Amazon trying to cover their ass?
Updated Wednesday, September 4, 2024 5:10 p.m. EST - Amazon reached out to deny the reports of a crack down on singing along with the radio in trucks and provided this PR video clip as evidence. A PR spokesperson told Jalopnik: “This post is completely inaccurate. Amazon has never issued guidance or communications to Delivery Service Partners that prohibits singing in the vehicle.”
couldn’t amazon just tap into the audio feed then?
The real question is… why the fuck should anyone be micromanaged to this fucking extent. It’s probably hurting actual productivity… even if their broken ass metrics are showing an improvement.
It fucking sucks to be deprived of the joy in what you do - there isn’t much joy in delivery to begin with but vibing to the music while driving down an empty stretch of road is one of the little ones… the more you suck the joy out of a job the less shits your employees will give.
Heard about this a while back. I think the real explanation is that amazon wants cameras in their vehicles to monitor their drivers. But Amazon’s insurer says “if you have this video we want to see it, and if your drivers are distracted in general, your insurance rates are going up” and/or when there’s an incident, any evidence of distracted driving will be leveraged against amazon… so instead of getting rid of the cameras, they are micromanaging their employees not to be distracted while driving, where “distracted” includes talking on the phone and also singing or speaking.
It’s all really shitty tbh.
I get that with a company as big as Amazon, small margins can make a big difference, but… pretty sure that’s just an argument against giant fucking companies running everything…
maybe it’s because the more time wage slaves are thinking about not being allowed to sing, the less time they’re thinking about how shitty the pay is
Even slaves were allowed to sing.
I had a job where my boss got angry at me for playing music in my office with the door closed, because I was wasting bandwidth. On my ipod. So I used headphones.
Now I want to see a black Amazon driver dressed as a slave, singing “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”, and getting chewed out over an in-van loudspeaker.
“Yuhsir! Won’t happen again suh!”
Can you imagine the emergency PR meetings?!
I feel like the more workers are generally miserable, the more they’ll be disgruntled
They’re not actually monitoring that specific thing. They have a camera looking at the drivers and the recognition software happens to interpret singing as the driver being “distracted”, but they don’t actually want to modify the software so they are doubling down on what the software has decided.
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Kinda the same way my car tells me I’m not looking at the road if I tilt my head 2 inches to the side or back. Its constantly giving me warning, and I’m constantly yelling that I am looking at the road! How else could I go around this turn!
At least I have the option of covering it with black electrical tape. Jeeze.
As someone who wears glasses I have to turn my head to check my mirrors. I would get so frustrated with that.
This isn’t right. Singing also counts as distracted.
Debatable.
Should car radio/stereos be illegal then?
I, for one, am in favor of volume limits. Too many times ambulances get stuck behind cars whose drivers simply cannot hear the siren.
Not necessarily, but there’s a difference between something being illegal and something being perceived by an insurance company as increasing risk. There are a lot of things that are legal and risky.
Insurance wanting employees monitored so they can deny coverage or excuse an increase in premiums is not much of “ok yeah that makes sense”.
With that logic our own cars are going start monitoring us and have us hand the data over to insurers so they can let you off the hook for the “privacy fee” or whatever as long as you then don’t sing in your own car.
This isn’t about risk. Its about humans not being allowed to be humans.