At this point, Amazon has to have set a target of making life more miserable for its employees every day.

This is why the US needs federal PTO laws.

Amazon needs a lawsuit and broken up like Apple

I never though the “black market” and “paied time off” would ever be in the same sentence.

So wild in the UK, in most jobs you just mark on a calendar and employers usually accept unless it's a busy time

This is more dystopian than Orwell's 1984

>Go to the servers >Destroy every single frame >You save the world

Black market: shows github Dead

I remember this same problem happening at my university back in 2004-2008. The university had a priority class registration system, where the more credits you already had, the earlier you could register for classes. The idea was to give those who were close to graduation the best chance of registering for the classes they needed to complete their degrees. What happened in practice was the classes that the upperclassmen needed to take were never full, so they would register for lower classes that were always full to save their freinds a spot. Then they would coordinate with their friend so they could drop the class and then have their friend quickly pick up the open spot. One entrepreneurial student saw this and found a business opportunity. They built a bot that would constantly check for openings in full classes and register students who had paid for the service in classes they wanted as soon as a spot opened up, thus killing the "freind dropping" shenanigans. The bot overloaded the registration servers so bad that it made it almost impossible to register for classes the normal way. What should have taken 10-20 minutes would take over 4 hours due to slow loading on the websites. The university eventually implemented their own waitlist software that all but killed the bot.

I used to work in a cal center and I learned the VTO system patterns so well I could predict if VTO was coming before it was announced, about 30 seconds decision to announcement time. I hated my job so much at that time I got every single VTO that came up for my last 3 months. That was nearly every day. I transferred within the company to a better job.

Meanwhile Bezos has a yacht that's literally as expensive as a new hospital. This is unreal.

As someone who worked as a driver, this is all true. Tried putting time off a YEAR in advance and couldn't do it because we'd be too busy. Im sorry you can't expect that market a year in advance, some holidays weren't as busy as they were usually so its not a constant trend.

Bezos is watching Black Mirror like “hmmm…. Good idea….”

I work at amazon and I’ve always thought of bots taking the vto but never thought it was a thing. Also at least where I work they offer vto 90% of the time at the same times usually half hour to an hour on the dot after a shift ends so people who know this pick it up instantly.

[This comment was edited due to the fact that I didn't fully think before posting previously. Long story short, screw Bezos]

Seeing that first image with Amazon "VTO" gave me flashbacks. Never do Warehouse work for Amazon, it is utter hell

What the hell? This shits becoming so dystopian, you gotta _pay_ your company to get time off that you're _supposed_ to have anyways?

I work for Amazon & this is the first I’m hearing of this, but ngl makes sense VTO gets claimed *ASAP*

VTO is normal at high-stress jobs like this - usually customer-facing or customer support. Its randomly given and given during work. I used to work for a similar big name company and had to use an autoclicker or ignore my job risk firing. Can only take so many screaming customers. Could get fired for hanging up on even irate customers. I did this for sanity and don't feel bad for using a clicker I made. This was almost a decade ago. I only made a simple thing, but people used more advanced bots at the time too. This was years and years ago, so yeah. Unfortunately nothing new.

Definitely not watching this in the ship dock bathroom while trying to decide whether or not my job is worth it anymore

The dystopian future is here, and it boils down to people accept it if their trinkets are shiny enough.

This shit is literally a dystopian future

Call center agents having first come first serve days off based on performance: "first time?"

“If money is evil, then that building is hell.”

Oh you could I don't know amazon give your workers a proper contract with days off they can actually take.

Amazon is trying to create anarcho-capitalism and it shows in how they treat their employees

Don't forget about those sneaky or bs (Silent VTO)

It's weird to hear someone talking about my job

Would be illegal in germany and sounds really dystopian Wtf

Wagey cagey is a meme based on reality, mostly Amazon.

I would die working in a place like that. In my current work I can come to the office whenever I want, I can take a small nap whenever I want, go home whenever I want. At my workplace the only thing that matters is that the work is done and that I do, well even. In a workplace like Amazon the stress would just kill me.

They have limited unpaid vacation? That's extremely depressing

That's absolutely fuckimg insane

To clear up the confusion: Amazon has several time off options, UPT, PTO, Vacation time, VTO, Bereavement leave, and sick leave. UPT is a limited balance meaning unpaid time off, if you go negative, you are fired within a week. You can use PTO to cover that time and refund UPT. PTO is just as it sounds, paid time off. It has a yearly cap, around 80 hours max with I believe is 60 hours max accrueal per year. It cannot go negative. VTO is voluntary, meaning you don't get paid for the moment you take it and clock out. Sometimes you can take a week-long VTO, rare albeit. Vacation time is accrued very slowly in comparison to UPT and PTO, but has to be approved when taking the time off. Sick leave can be tricky, sometimes they'll be a little hard to use. They'll refund UPT if a supplied doctors note is valid. Bereavement leave lets you take a few days off to mourne a deceased immediate family member. UPT, PTO, and Vacation time all accrue at different rates, have different caps. Amazon is one of the most fair companies in terms of time off policies.

Wow, imagine escaping the hell of working for amazon only to create something to make everyone still stuck there's lives even worse, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night

being able to quit on the spot is a godsend.

Who is making these bots?

Amazon still owes me £500. From 8 years ago when I worked for them.

Man, Amazon is a jungle.

Limited unpaid time off that comes with risk of retaliation should be illegal. People have lives.

Imagine getting a job and then scrambling to find every possible way to take time off lmao.

Amazon needs to unionize BAD

Buying time off is something that should trigger revolt when heard.

To be honest, I've had the same idea when I worked there.

And people wonder why everyone was annoyed when that worker the other day saved a persons life and got a pizza party and laptop. The next day they do shit like this. They don’t care, they just want the numbers to increase.

I dont have to imagine, this is the standard.

"You load Sixteen Tonnes, Whaddya Get? Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt."

I promise the turnover is so high there that if you just don’t show up for a day they might not even notice if you’re in the warehouse lmao

As someone who worked at Amazon it's even worse during peak times of the year when VTO is barely given out

Handing out what should be your right is really crooked behavior that the government was made to stop happening.

Reminder: you don't request time off, you tell your workplace WHEN you're taking off. You're informing, not begging.

If this isn’t breaking any laws we should consider crime

Never have understood the mentality of accepting a job and then bitching that they don't do things the way you want to.

They also have PTO (paid time off) vacation time and unpaid time off depending on your state but this works near me in Wisconsin

Can confirm, My wife and i cannot claim VTO via the app, however managers can give out VTO on site if they are allowed, meaning you can still get it if you show up for a few hours, usually. Doesnt help they recently updated the app so its loading screens are worse, making it harder to claim VTO or extra shifts.

Wow, this actually made me feel better about my job. Thank you.

VTO is only dished out when demand for warehouse is low, Amazon has UPT (unpaid time off) that builds up every day, PTO (paid time off) which build very week and Vacation that builds every week. VTO is effectively a cut list. I have worked in warehouses for Amazon for the past 4 years, it’s not bad, it just sounds like it because it’s different than other jobs. And calling UPT a finite number is technically true, but I had 80 hours of UPT at one point very early in my time at Amazon. As long as you show up for 90% of your work days you will typically will be fine. You have to try to be fired from most FCs

This is why we get 48 hours of pto a year, 5 minutes of upt an hour and 1 hour and 33 minutes of vacation a week.

The Air Force treated me like a number, but Amazon treated me like a piece of equipment, and not a valuable one either.

I used to sit and wait for this to pop up ,it would only show up on the east side of the building at a certain time

When I worked at TUS1, it wasn't VTO, it was being VTold to go home. Either you'd take the "voluntary" time off, or you'd get shoved into a position you weren't trained to do that had rate and held top the same standard as the usual worker. We learned pretty fast that you either took the hot or your risk getting fired for not making rate in an area you didn't typically work in and didn't have the experience or training for. It was an absolute shitshow and I'm delighted to have gotten out.

I've never "asked" for time off. I've been gracious enough to TELL them when I was taking off, so they could staff appropriately, though.

Was a driver and a warehouse worker, neither of them are worth it and both are part time

Imagine having a business model that is so twisted it creates an entire black market

I used to work for Amazon, VTO was indeed hard to come by, but the work was pretty easy. Just moving around packages. It was actually kinda fun.

Hi former amazon worker here who quiting tomorrow at time of writing. It didn't help that there be rarely a warning that we be getting VTO and when we wanna check we get in trouble for being on our phones.

Black market days off sounds dystopian as hell

Not only was it a pain in the ass to try and use it, but it was also a pain to build it up.

Bro forgot to mention PTO, Vacation and Sick days.

That's literally my job. I don't even want to get paid to get time off but I have to basically beg for time off

Sounds a hell of a lot like Comcast when I used to work there. Shop around, folks, there's always a company that'll treat you better if you have the skills they need

Amazon just keeps getting more and more dystopian

“Voluntary time off” is some f-ed up newspeak dystopia bull.

"Amazon! We own everything!"

See they have us so reliant on work that taking a day off to do anything is a punishment.

Here’s to Amazon, somehow making my employer look good.

UPT isn't really finite, as we accumulate it over time as we work, and there's no limit to how much we can get each year, only a limit to how much we can have store up at once. I'm pretty sure it's 80 hours for most employees, and at least at my facility, we get 1 minute of UPT per 12 minutes worked (5 minutes per hour), which means that it actually builds up pretty fast. Even outside of that we also get PTO and Vacation, which are both paid, and we have Leave of Absence options for anytime we need to take expended periods of time off, and they don't use up any of our other time off options.

This is fucking dystopian

Worked at an Amazon warehouse and can confirm you’ll never see VTO

Insane how they dont just give each employee their own time off

Amazon doing the irl dystopian world record speedrun

I still hear the jingle of the notification in my sleep and dashing to my phone

Plot twist: It's actually Amazon running the bots and selling the slots to its own employees.

Wouldn't be surprised if Amazon was running those bots on ghost employees

Literal dystopia

Imagine working for a mega corp and being surprised when it acts like a mega corp

As a federal government employee, I watched this 4 times and it only made my head hurt worse. We get 4/6/8 hrs of paid leave/pay period (depending on length of service) & 4hrs of sick leave. We also can accumulate up to 140-ish hrs of leave without pay & in emergency situations can use up to 240hrs of advanced sick leave that we either have to pay or earn back. Plus, we get about a dozen paid federal holidays. We also have a leave donation program for if a colleague gets sick we can transfer some of our unused leave to them. Oh, and many agencies are unionized.

They'll sometimes offer it in building too. Depending on the warehouse.

Makes sense whenever I get a message that there is VTO I immediately check to see that it's already filled up

I used to work for Amazon n it doesn’t matter how good of an employee or how long you’ve been there. If you’re even -1 unpaid time off you’ll immediately get fired.

Wow... That has to be a nightmare for workers.

That's exactly at every job!

They call it Voluntary Time Off as if their job is their life and the time off is just a burden

We did something similar with the flex program. We made little bots that you could put your phone on and it would tap the screen for you in the correct way to get you work for the day as you slept in till your shift. If you didn't know, they dropped the work at like 6 or earlier in the morning, so you'd have to wake up all super early and sit there and tap your screen for a chance to work. The bot did it for you. Go in at 9 of later depending on what job it caught for you

Idk how accurate this is.

Amazon here making dystopian fiction a reality

VTO occurrence varies greatly from warehouse to warehouse, to time of year, and how many employees called off. The warehouse across from the FC i worked at got it all the time. Mine had varied from having it everyday, multiple times a day, throughout a week, to 3 and half months of no VTO available. But one thing that wasn't mentioned that at a lot of facilities, if you claim VTO too much, they'll bump you down the line

the effects of unpunished corporate greed: bring back tar and feathers

Everyone will talk about how bad Amazon is to it's employees but none of there customers will stop shopping.

Boycott Amazon if you can.