Amazon to hire 20,000 seasonal workers in UK Amazon is advertising to fill more than 20,000 seasonal roles within its UK fulfilment centres. The biz currently has 10 fulfilment centres in the UK. Two new ones centre are also opening - in Manchester and Coalville, Leicestershire - next month, creating 1,500 new permanent jobs over three years. The outfit claims it has …
> creating 1,500 new permanent jobs over three years
The 'tat' [1] pickers are only employed for 9 months at a time and then laid off, able to return only after a few weeks to avoid Amazon having to deal with those pesky bits of legislation like holiday entitlement, sick pay, redundancy pay etc etc.
Perhaps MPs would like to investigate that as well as their tax arrangements in future?
[1] Oi those are my Christmas presents you're talking about!
They don't just hire tat pickers, my sister worked for them over the season to provide HR for the extra tat pickers.
They get a staff discount so if they spend all of their money with Amazon they are better off too; for some reason this remionds me of cornish/devonshire tin miners having to buy candles from the mine owner so they could see to work.
It's fine.
As soon as zero hours contracts are gone and everyone is on the living wage, these warehouses will be able to justify the cost of full automation so they won't need 20k unskilled employees over Christmas, they'll make do with about 20 technical overseers and a few mechanics for the robots.
Stop the exploitation of the people! Make them unemployed instead...
About forty years ago, I was hired as a stockboy at a department store (remember those?) over Christmas break from school. On the Friday after Christmas, I was not surprised to find my name on the assignment sheet for the following week, only amused that I hadn't heard otherwise. More than sixty years ago, my father, then employed by a federal agency, moonlighted at the United States Post Office (if you remember that) about Christmas time.
So whatever Amazon may have invented, seasonal jobs aren't on the list. None of this is to excuse ill-treatment of its employees. The troubling aspect is that 1960s and 1970s jobs for teenagers--seasonal stockboy, MacDonald's cook--have come to be the least bad or only option for so many grownups. A discussion of that would be most interesting, but maybe not up The Register's alley, as a) involving a lot of companies with less computing involvement than Amazon and b) too dreary to be perked up with snark.
If you want cheap goods from Amazon then you are driving down the cost of production and management.
If you also set a minimum wage then you are driving people out of work by making it illegal to employ them for less than the cost of the machine, whether they want to work for that price or not.
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