445
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
445 points (98.3% liked)
News
30825 readers
2752 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
And here’s a reminder that it’s actually illegal to volunteer at the same company you’re employed at. Specifically to prevent situations exactly like this, where employers attempt to pressure their employees into volunteering, so they don’t have to pay overtime. If you’re working for your employer, you’re required to be on the clock.
Given, that only works if the rules are actually enforced. And this administration has done a good job of dismantling agencies that would be enforcing this.
Easy, you're a salaried employee and "seasonal duty: light warehouse work"
Boom, it's part of your job.
There are specific requirements for being exempt from overtime, even for salaried employees. There are three big exemptions, and each one has multiple requirements; You need to meet ALL of the requirements for any exemption in order to be legally exempt. I’d advise you to check the requirements here, because employers regularly misclassify workers and lie through their teeth about it to avoid paying OT. Intentional misclassification is one of the most overt ways that employers steal wages, but also extremely common in many industries.
Also, there’s a blue-collar clause that says all manual labor positions are non-exempt. So if they’re dumb enough to write manual labor into your job description, you’re non-exempt no matter how highly paid you are.
next youre gonna tell me something crazy like how the most theft in america is from unpaid wages or whatever
collapsed inline media
Data is beautiful and goddamn infuriating.
beautifuriating
Its not hard to maintain those requirements though. Sure its used to mislabel positions like you say, but plenty of correctly labelled positions are abused as well. Salary means extra work with no pay regardless of whether you meet the requirements.
I think you're mistaking volunteering for a different task as them not being paid - these employees are salaried, they're being paid for this. It's basically just doing 2 hours of warehouse work instead of 2 hours of their usual corporate job. Potentially some people would have to do additional work after hours to make up for work they didn't do in those two hours, but I assume busier people wouldn't volunteer.
You need to read about how salary positions work in the states. Its entirely legal to fire someone who's on salary for refusing to volunteer extra unpaid time. They also aren't owed overtime in a lot of cases although there was law passed that limits that to only affecting higher earning people.