Honest question, if you were running Amazon, how do you protect against bad actors or poor performers? Do you leave it solely to the discretion of the managers? How do you judge manager performance, solely by morale?
> Honest question, if you were running Amazon, how do you protect against bad actors or poor performers?
define poor performers.
I've work for abusive corporations that were setting impossible goals and called employees "poor performers" and fired them when these impossible goals were not met.
And so defining the level of work required in law is usually not going to help anyone. This is why unions exist - so the people that know the workplace and subject matter best can negotiate to make the job fair.
... which is the ridiculous thing. As much as unions do have problems, I think a better fix to all of this would be a law that just said "all warehouse employees must be a member of an independent labor union". Amazon has fought tooth and nail to keep their warehouse workers out of unions.
(I don't love this sort of law, but it'll probably give these workers a better outcome than they have now, and likely a better outcome than the law that we're talking about here.)
> if you were running Amazon, how do you protect against bad actors or poor performers? Do you leave it solely to the discretion of the managers?
You take the explicit metric and make it unsaid. Over the course of a few months, if a worker isn't meeting their "goal", they're given a generic performance warning. If they don't improve, they're terminated.
This is why workers need a way to push back on quotas.
> instead of the workers knowing the metric out in the open, you hide it from them and secretly judge them on it?
I'm not advocating this. But it's how most management is done. Pushing back only on quotas, without otherwise empowering the labor force, will almost certainly lead to such a regression.
Quotas are fine, as long as they are reasonable, and workers don't need to skip food and bathroom breaks in order to make them.
The problem seems to be that Amazon has ahead of time decided the level of "productivity" they want, as well as the amount of money they want to spend on labor, instead of actually measuring bad/average/good productivity on its own, and then setting quotas (and expectations of labor cost) based on that.
Is having quotas itself a problem, or is it that the quotas are too demanding and rigid? From what I've read, it's very hard for most people to meet them, and injuries are common. Turnover is also very high. Quotas do have the benefit of being objective, which is good for workers too. It's harder for a manager to fire someone for discriminatory reasons if they're meeting an objective criteria, for example.
It seems like instead you could make the quotas challenging, but not to an extent that they're impossible for most people to meet without injuring themselves. You could also have some (but not infinite) flexibility to allow for bathroom and lunch breaks.
define poor performers.
I've work for abusive corporations that were setting impossible goals and called employees "poor performers" and fired them when these impossible goals were not met.