle? Because sometimes they have 240 packages to deliver in one shift. And when they don't do a perfect job, customers complain and they get penalized. Unlike with Uber, a simple UI update doesn't fix the problem. The customer expects same day delivery. Is it Amazon's fault? Yes, they promised impossibly convenient delivery times. Fixing the issue means longer delivery. Are we willing to compromise?
I grew up knowing several people in long haul trucking / delivery and this problem isn’t uniquely Amazon.
Chances are if you’ve bought products that are shipped somewhere in the US you’ve been paying for pee labor.
I also don’t think mandatory delivery targets are the sole reason. Even if you go right now onto the Amazon flex subreddit you can find people asking questions about peeing. Those drivers accept in blocks of a few minutes to hours, they could wait, find a bathroom, then take another delivery but it’s less money.
This is a societal problem, it’s just Amazon that is having it exposed for them.
There are 3 parties involved here: Driver, Amazon, and Customer. Your comment makes it sound like either the driver should compromise and pee in bottles, or the customer should compromise and accept late deliveries. Why can't Amazon compromise, and hire more delivery drivers?
>Why can't Amazon compromise, and hire more delivery drivers?
Amazon doesn't compromise where profit is on the line. If Amazon hired more drivers, they would still require that rates and quotas remain the same. It would just make firing drivers caught urinating and defecating on the job easier for them.
Someone needs to start urban truck stops. Convert storefronts in centralized areas into a space with bathrooms, showers, maybe some snacks and sundries. Keep it clean and climate-controlled. Maybe it’s a gas station too, but the idea is to have them scattered around town and easy to build/operate, so maybe not.
Work out a deal with UPS/FedEx/Amazon but also Uber, Lyft, Postmates etc where they pay a membership and all of their drivers can use the space.
It's regularly commented-on that the reason we don't have widespread public bathrooms like many other developed and Middle-income countries is due to insane laws prohibiting against pay toilets, on the grounds that. Turns out when you don't allow pay toilets, you end up with no public toilets at all, even in places like San Francisco where the government attempts to pour money into providing them.
It's a very "American left" pitfall: make the victims of your "compassion" worse off as long as you avoid the appearance of inequity. See also: payday loans, boxing gloves, etc
The problem with public toilets is they become massive hazards if you can't police them. Things like prostitution, drug use, homelessness, and crime all become concerns. Neither the Left nor Right have root cause credible solutions for this.
The credible solution already existed, before we prohibited private entities from providing restrooms. Banning pay toilets effectively meant banning public toilets, since municipalities self-evidently don't have the will or competence to maintain them. This is one of those big problems that isn't actually that hard.
How about just selling businesses signs that read "Driver's Welcome", have a recognizable design, and carry the message that they are welcome to use the restroom without buying anything?
I don't know about urban core businesses, but in most places, it's already the case that no one working at McDonald's/etc cares if you walk in, use the bathroom and leave.
The companies that pay for access can use it in their marketing. “You can feel good about ordering from our food delivery service, our drivers don’t have to pee in bottles.”
> 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.
Amazon's PR (one of the best in the industry) at its finest.
Minimize/deny/ignore the issue raised, and quickly bridge to something else entirely.
Disclaimer: worked at AWS 2008-2014. Opinions my own.
> Two economists are walking down the street, when they pass buy a luxury car dealership. One economist says, "I really want that Ferrari!" The other economist replies, "Clearly you don't!"
And the other one that isn't as relevant but is funny:
> Two economists are walking down the street, when one of them sees something on the ground. She says, "hey, is that a $20 bill on the ground?" The other economist replies, "obviously not, otherwise someone would have picked it up already!"
Does the first joke refer to the fact that if they wanted the Ferrari they’d have bought it already, or that if they really wanted the Ferrari, they’d have chosen a more lucrative profession than economics?
More specifically, the first one is a dig at anyone who tries to infer preferences from behavior, without considering or knowing the full set of alternatives available to the individual.
In this case, even a well-paid tenured economist probably could not afford the Ferrari without making some significant sacrifices elsewhere. So it's not that they are choosing between "Ferrari" and "no Ferrari", it's that they are choosing between "Ferrari and I don't have any money and my wife leaves me" and "no Ferrari and I keep my retirement savings and my wife doesn't leave me."
The relevance here is that, for some people, their best option might actually be "stay at horrible job at Amazon where I'm forced to piss in a bottle", not because they like pissing in bottles, but because the alternatives are actually worse.
The only thing you can tell from a person's behavior is that, to that person at that particular time, whatever they did/chose seemed like the best option.
> You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us.
Amazon is not okay with their employees pissing into bottles; they issuing the warning letter; yet some of them still do it. Not because they have to but just because they can. It's not uncommon among males when they're on a long drive to piss into bottles. When they get caught, of course they'd claim it was due to the deadline, not because they don't want to take few minutes for a detour.
Disclaimer: Work at AWS now. Opinion my own, and I have both good and bad things about my employer. I also have extreme reservations about capitalism.
1.) This is all competent PR. PR is there to cast the employer in a good light, and bait-and-switch is a tactic used since before there was a formalized PR industry. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon PR was going to next say 'most of our drivers aren't Amazon employees. We can't control how subcontractors act.' Which is a technically true statement, but misses the point.
2.) The context of this article is recent comments from Amazon's social media team and a director. In an incredibly large organization like Amazon, a director (and members of the social media team) is going to be far removed from the realities of package deliverers.
To give the director and social media team the benefit of the doubt, they could be speaking the truth as they believe it. Members of the social media team probably wouldn't work in a position wherein they're forced to urinate in bottles.
The director probably isn't aware of the 'leaked document'--which was really just an email sent to an unknown audience. But they typically won't send those types of emails to directors, because they don't want directors to know that stuff.
---
Amazon has a lot to atone for. It has some abhorrent practices. But let's not pretend that Amazon is the only company around where line workers don't have time to take adequate bathroom breaks. Or that Amazon's drivers are the only last mile delivery drivers who have issues finding time/places to go to the restroom.
Can Amazon do more? Yes. Should Amazon be a corporate leader? Yes. But this a larger problem than Amazon. This happens across industries with line workers and last mile delivery jobs.
> Can Amazon do more? Yes. Should Amazon be a corporate leader? Yes. But this a larger problem than Amazon. This happens across industries with line workers and last mile delivery jobs.
Amazon is becoming one of the only employers for less skilled workers ... because of Amazon's ruthless pricing, co-mingling, white-labeling, outsourced externalities, and other strategies. This is why we have anti-trust.
Whether others are also abusive or incentivize dehumanizing behavior is irrelevant.
> "Whether others are also abusive or incentivize dehumanizing behavior is irrelevant."
Only irrelevant if you want to fix symptoms, not causes.
If you demonize a specific company, you might change a company's practices. This is good for the workers at that company who are treated inhumanely.
But know that by focusing on the behavior of a specific company rather than economic system that incentivizes companies to treat humans as disposable cogs, you're letting off the hook every other company that engages in the same behavior. By focusing on the behavior of a company rather than dearth of meaningful regulation to protect workers, you're enabling the exploitation of workers across a swath of industries.
If your appendix bursts, morphine will make it hurt less. But it's probably better to do surgery to handle the root cause.
> By focusing on the behavior of a company rather than dearth of meaningful regulation to protect workers, you're enabling the exploitation of workers across a swath of industries.
Pointing out an individual's wrongs doesn't mean I cannot also advocate better regulation for all. Let this instance be another push toward that end. Apathy and "everyone's doing it" cop outs are just as damaging as calling the problem solved after a single corrective action.
I rent a small 2 seater airplane. On long cross countries where the wind causes problems, it is not uncommon for the fuel to last longer than the bladder. Our rental shop had to put out a similar message - if you used a pee bottle, don't leave it in the plane. Most of the time you find that 'half drunk bottle of yellow Gatorade'.... it was not.
I floated around grocery stores quite a bit in the early/mid 2000s, working at several locations and various jobs. Meth was fairly common among the grocery night stockers, especially in the big stores. Often times management has some idea of this, but it was usually don’t ask, don’t tell, especially in the union stores, until the point somebody wanted a person fired.
Any guesses as to whether the causality is more "night stocking is tough -- better pop some meth to up my productivity" or "night stocking seems like a good way to earn cash while I'm high on meth"?
It was usually the former. It was a very hard job, nearly aerobic, job at least 3 nights a week (1-2 of the nights was working backstock which might not need as much hustle). On top of that, it’s between 11 and 7, some people have more than one job and/or have to switch between day shifts and night shifts.
Interesting. I didn't know meth was cheap enough for this to be economically viable. It reminds me of hearing about cooks who took up smoking because smoke breaks were the only way to get breaks at all during service. From a short-term standpoint, it's got a logic to it.
How do UPS USPS and FedEx drivers tackle this issue ? Restroom access is a problem and it's important to come up with some proposals especially if we want more women to be able to work these jobs
Gas stations would be my guess, based upon what I've seen.
Our UPS driver at least tends to stop over by one right down the road from us. We have a regular driver, which likely helps create a bond with the staff, so you can skip the need to buy something every time.
I wonder why this is so downvoted? If you think peeing in a bottle is degrading, it doesn't seem that using a product like this would be any more degrading than the male method. I have women friends who use devices like these when we hike and there's nothing weird or embarrassing about it for any of us.
Though it's important to note that women's bathroom needs are different from men in more ways than just the mechanics of urination. For one, menstruation is a recurring situation that has specific bathroom needs that a bottle doesn't really address.
When you hike? I'd have thought doing it in nature would be fine (considering all the animals doing the same). I always do so when I hike anyway (just making sure there's nobody around :P ). My female friends also do so. Not sure exactly how as I am polite enough to turn around O:-)
Indeed menstruation is a different issue altogether.
Peeing in nature is fine. The reason for things like this for a woman to pee normally means exposing a lot more skin to eyes and the weather. Also, the usual scenario for being seen is someone not of your group coming up behind you--and with a pee funnel your bum isn't exposed at all.
(Poo is another matter--you're expected to bury it 6-8" down, at least 200' from the trail, at least 200' from water. If you can't meet all three of these requirements you're expected to use a poo disposal bag (commonly called a WAG bag) and pack it out.) Locally, if you can accomplish the digging you're very likely in a watercourse.
I live in a pretty dry area. I can think of only one area with pretty dense foliage within a couple hours of home and that's in a seasonal stream.
In the winter I've often been in areas with half a mile line of sight to any place you could actually get to and plenty of canyons where anyone coming around the bend is going to see you, period.
Summer provides a bit more cover at lower elevations, but as you go higher there are trees but you can see under them and in many cases getting off the trail is difficult.
If you hike long enough trails to need to relieve yourself you know there's a small chance you'll be seen, and likewise, you know there's a small chance you'll run into someone relieving themselves--if you can't stand either scenario, don't go.
> When you hike? I'd have thought doing it in nature would be fine (considering all the animals doing the same)
I assume it's because sometimes there's enough brush that you don't want to squat more than you have to, exposing your privates to plants, insects, etc. On top of that, you need a lot less privacy to stand-and-pee than you do to squat: if someone comes across you squatting on a trail without much cover, you probably wouldn't want them catching a view of either side of you.
Perhaps it's just not-totally-rational squeamishness, but that's my understanding of the thinking behind it.
Aside from the obvious reasons, surely some health authorities would have a problem with a company that knowingly has their employees "relieving themselves" and not washing their hands before handling the packages?
Since Amazon constantly tracks their employees, they could mandate that they take their breaks or be penalised. They would rather not do that and try to deal with biology some other way.
9 comments at the time of writing this, and three of them are already saying this a "normal" practice. Let's get something very clear: making your employees work insane hours for a simple delivery job, at such a rate that _you literally cannot deliver your daily packages if you do not shit in a bag on the side of the road_ should be criminal. Seeing people with a cushy little job in IT paid more than 90% of their fellow countrymen consider this as "normal" because they need to have their cheap chinese products delivered the same day need to take a large step back.
This is not to go home earlier. It's the exact same thing as their warehouses, where the targets are set so impossibly high that you have no choice but to ignore your bodily needs. Whichever manager forces this onto their employees is at the very least a sociopath.
This is especially true in US where there are almost no public restrooms . And as there are no trashes, we see those bottles and boxes littering the streets. At least in the large city I live in.
I was in a class in high school when a teacher wouldn't let a kid go to the bathroom (semi-justifiably). He ended up peeing in a bottle discretely during class.
Next step would be the need to upload pictures before and after so you have the ability to contest any false claims.
I'm partially kidding, but seeing how much time I spend 'starting' and closing a car in a car-sharing app (making pictures of all corners, all areas), a better approach to these processes would be welcome.
Amazon is, to me, a glaring example of just how little people are willing to translate outrage over capitalism and wage slavery into voting with their feet. I've literally heard people trash Amazon's labor practices, admit that they've been Prime members for years and will continue using them, and then express hope that the government will step in and do something to Amazon. Since many of these people are individuals I like on a personal level, I don't push on this, but there's something disturbingly infantile about it.
It's not infantile to believe that one of the roles of government should be to protect individuals from the gargantuan power amassed by corporations. There is no way to avoid capitalism through personal responsibility.
I agree that it's reasonable to ask one's government to intervene against a powerful and possibly monopolistic corporation. However, I think this should be accompanied by the personal responsibility of avoiding that corporation. I'm sure there are people that really rely on Amazon deliveries, but for most consumers it comes down to it being slightly cheaper and slightly more convenient. It seems like such a small amount of personal responsibility to ask of people to divest from this particular company if they think it's bad.
Most consumers expect that all available options in the marketplace comply with all regulations, and then make a surface level decision on the best option. So if there’s a company that is not competing in a fair way, there should be regulation to limit unfair behaviour (imo) -- otherwise every consumer needs to know every detail about every company and process and purchase with integrity.
Look up the phrase "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism."
We live in a time when the economic power of the middle class is eroding rapidly, and being able to order cheaper goods from Amazon with fast free shipping was a huge benefit even before we started living through a global pandemic.
It would take a truly staggering percentage of people around the world to choose to boycott Amazon before they actually started feeling it—and that wouldn't even touch some of their other major sources of revenue, like AWS, which provides it with a lot of income these days.
> We understand that DA’s [driver associates] may have emergencies while on-road, and especially during Covid, DAs have struggled to find bathrooms while delivering.
> Halie Marie Brown ... told The Intercept that the practice “happens because we are literally implicitly forced to do so, otherwise we will end up losing our jobs for too many ‘undelivered packages.’”
Sounds like there may be a little more to it than you suggest.
There really isn't. Peeing in a bottle has been going on for decades in UPS/FedEX. Actually pooping in your truck and putting all of your customers at risk of disease so you can meet your quota is not sane human behavior.
Why? Because the driver will have a set of deliveries. Once they’re finished those they’re done for the day.
In NYC at least finding a restroom and finding parking (even double parking) beat it takes valuable time. It saves time to pee in a bottle.
This just isn’t unique to Amazon is all I’m saying.