Amazon also mistreats non-employees

I know this site is for employees, but it's important to recognize that amazon illegally straddles the lines between employees and independent contractors. The overwhelming evidence in my case (if it ever went to trial) is that the contractors are actually amazon employees. They think they're having the best of both worlds but it's illegal to think they can treat people as employees and contractors at the same time. This compounds our mistreatment since they think they can get away with it even more.

I was an amazon flex driver who basically got railroaded.  In case you don't know about the way it works, all the information that we use, including all the training and everything, is on their smart phone application. This might have been a great idea, but the application is faulty. During deliveries for a couple of weeks, I got lost many times after the application crashed numerous times, so I went back to the distribution center and the amazon employees there basically badmouthed me to my face in front of all of the other people in the office. They lied and told me I was the only one experiencing these problems. Obviously that's not true because I'm a former technical computer support person and I know very well that their application was designed to have 100% data connection to their system all of the time. You know obviously there's not data connections everywhere and there's not cellphone service everywhere you walk across every square inch of the planet. When there is no service, their application would hang and crash resulting in all kinds of late deliveries and nothing else but trouble. Also, they would insist that I use that application on my phone while driving and that's illegal in my state. 

After that situation, I called the main number for support because I had a great track record of on time deliveries as shown by my metrics on the smartphone application and they had given me extra work based on my great record, so I figured they must like what I was doing and would want to fix this problem. Even though it was local number, it was really a call to Seattle HQ. Their response was to immediately delete my account on the application, so I couldn't get any of the information on there any more, like all of my hours and how much money they owed me. Luckily, I thought of that in advance and took screen shots of all of this information before they deleted my account.

Another illegal thing they did was to tell drivers that tips should never be accepted except through the app. Drivers are not happy about this because they should be able to build a personal relationship with the customers and get tips for great service so what right does amazon have to interfere with this since we're not supposed to be employees. They just want to control everything without respecting our rights at all.

It's a really sick culture at amazon. Not one of the people in that warehouse smiled during my many trips there, not even once.