--most people working in Amazon warehouses are employed by temporary staffing firms, not Amazon
--most people working in Amazon warehouses don't come anywhere near 3 years of tenure before quitting or being fired
--reimbursement is limited to $2,000/year for four years, while $5,000/year is pretty much the minimum direct cost to take such programs
--the program is limited to full-time workers, so only those who can take classes while working full-time and mandatory-or-you-get-fired overtime can partake
The number of warehouse workers eligible for this is nearly zero. Might even be precisely zero.
First of all, you are talking out of your ass. You make many claims, but provide no sources.
Amazon has many thousands of warehouse associates. Most of the temporary workers, however come in during the holidays - that's no surprise.
Amazon is experiencing tons of growth right now, the last thing they want to do is keep having to rehire associate workers. If you are good, there is no reason why they should fire you.
A reimbursement of $2,000/ year may not seem like much, but it goes a long way if you are in a state school or in community college. A lot of the associate workers are making somewhere around $12-$14/hour, so this ends up helping them a lot more than you realize.
earl who replied to you seems to have been hell-banned. So I am copying his comment because I think it adds valuable data points.
--
Amazon is experiencing tons of growth right now, the last thing they want to
do is keep having to rehire associate workers. If you are good, there is no
reason why they should fire you.
Kindly educate yourself before writing [1]. Because despite your hypotheticals, it's well documented that amazon is doing precisely that: hiring tons of workers, firing them very quickly, and intimidating injured ones into signing papers saying it wasn't from the job. Amazon even stage ambulances outside their unconditioned warehouses in order to be prepared when employees get sick and have to be taken to hospital because of heat.
From the article:
Temporary employees interviewed said few people in their working groups
actually made it to a permanent Amazon position. Instead, they said they
were pushed harder and harder to work faster and faster until they were
terminated, they quit or they got injured. Those interviewed say turnover at
the warehouse is high and many hires don't last more than a few months.
This whole program is a bullshit ruse to deflect criticism. Because guess what: the first thing a student needs is a reliable schedule. Mandatory overtime kills taking classes, because your butt often needs to be in the seat at a fixed time, particularly for tests.
The only case I'm aware of where pg has commented indicated that a person posted a link that was being spammed on HN in one of their comments and got banned accidentally.
The reason for the fast hiring is to get ready for peak times. They hire tons of temporary workers from local agencies, and when there is no more work, they are let go. That's what temporary agencies are for. The only difference between Amazon and others who use temp agencies, is that Amazon hires 10s of thousands of employees to work in response to seasonal work. I don't really see your point here.
The whole program is not bullshit, and let me tell you why. Once upon a time during my early years of college, I held a full-time job for a logistics company doing work in a warehouse. I worked at night and went to school during the day. I took every opportunity of overtime I could take and still managed to do well in school. Keep in mind that my tuition was not that much, but I saved every dollar so it would go towards schooling. You know how much misery $2,000 grand would have saved me? There are much worser places to work and I am not saying that Amazon is setting the bar, but they are improving quite a bit.
I left Amazon just over a year ago, but have just over two years as a manager across three of their large fulfillment centers. I can offer some perspective:
-- Yes, the ratio of temp associates to "blue badge" Amazon associates can be 50/50 at best during off-peak (though trending worse as Amazon expands) and during peak season temps will be 80% of the workforce. And yes, temps get absolutely nothing from Amazon as far as benefits. This is in stark contrast to a company they own - Zappos.
-- Very few tier 1 associates made it three years. Very, very few. On my last shift of about 50 associates, I can only think of about 5, and this was one of the older fulfillment centers.
-- Maybe it has changed, but there was no option to work part-time. Standard shifts are 10 hours. Mandatory OT can be frequent off-peak and is every week during peak. I had plenty of associates that took college classes during the day (I managed on nights). They did it, but were really dragging ass at night. They got maybe two or three hours of sleep a day. Many just couldn't make their productivity goals and would eventually quit before being fired.
This initiative is what I would call a good start, and better than nothing. But as some have mentioned, the ability to move to a part-time schedule would be nice. As would a higher reimbursement amount. But maybe that will come in the future.
"Standard shifts are 10 hours. Mandatory OT can be frequent off-peak and is every week during peak" That's pretty rough. What's the benefit to Amazon of doing 10-hour shifts instead of, say, 8?
10 hours shifts are actually 10.5 hours as there is a .5 hour lunch in the middle. So you have a night shift and a day shift that total 21 hours of work in the warehouse. This leaves three hours of down time for maintenance (both mechanical and software) that is very much needed to keep things rolling. In order to fill customer orders, they NEED the labor to be as constant as possible. The difference between 17 hours and 21 hours of filling orders would be quite drastic.
During peak, especially the three weeks prior to Christmas, the shifts are actually 12 hours. This leads to massive amounts of frustration as night and day shifts step on each other trying to get the hell in/out. And parking, long lines at security, crowded break room, etc add to the frustrations. Maintenance has to fix things on the fly while we try to work and software pushes gone bad (they limit them as much as possible during this time) can just kill a facility.
If you need four hours of downtime, either the three 8 hour shifts would have to overlap (meaning for the overlap periods you'd need twice as many workstations, i.e. a warehouse twice as big) or the third shift would have employees standing idle for 4 hours.
Downtime is useful because you can get in and perform preventative maintenance and software deployments, and if there's a problem (like a machine breakdown) that delays picking by an hour or two, you can complete the day's work instead of having the problems spill over into the next day.
Why they don't offer an option to do three 7-hour shifts I don't know.
Simple really - productivity. On every shift you lose time starting up and getting everyone to work. This happens twice a shift (start of shift, coming back after lunch). There is a gap in time from when everyone clocks in to when they actually start producing. This time is referred to as "stand-up" and is when the manager covers safety, quality, admin messages, announcements, etc and also performs stretches. Multiply the time spent doing this by the number of minutes your shift is producing absolutely zero and you start each shift in the hole. You also lose some towards the end of a shift (everyone stops just a bit early until you start dropping the hammer). Knowing this, the fewer the shifts, the less "lost" productivity.
While I wasn't getting reimbursement, I was working roughly 60 hours a week on the assembly floor at Dell while taking a full load of classes (12 credit hours). Before any financial aid or assistance, tuition and books at the community college I was going to was around 1800 a semester. After financial aid, it was around 800. This is a great program for those who cannot live on financial aid alone (need to work for whatever reasons) and have the drive to better themselves. I didn't get a degree, but not because I was working so much.
or maybe it was because you were working too much? You shouldn't sell yourself short or overlook the affects of overwork on a persons ability to deal with outside forces.
Additionally, i think ALL reimbursement programs are great. But as a comparison, this one is kind of shit. 2k a year max helps with books. That's about it. It is hardly an "Amazon Sends its workforce to school" Program. There is a regional gas station/mini mart here in WA state that offers a better program and you only have to work 35 hours a week.
When I had to stop taking courses was about a year after I had saved up enough money that savings + GI Bill + financial aid would cover tuition, books and living expenses. There was a paperwork screwup on my financial aid that meant I couldn't pay tuition which meant I couldn't get the GI Bill payments which meant I couldn't cover rent which meant I had to get a job. The end result being I never had a need to go back to school.
while their amount per year is low, for low to middle income earners, it's enough to be the difference between not having the option and cutting back a bit to be able to go to school. Sure, there's no way to have it pay for a state or ivy league school, but if your only skill is low-level employee in a warehouse, working towards an associates degree or taking management courses can greatly improve your station.
Not to mention Dick's burgers: College, vocational/self-improvement scholarships up to $22,000 over 4 years to employees working 20 hours per week for at least six months and continuing to work at least 20 hours per week while attending school.http://www.ddir.com/employment
yeah i completely forgot about that. that's a really cool program and its for people who work in essentially the lowest income positions available in the state.
I suppose it's better than nothing, the full time thing is the kicker, I'd say a year and part time should suffice to weed out people that are just getting hired for college money. Plus, if they quit before the schooling is up they wouldn't keep getting tuition.
On a side note, does anyone know of other workplaces that offer a tuition payment program? --- A google search later and I actually find this site http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/finance/746434/
I does look like Amazon isn't really doing that much of an amazing thing here though.
Unfortunately, most companies don't seem to publish it, but you can find out through HR. I worked at a company (now Lonza), and they had 100% tuition reimbursement with no caps. I did my entire Master's degree at their expense (ECE), and I am familiar with one full-time warehouse employee who started moving boxes and ended up leaving after he had enough education to become an actuary! Of course, your reimbursement was contingent on maintaining at least a B in each course, which I think is completely fair.
Yet, for some reason, this company has never made it in the news for its tuition programs, but Amazon offers basically nothing in comparison and somehow they are worth mentioning.
Well, Amazon is making news because we can naively assume by looking at a summary that they're doing it the same way they make money — by working in volume. We can estimate pretty quickly how many people work in Amazon's warehouses, at something in the neighborhood of "an awful lot of people". So it sounds good at a glance. Few people will even notice the details that whittle away the eligible base down to around 0.
If they were giving a paltry reimbursement to everyone who worked in an Amazon warehouse while taking classes, that would add up to something much more significant than the big companies I've worked for that employed people who already felt set-for-life and who could've gotten an advanced degree on the company dime if they felt like it, for example.
yes. almost every employer offers some degree of tuition reimbursement because, as far as I understand, they can get a tax deduction for the money they pay to their employees under such a program. most places will offer around $5000 a year, as the federal cap (the last time I looked) for reimbursement was $5250.
Is it actually common for hourly staff? I know it's common for tech employees, but I didn't realize it was also common for warehouse staff, janitors, etc. to get tuition reimbursement.
I have never seen a restriction on the class (exempt/non-exempt) of employee. The only restriction I remember seeing for tuition reimbursement at the companies I've worked at was that you must be full time and the coursework must somehow be related to what the company does. That last bit is typically only there to discourage "underwater basketweaving" courses.
The most common degrees people go for seem to be general Business, Marketing, Accounting, and then the more specialized tech. degrees. I'm amazed at the number of CS people I come across who have "silent" MBA's. At my last job I knew at least one person who joined with a high school diploma and eventually had an MSEE all paid for by the company.
There are 1,721 2 year colleges in the US (as of 2011), pretty good chance there is one nearby wherever you are. Also, the whole purpose of putting warehouses around the country is to be closer to people. So they are turning up in suburban areas of large cities (e.g. Phoenix, Nashville, Dallas). These are places that will have access to schools.
Two hours of travel round trip to go to, what, an hour of class? And that's alongside however far one has to drive to work in a day. So maybe you can get away with doing that one day a week? Two? It's going to be a very slow, very miserable slog. Even an hour of travel total, which is probably near the average minimum, is a lot when your days are as packed as Amazon's full-time warehouse employees.
What data do you have that an hour each way is the average? I looked up a few Amazon warehouses. The Irving, TX facility is 6 miles from North Lake College. The Phoenix warehouse is 10 miles from Glendale CC, and the one in Lebanon TN is 20 miles from Volunteer State CC.
No, why would you think that? The warehouses have to be not only where people are, but close to shipping and mail hubs. That means near infrastructure, which means there are plenty of universities and colleges nearby.
One of Amazon's warehouses cough "fulfillment centers" cough is in New Castle, Delaware-- not far from the University of Delaware, a top US engineering school.
--Amazon has more than 15,000 full-time employees at 69 different warehouses (fulfillment centers) in the United States and of course the program is limited to full-time employees. What industry or job have you ever seen a employee working 20/hrs work week getting benefits?
It has been a few years since I worked there, but I am pretty sure the threshold for qualifying for benefits at Starbucks was actually 20hrs/wk. Their basic theory was that training was one of the most expensive things they had to do, so giving people an incentive to stay for a while was a net benefit.
"During summer heat waves, Amazon arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside, ready to treat any workers who dehydrated or suffered other forms of heat stress. Those who couldn't quickly cool off and return to work were sent home or taken out in stretchers and wheelchairs and transported to area hospitals. And new applicants were ready to begin work at any time."
I had the same thought, but I hopped over to the web site of the local community college and did some arithmetic. It turns out that $2,000 per year will easily cover four courses, two per semester, which is a decent part-time load. Cost works out to about $1,250 per year, plus a textbook rental fee of maybe $300 or so, depending on course selection.
This is plenty to get through community college and get a vocational certificate. A community college in Kansas runs $71 per credit hour, and you need 60 to get a 2-year AA degree. That's just over $2000/yr for the program.
If you're looking at it full time, then yes, but my partner just finished her part time AA in WA, and the peak we had for tuition/fees/books in any one year (she did it in a little over 3 years) was $2100 (the link you had shows the maximum that a community college can charge for 3 15 credit terms, not all charge that). If we had spread it out over 4 years, $2000 would have easily covered it all.
Not to say that this is an people will be lining up to get a job at an Amazon warehouse for, but it is something that can help some employees get a little ahead.
This includes colleges with football teams and Olympic swimming pools. As others have noted, education credits in WA tend to be cheap when it's just the education.
Not that it matters for home state advantage - their warehouse workers are spread across the country, not in the most north-western point of the continental US.
It'll cover community colleges just fine. Universities is where the issue arises.
Edit: The person above me said they went to a Community College in the midwest, but I have no idea how it cost them so much. I was attending in Fresno, California, and a full semester wouldn't even get close to 1k.
Well it's $2,000 per year, not per semester.
Are semesters a year long in most vocational schools?
I guess this program would work for anyone who wanted to pursue a vocational program as a part-time student while slaving away in an Amazon warehouse. :O
Maybe if this actually works well people will be joining Amazon's workforce to pay for school instead of the military. Ha!
No need to be snarky! Community colleges are far from just vocational schools.
A lot of people who work warehouse-type jobs don't have any additional money available for school. This program is an incentive to attract people who are likely to stick around at Amazon while their education is paid for. It self-selects for people willing to work harder to get ahead and my anecdotal evidence is that tuition reimbursement increases company loyalty.
$2k/year may not seem like much, but when your only other option is to work yet another job to pay for the education, or not get the education at all, then it's a huge benefit.
I have always recommended that people take advantage of tuition reimbursement: the benefit is there, why not use it? There is typically no downside, other than you have less free time. The upsides are obvious.
Four years ago I went to a community college in the rural Midwest, and $2,000 a year would probably just barely cover tuition and books. And that was by far the cheapest school I have ever encountered.
I'm not sure what those terms means, but I was taking around 15 credit hours per semester. I also had a part time job, so I don't know if you would call that "full time" school.
At my school, "full time" meant 4 or 5 courses per term. "Part time" was 3, 2 or 1.Also there were three terms per year.
So if a credit hour is an hour of class per week. Our classes all had 3 hours per week, so 4 classes is 12 credit hours and 5 classes is 15 credit hours. That fits the bill.
I think I understand now. I just hadn't been thinking of it in terms of "credit hours".
Judging from this news article[1], it seems like there aren't many warehouse workers that 1) work there full-time, 2) have worked for 3 years, and 3) have the free time to pursue a degree.
Then again, the money may be targeted towards warehouse managers, who Amazon could see as potential higher-ups in the main organization if they had formal training.
While some may argue this is not much in regards to tuition, this can get you VERY far in a community college. See this tuition graph here: http://www.maricopa.edu/about/?tuition
I went to Maricopa community colleges and I had better instruction there than I had at the big schools. The best teachers I had were at community college.
So while some argue its not much, its almost enough to cover your tuition for a year at a community college.
If someone has the drive, they'll go do it and take advantage of the program.
I absolutely agree. I attended College of the Albemarle for two years before transferring into UNC-Chapel Hill.
The teaching quality at COA was astoundingly much higher at COA than at UNC.
At UNC most of my classes, even at the higher level, were taught by graduate students who had clearly received little to no instruction on how to effectively teach. They were there to learn and research, not to teach.
At COA my classes were taught by professors with a graduate degree in the field (usually a PhD) who were dedicated to the art of teaching. They were there to teach, not to research.
Of course higher education should be dedicated to research and expanding our knowledge, but that doesn't mean that they are good at sharing the basics.
Hmm, never heard of College of Albermarle. I don't disbelieve you -- most survey courses get taught in the 50-300 person seater rooms at UNC-CH. I just don't recall grad students teaching most of my courses, even the survey courses, whether they were in CS or Math (my majors) or the graduation requirements from social sciences, philosophy, etc. I had only one course taught by a grad student -- graphics. Which was your major at UNC-CH?
My degree is in History. I also took a lot of math and computer science courses: all but one of my math courses was taught by a grad student. All but a few of my history courses were taught by grad students.
Since I transferred in I never actually took one of the 100+ person courses.
I'm a grad student at the University of Arizona, and many of my students say they prefer math / science classes from community colleges precisely because so little real teaching happens in lower division classes at the U of A.
For a company who has repeatedly come under fire for hellish work conditions in their warehouses, a tuition reimbursement program seems like a rather pathetic PR nod. What hourly employee of theirs is going to have the time and 3 year commitment to earn this reward? Never mind the fact that most of their employees are temps from external agencies.
"repeatedly"? Source? I've worked in Amazon warehouses and they are far and above any other workhouse job in terms of both safety, pay and workload required. Granted, I only worked at 2 different Amazon warehouses so my sample small is probably smaller than yours.
It all depends on what your standards are. The working conditions at Amazon warehouses as reported repeatedly by the press would be completely illegal in most Western countries outside the US.
Well, that's meaningless, given that they're in that US. By that logic, the working conditions at most white-collar jobs in the US would also be below your standards, as many EU countries require more vacation, shorter hours (France) and other work rules that don't apply here in the US.
You can't expect Amazon or Walmart to adhere to the laws of a country a facility's not located in. If you think the laws aren't strict enough, then change the laws.
Well we should expect that to happen. we should expect companies to have their own standards which are superior to the mandated minimums.
Apple are doing this with sourcing.
The big mining firms, like BHP Billiton, often apply much higher environmental and safety standards than the local laws. I saw this in a plant in Mozambique, several in South Africa and Australia and one in Colombia. Australia had the toughest laws, but even there the imposed corporate standards were higher than the minimum. It's the right thing to do, but it's also just good business to treat your staff and environment well.
No, Apple is doing this because of pressure from their consumer base in the US, and not from an altruistic sense of right and wrong. It's just good business.
This program only covers inexpensive two year community college degrees, and only for a small number of subjects.
The subject limitation I can understand, it's not unreasonable for the employer to lock out degrees that they feel might not directly benefit the company.
But the two year degree restriction, which locks out all serious degrees and universities, has no justification other than being incredibly cheap on reimbursements. It would be better to have nothing at all since community college tuition isn't that expensive to begin with. If I was there I'd interpret this limitation as more of an insult than anything, and I have no doubt that many there will see it the same way once they look into the details.
By creating a program such as this it deflects attention from the working conditions of Amazon's employees while actually doing very little to benefit them.
I understand that you may think that $2k/year is very little, but to many people it's a small fortune. Anyway, why do you think it's necessary to deflect attention from their working conditions? Warehouses aren't the most comfortable working environments in any case, that should not be surprising. Not everything can be a nice air conditioned office.
I agree that $2,000 is a decent chunk of change, but as has been pointed out by others the hoops to jump through to get the $2,000 excludes a huge quantity of Amazon's workforce. So again, Amazon gets good PR, while conditions and compensation for much of their workforce stays the same.
In all fairness, allowing people who are unhappy, in a first warehouse job, or in skilled occupations to train themselves out of their unhappiness is a very novel and extremely favourable idea.
This is like saying, it's not you, here's a chance, take your time, we'll help you and then move on when you are ready. I wish every company did that... It is way better than laying you off and even more superior to keeping you in a job you resent and do just because you need to pay the bills...
"Unlike traditional tuition reimbursement programs, we exclusively fund education only in areas that are well-paying and in high demand according to sources like the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and we fund those areas regardless of whether those skills are relevant to a career at Amazon. In addition, the Amazon Career Choice Program will pay tuition and fees in advance rather than reimbursement after the completion of the course."
That is /really interesting/ I mean, why? from an employer's perspective, it seems like you'd keep your low-skilled employees longer if you helped them pursue their dream of, you know, something unemployable. (I mean, assuming they are going to learn something that doesn't help amazon, amazon keeps people longer if they learn something that isn't in demand.)
I find it's kinda cheap. 2000$ per year... looks more like recruitment marketing without too much commitment, than an actual initiative for the well-beings of the employees.
I like to think "do things right, or don't do them". In that case, I'd prefer if Amazon would go all the way and give maybe, 5..8k$, or give nothing at all.
2k$ a year, that's really not much. I like the initiative, I was reading it and thinking "Hum, this is interesting and nice" until I got to the "huh what?" of the 2k$ line.
--most people working in Amazon warehouses are employed by temporary staffing firms, not Amazon
--most people working in Amazon warehouses don't come anywhere near 3 years of tenure before quitting or being fired
--reimbursement is limited to $2,000/year for four years, while $5,000/year is pretty much the minimum direct cost to take such programs
--the program is limited to full-time workers, so only those who can take classes while working full-time and mandatory-or-you-get-fired overtime can partake
The number of warehouse workers eligible for this is nearly zero. Might even be precisely zero.