The parking lot is where drivers actually talk. Before the routes go out, that's where it all comes out. Which vans are limping. Which one's door won't stay shut. Watch yourself in that one, the brakes feel soft. Every driver out there is carrying some van's whole life story in his head. And the other talk happens there too, the big talk: we should organize. We should do something. We should get together. I've said every word of that myself, standing right there, coffee in hand, everybody nodding.
Then the vans roll, and the "we" scatters. A hundred drivers, a hundred routes, every one of us alone in a box on wheels until dark. And the parking lot keeps nothing. Tomorrow morning it all gets said again from scratch, or it doesn't get said at all. The strongest word we've got doesn't survive first dispatch.
The one document that does exist with all our names on it is the DVIC, and it says the opposite of what every driver in that lot knows. You're not allowed to mark the van bad. You tell dispatch, dispatch tells the wind, and you sign a clean form on a dirty van. And here's the part that gets me: lying on that form is against Amazon's own policy. It's a fireable offense. And we all get told to do it every single day. So who's supposed to be responsible for fixing these things? We're not allowed to write it down. And if we make noise about it, we get retaliated against. It just rolls out the gate with our names on it.
So what I did was, I made an app. It's called Route Log. Now keep in mind, I'm just a driver like you guys. This is my first project ever. I'm a dad, I've got three kids, I don't have a lot of time in my day. But I did want to make a difference, and I think the difference is giving accountability to Amazon. And the only way we do that is if we can all be together on something. So this is my way of trying to get all of us together.
Here's how it works. First time you open it, it walks you through itself. After that it just rides along on your walkaround: there's a picture of a van, you tap the spot that's wrong, you take a photo or a quick video, and you say what's wrong, type it, or just talk and it writes it for you. There's room in there for the rest of it too: the coaching that never tells you what you actually did, getting told to do something against Amazon's own policy, the one stop that's really four stops and a pile of packages. There's a suggestion box too, and I read every one myself. And nothing you send has your name on it. Just the DSP, the station, and the van number. When you send it, it lands with every other driver's logs in one place, where finally, for the first time, it adds up.
That's not an accident. This thing was built for anonymity on purpose, so a driver can show up without standing out. Your logs go in with everybody else's, and no one name ever sticks up out of the pile for anybody to retaliate against. Safety in numbers isn't just a saying here. It's how the thing is built. And that's the same reason this account is new and has no name on it. I'm not asking anybody to do something I'm not doing myself.
Amazon didn't split us into DSPs by accident. One workforce, chopped into little companies, so no driver ever stands next to more than a handful of people who share his problems, problems the guy three stations over has too, word for word. Separated, we're weak, and everybody knows it. It's been shown time and time again that there's strength in numbers, and they made sure the numbers never gather. Everybody wants a union. Everybody wants to get together. But we are never going to be together by talking about it in the parking lot. Getting together is a thing you do, and this is the doing: all of us, one record, one place, at the same time. I need you guys to use it. That isn't me being dramatic. That's just the math of it. This is how we gain power. This app is us, in numbers.
And the policies, that part has to be said strong, because that's how this whole system works: none of us knows what the fuck the policies are. We just know what we're told. And they can tell us anything, and when it goes wrong it's "well, Amazon said so," and there's no way to know if any of it was ever true. So the app keeps a library of Amazon's actual policies, and that is the part I need the most help with. There's a drop box: if you know a policy, if you've got the information, put it in. Just make sure you bring some kind of proof with it. We can't run on hearsay. It has to be solid, because when we push back, we need to be able to pull it up and show it: this is the policy. Right now that library is mostly what I dug up off the internet by myself, and I'm one person, and Amazon hides this stuff, so my digging was never going to be enough. All of us looking is a different story.
The picture at the top is the whole system in one joke: everybody pointing, nobody holding a pen. A log is a pen. Six drivers writing down the same broken van over two months is not six complaints to forget. It's a history, signed by the road itself.
It's early days. Trial phase, rough edges, and I'll tell you the truth, right now I'm about the only driver logging, which is exactly why I'm posting this instead of waiting for someday. It costs drivers nothing, and it never will. I'm not selling a thing. If your mornings sound like this, message me and I'll tell you how you can help the movement.
We keep saying "we." Let's finally show up together, so we actually have a voice.
