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Amazon asks corporate workers to ‘volunteer’ help with grocery deliveries as Prime Day frenzy approaches
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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I can't help but think that, just maybe, the idea is to volunteer for extra shifts.
Yes, perhaps Amazon is just terrible, I think it's also possible this article is painting an inaccurate picture to make things seem worse than they are.
salaried emps don’t have “shifts”. the safe thing is to assume amazon is doing the profitable thing and that means exploitation.
I highly doubt that Amazon is dumb enough to ask people to volunteer their time for free. There are way tooany ways that ends in lawsuits. HR and the lawyers would put a stop to that faster than you can say "wage theft".
I've worked jobs where, at times of peak business, office staff were asked to volunteer for paid shifts rather than hire more people for a very short time. It's not weird or malicious, it's fairly normal.
"Volunteer" doesn't always imply "work for free".
when a multi-billion dollar corp asks for volunteers you’d better believe it’s because it benefits the corp. the owners of amazon are trash.
You've worked some shit jobs.
you don't understand how exempt salaried employment works in the US.
Exempt employees are are not entitled to overtime pay or minimum wage protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act. It is supposed to be limited to those who work in professional, administrative, executive, outside sales, or computer-related roles.
Asking a salaried employee to do something like this as a one off isn't going to revoke their exempt status.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17a-overtime
"perhaps"