I’m expecting a package from Amazon, and I can’t help feeling guilty about the Amazon employees I am apparently exploiting. The Amazon driver who is bringing my new gym pants, and all the other drivers on long routes, will have to keep peeing in bottles because there are no accommodations for them on their drives. And I did nothing to help Amazon employees in their fight for unionization. They fell short of required votes in Alabama yesterday, to unionize.
At first Amazon denied and then issued this apology: “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.”(See Our Recent Response to Representative Pocan April 2, 2021 https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/our-recent-response-to-representative-pocanI).
Peeing in a bottle is not the only problem for my Amazon delivery driver. He may be being spied on by his Amazon bosses. Recently, Amazon revealed the installation and use monitoring cameras in company vehicles — to “improve driver behavior.” There are four cameras in every van. The cameras use artificial intelligence (AI) and record the drivers according to certain triggers, such as when the driver makes a hard stop. You can see how it works here: https://vimeo.com/504570835/e80ee265bc.
In March, five senators wrote a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos raising concern about the AI-spy cameras in some of its delivery vans. (Read the letter here: https://www.markey.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/(3-3-21)%202%20Senate%20Letter%20-%20Amazon%20Driver%20Video%203-3-21.pdf
The Amazon drivers aren’t the only ones being monitored either. The Amazon Alabama warehouse workers who initiated the drive to unionize complained aboutAmazon management spying on them. An entire infrastructure has apparently been developed to spy on Amazon employees, from the drivers to the plant-workers. It does not stop there, however.
I admit there is self-interest on my part to support the Amazon workers because I know that we are also subject to Amazon’s vast eavesdropping systems. Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa through its microphone-equipped Echo speakers, records us all. Also, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, richest man in the world, has the power through his company to set up workers to overhear what you say to Alexa. Every time you ask a question of Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant, there are real live humans on the other end, somewhere in the world, listening to you, gathering information about you. It records you too. You can go back and hear years of what you said, as the author of a Washington Post article found out, to his shock:” I listened to four years of my Alexa archive and found thousands of fragments of my life: spaghetti-timer requests, joking houseguests and random snippets of “Downton Abbey.” There were even sensitive conversations that somehow triggered Alexa’s “wake word” to start recording, including my family discussing medication and a friend conducting a business deal.” (See https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/06/alexa-has-been-eavesdropping-you-this-whole-time/)
The next time Amazon workers try unionizing, maybe we should help them. In fact, go to Alexa right now and tell them!