Amazon’s answer to delivery driver shortage: Pot smokers

The article seems to allude to that:

“If a delivery associate is impaired at work and tests positive post-accident or due to reasonable suspicion, that person would no longer be permitted to perform services for Amazon,” she said.

I mean, this has always been this case with alcohol hasn't it? it's legal to consume but not while at work or operating vehicles. if you do so and injuries/death result, you are held liable.

Is that not a different kind of test, for current presence rather than past use?

Bus companies cannot compete. Bus companies will simply claim a shortage and your child will be left at home if the route has no driver.

To get the contract you must be the lowest bidder. In order to do that you need to pay drivers as little as possible. Raising wages means losing money.

Except all Amazon has done was taken a group marginalized by the prison system (war on drugs) and is taking advantage of their position (drug testing vulnerable or felon status due to drug arrests) and putting them in a situation where they are at the absolute mercy of Amazon if anything were to happen. (Get T-boned by someone who ran a red light? We'll drug test you and fire you for cause even if you were sober at the time.)

This is an extension of prison labor.

Something I learned from a pot smoker: they sometimes mix it with other drugs for higher effects.

> Amazon delivery contractors are often outbid by school bus companies. Drivers who work for those can make more than $20 an hour and be home for dinner. Amazon contract drivers typically earn $17 an hour and often work late into the night to keep up with demand.

I mean, sure, Amazon can raise their wages to compete, and then we run out of... school bus drivers? I'm not sure that's any better.

At a point, you either need to increase the labor pool (by pulling people out of unemployment, retirement, etc) or seriously automate the profession, and we're just not there with delivery services right now.

Decades of exposure to intentionally misleading propaganda is difficult to ignore. It becomes a part of the worldview, making it hard to even think outside that box.

We don't regulate alcohol use, and it's quite a lot more destructive for some. I don't get the specific puritanism for pot.

Edit: Regulate as in drug testing for past use in an employment context, like what the story is talking about.

Personally, I can't smoke pot. I get very nervous, and can't wait until it's out of my system.

But I have worked with many frequent users who smoked daily, and their job. They didn't mind doing terrible jobs.

I'm suprised people arn't talking about habitual pot smokers vs. occasional. If used to smoking--it's no big deal.

Same with alcohol. An alcoholic can drive perfectly well at .08, or a bit higher. An occasional drinker probally shouldn't be drinking and driving.

I heard TX takes into account tolerance when prosecuting DUI's.

And also clearly have never been high enough to realize that they are more likely to be super paranoid and going 10 miles under the speed limit than driving through a fence or running over children. It’s not at all comparable to being drunk.

This is an interesting subject. Most people would be pretty worried about a drunk 747 pilot, and want laws and policies to prevent that from happening. A high delivery driver -- better, but a lot of people still don't like that idea. But tired commuters on the road at 6:30am is acceptable.

Could be better informed by numbers here. But hard to say because there aren't reliable tests for "high right now", and maybe not for "tired" either.

Some of the smartest people I have worked with smoked pot daily and before work. one is a head of engineering at netflix, another a head of IT at a big firm...

some of the highest performers I have ever worked with, and pot was a daily for them.

A larger portion of them are from experience of hiring and being around people who smoke it. I would not employ someone who does because of those people. I have horror stories a mile long.

I know this is unpopular on internet news sites but I assure you that your social reputation isn’t that great if you smoke the stuff generally and that’s not going to change because of the propensity of people to be unreliable or dicks. The only thing that’s faulty is your perception of it.

> Drivers of school buses, semi trucks, and similar have federally mandated drug testing, non-CDL delivery drivers don't.

False, at least where I am.

I learned to drive school bus, and they drug tested my class before we were allowed to test, and every month, there were random drug tests.

I quit after 1.5 days because of the stress and the constant push to get kids to school on time over safety.

That delivery company also has a union which could've been negotiated for.

>Also, any shortage is entirely self inflicted from offering poor wages.

Yeah! All the millennials who can't buy a home are just self-inflected by not bidding high enough! Government policy certainly didn't' contribute to either!

Especially with their new corporate slogan, "Puff hard and break things."

Or perhaps they are underwriting their own insurance. Once companies get big enough, it makes more sense for them to hold onto the premiums themselves and just pay an insurance company to administer the paperwork.

Marijuana testing is an arbitrary bar, but a fairly well-known one, so you do actually improve the distribution of your candidate pool by using it for low-skilled jobs with a large, undifferentiated labor pool.

Specifically, if it's known that these jobs test for Marijuana use, you're cutting off the portion of the applicant pool that knows this but still uses anyway, which stochastically reduces the likelihood that a candidate will eg show up to work intoxicated (fwiw, I'm a big fan of marijiana: I use it regularly, am a commensurately lighter drinker relative to my peers, and I'm pretty sure I'm making the right choice in terms of health and responsibility)

Like I said, it's an arbitrary bar and a path-dependent one, and a counterfactual equilibrium in which alcohol or another intoxicant was tested for would work just as well. But it's not irrational for employers to use it in certain labor market conditions. There are analogues in other labor markets, like requiring a college degree to be a firefighter; the false positive rate only really starts to matter if you start finding it difficult to find qualified applicants.

Tech jobs, by contrast, already have plenty of bars that their employees need to clear. In this context, any candidates swept up in blunt drug tests are likely to be false positives, and the use of the bar is a net negative for the employer.

From a safety point of view, it’s difficult to test for marijuana intoxication. There’s a simple test any employer could do to test whether their forklift driver is drunk right now. The best a marijuana simple marijuana test can do is whether you’ve had it in the past few days.

It's not an idea I've explored seriously in any depth, but it seems like testing for capabilities required for a specific task might be a way to go here over actual drug tests.

Thus if it's determined that people need a certain reaction time to drive safely, that could be one thing tested.

Clearly setting the levels and the particular capabilities might well be contentious, but by aligning the test(s) with what's needed for the task it's fairer and in certain ways more robust: for instance, you could be under the threshold for alcohol/cannabis but if you combine that with legal medicines that cause drowsiness or simply happen to be extremely sleep deprived, you might pass a traditional test but the combined effects would lead one to fail a capability test.

It also helps in other ways too, such as fairly treating older people - you might be a sharp 75 year old and yet come up against some age limit. This let's you continue so long as you maintain the capabilities. Then if things start to change it's clear and takes some of the awkwardness out of the discussion about whether one is still fit for a job.

Of course the risk is that people are pseudoscientific or arbitrary in setting the capabilities to a level that doesn't align. We've all seen the unrealistic hiring prerequisites that managers ask for if left to decide (must have ten years experience of XYZ!) In the wrong hands these could be used unfairly (eg setting totally unrealistic levels precisely to screen out groups they don't want).

> 50-something or older executive

Do you mean to imply or assume that 50-somethings are unfamiliar with marijuana? It was already common for Baby Boomers, who are older than that.

What happens is that open-minded, pot-smoking 20-somethings think 50-somethings are close-minded and ignorant. Then 30 years later many of those 20-somethings are the exact same as their predecessors. Instead of dismissing the older generation, the 20-somethings might consider how they will avoid that fate.

More realistically:

The drunk driver will tell you that they're basically sober, and will be shocked when everyone can tell from their behavior that they're drunk.

The stoned driver will tell you how stoned they are, and will be concerned that everyone else on the street can tell from their behavior.

(These are, of course, broad generalizations. There will be exceptions.)

Those are also good ideas, but you don't have to exclude pot smokers in order to implement them.

$15/hr is what populist politicians have been calling a living wage. What do you think they should pay?

You can drive sober every single time and still come out positive on a drug test or weed, they can't screen for active intoxication only evidence of metabolites.

What are the numbers?

When did HN start having such low quality comments?

The hell kind of comment is this? Would you ask, "Do we really need more folks who drink beer on the road?"

As long as they're not high/drunk when they're working, what's the issue?

> Seriously, do we really need more folks that smoke pot on the road?

Who cares if they smoke pot when not working. We don't need high/impaired people on the road.

If by "harsh consequences" you mean a $20 fine for smoking pot/cigarettes/cigars in a crowded public places I guess maybe. If you're proposing locking people up that seems a bit extreme.

Just out of curiosity and this isn’t meant to be mean, but, what kind of harsh consequence do you think would be appropriate for imposing that smell?

Oh, I'm all in favour of "harsh consequence" for people for making bad smells. I'd start with drivers with engines that belch fumes and particulates because they are defective or out-of-adjustment.

We should aalso inflict "consequence" on the SUV drivers who clog the roads in the town I live in; I have medically-compromised lungs, so the stink of diesel fumes isn't just an annoyance for me.

Let's also punish people who use wood-fired stoves in built-up areas. I live in a smoke-controlled zone, but for some reason builders are allowed to install these stoves in new-build homes, provided the model of stove meets certain standards. Well, that's cool; if the stove itself is safe, it must be the owner, operating it incorrectly. So let's give them some consequence too.

These offences aren't much like smoking a ciggie, which last about 7 minutes; the amount of fumes produced by a ICE per minute is much greater than that produced by a smoker, and the ICE generally runs for much longer than 7 minutes. Wood-fired stoves are normally run continuously for several hours, and not for heat; they are used to generate a nostalgic and aesthetic effect. If that harms others, or even if it just creates a bad smell, let's be harsh.

I'm also keen to impose "harsh consequence" on dog owners who allow their dog to deposit smelly stuff at my front gate, and who then fail to pick up that shit and take it away with them. This is a particular problem if you get a 3-week cold snap; 3 weeks-worth of dogshit all thaws at the same time, and the smell of dogshit coming out of deep-freeze pervades entire neighbourhoods. And of course, pot-smoke doesn't contain toxoplasmosis.

Hey, we wouldn't have to stand around outside if the busybodies hadn't stopped us lighting up in bars.

Hopefully somebody introduces this. Weed stinks and people who smoke it outdoors are as much a nuisance as people who smoke cigarettes. Both should be legal but banned from any public places.

Harsh? Like caning, or what?

Do you fart in public? Should your butt be plugged in public too?

I’m with you on the fines. It’s about as pleasant as snooting up someone else’s bowel contents on a train.

It is antisocial behaviour, has a health impact and needs to have a consequence.