“There’s a lot of cleaning up poop”: A Depot Worker on the Human Labor Behind Waymo’s “Autonomous” Vehicles

Waymo markets itself as fully automated: “Welcome to the future,” reads one of its many billboard and bus stop advertisements. The Alphabet subsidiary offers customers the opportunity to put on makeup, sleep, or simply relax your way through rush hour — as if a passenger couldn’t do those things in a human-driven cab. While currently operating as a robotaxi service, Waymo envisions itself as already welcoming you to a future in which you will own a self-driving car that, as Waymo claims, never “gets tired, angry, or distracted.” 

But Bay Area Current readers know not to believe the hype, or the self-driving smoke being (safely) blown up their asses. We’re not meeting the future of George Jetson, but of George Orwell. Waymo’s fleets of not-so-self-driving snitches now gather data on the streets of Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, Orlando, Phoenix, and San Antonio. But the Bay Area, and especially San Francisco, remains the spiritual parking lot of these soulless surveillance cameras/cat killers/job stealers on wheels. And thanks to this exclusive interview with someone who worked as a contractor at Waymo parking depots throughout the city at the time of this interview (July 17) — who we are calling Robotaxi Handler to maintain their anonymity — Current readers can also know the depths of the company’s poor labor practices and the true superficiality of their “autonomous” claims. Though Mayor Lurie previously heralded Waymo as “another safe and sustainable way to access shopping, theaters, hotels, and restaurants,” he is now petitioning members of Congress to regulate them following Waymo gridlock on July 4th.

Still, many Waymo boosters often lambast taxes that would pay for Muni and BART with thinly veiled lamentations about the mental and physical hygiene of public transportation users; but as Robotaxi Handler makes clear, Waymo riders can be even more gross and depraved than their antisocial ideology reveals.

Current: What’s your job at the Waymo depots? 

Robotaxi Handler: I’m an L1, it’s very hierarchical, everybody’s job is on a level system. As an L1, the core work revolves around managing different zones in a parking lot to make sure that cars come in, park and charge.  

While the cars are charging, we troubleshoot any issues with them. We make sure certain things are up to date, like their registration, make sure the sensors are cleaned, and report any issues. If there’s throw-up in the back or disgusting stuff in the car or damage to the vehicle, that gets escalated. That’s one side of it.

The other side would be supporting the depot, which includes people hired specifically for cleaning. If you become buddy-buddy with the managers, you can bring supplies and hardware from one depot to another. There’s transit people whose whole thing is bringing people from one depot to another. Who gets placed in those specific jobs gets decided by managers the day of. So your job changes every day depending on how much experience you have, how long you’ve been there, and how friendly you are with the managers.

Current: So to clarify, you don’t work directly for Waymo. Instead, you work as a contractor? 

Robotaxi Handler: Yeah, we’re contracted by Transdev US. I’m just going to say this right now. Transdev is the most disorganized, mismanaged company ever. It has the most messy hiring structure.

When I got hired, I got called by someone in a different country, and they said, “You’re hired.” And I’m like, “I didn’t even get an interview.” There’s no interview process. 

They hire 40 people at a time and then they go through this arduous orientation that’s extremely mind-numbing. It’s three different orientations at once because you need to get onboarded to Transdev, Google, and Waymo. So it’s insanely convoluted.

They weed people out over time based on whether or not you can keep up with that process and adapt really quickly. When I started, we were being trained by multiple people for different things. And every single trainer did nothing but talk shit about how the company has just decreased their pay like $8 an hour.

Current: So people who are employed by Waymo are more on the tech and software side?

Robotaxi Handler: Yeah, tech people from the garage, mechanics, are not contracted workers. I don’t know to what extent they’re doing software stuff. There’s no people from Waymo at these depots; I don’t think I’ve ever met an actual Waymo manager. If they did show up, I had no idea. 

The extent to which we do tech stuff is literally just turning the car off and turning it back on again after 30 minutes. 

We have a work phone that we use to connect to a system that pings out to our phone what issues the car has. Based on that information, we can decide what to do for the car. We can stop the LiDAR sensors from spinning so that we can inspect them and clean them. So there’s a limited capacity of what we can do with the phone, but most of those are just pre-established scripts that are well-known to fix most issues.

Current: So what are your main tasks at work?  

Robotaxi Handler: The number one thing is data. Depending on the car, we have two ways of storing data in the cars. We have these devices called VFLs, little storage devices that we plug into the back of the car, and those hold all the data for the trip. Then we take that data and put it into a little offload storage place.

And then we have something called Loda, a wireless way of offloading data. Certain depots have these little devices that are installed into the parking spaces where if they don’t have a VFL, a physical data offload piece, then it will wirelessly offload data about the trip. 

Sometimes certain computer parts just aren’t talking to each other correctly. Usually turning the car off and on again fixes that after a while. Let’s see, what else is there? I can actually look at my work phone right now, let me see…

Current: If you were to go to work right now, these would be the tasks that you would have to do? 

Robotaxi Handler: Yeah. Like downloading software. The cars usually don’t have what’s called a “soul” until an hour before they’re supposed to have a person driving them. I don’t know all the details, but basically you can’t connect to the car, you can’t do anything with it, you can’t adjust its settings at all until it has a soul. And for some reason they don’t get a soul until an hour before a shift starts. So you only have an hour from when you can even connect to the car to see if it needs new software.

And then the cars have different “missions” depending on what it needs to do: if it’s going to pick up customers, if it’s going to be driven manually [by a driver] to record data, or if it’s being set up. You have to swap it and make sure it actually switches over. When you unplug it, it’s supposed to automatically switch into an automatic mode so that it can leave by itself.

Sometimes it will just sit there and one of the bugs is called “move the vehicle.” It literally just means move it five inches because it’s being a little weird and maybe you just need to nudge it a little bit and then it’ll kick into gear.

Current: It’s so funny that it’s like every appliance ever. Let’s unplug it and plug it back in, let’s give it a little hit, see if it works. Would you say that that happens with most of the cars? I always see the long lines of Waymo’s blocking 14th Street and wonder what you workers in the reflective vests are doing. 

Robotaxi Handler: That one-way street where the Waymo will park right outside in a line to try to get in and then they’ll all get stuck? They’re definitely stupid.

Let’s say two Waymos are coming from different directions. They’ll stop before they hit each other, but then they’ll just fucking sit there and stare at each other for minutes at a time.

You’re hearing people honking at these cars for hours because we just could not get it clear. Those cars are still trying to get in while there’s still an entire wraparound of cars inside the depot trying to get out.

So it’s just a massive fuckstorm because they don’t have reasoning in that capacity. The cars don’t talk to each other. If a car sees that there’s 10 cars in front of it that are all trying to move at the same time, they don’t respond to each other. It’s just based on what it as an individual is trying to accomplish, and trying to make sure it doesn’t crash into anything. So it’ll over-yield and sit there waiting for something to get out of its way. Because the main thing with Waymo is they don’t want these things to crash.

The policy for Transdev and Waymo is actually to let it sit there and figure it out, because if we disengage it whenever there’s an issue, then the cars don’t have a chance to figure out the issue itself. So they dissuade us from disengaging the cars when there’s congestion. But when it gets really bad, then we have to — what are you going to do? There’s 50 cars all stuck and people off the street yelling at us and threatening us.

Mission Street [depot] was in the news recently because it’s a shared building with tenants of an apartment complex. And they hate us because we rent out the bottom half of the parking garage and they rent out the top half.  There’s so much congestion because it’s so tight. And because of that news story, we actually have a lot less cars going there.

And these cars aren’t the type where you can just move them. You need to get in, disengage the car by pressing a couple buttons, and then give a reason for disengaging the car. And even after all that, sometimes the car can still try to run away from you.

Sometimes if your Wi-Fi isn’t going well, you need to claim that car — have your car physically connect to your phone. So it can take forever to get these cars out of the way.

That’s why you have those situations where a car will just sit there in an emergency situation and not move: because Waymo’s more worried about crashes and how that looks on their metrics, in my opinion. 

Current: Say, God forbid, a Waymo got stuck on the Bay Bridge. (As of this writing, Waymos have been cleared to operate on highways but not bridges.) Only a Waymo or Transdev worker with a phone would be able to move it?

Robotaxi Handler: With emergency situations, only a remote worker in the Philippines can remote into the car, or a higher level worker with their work phone. But there’s a difference between a depot worker that connects to a car [in the depot] and one that’s driving in the field. If there’s a car just driving around, it’s engaged in automatic mode; you can’t just pilot that car while it has a customer in it.

I remember hearing about a fire and the cops couldn’t get the Waymo out of the way and the remote workers were having trouble remoting into the car. I think for the most part they’re able to do it. But the worst case scenario is a bug happens for the remote-in and they can’t get it to respond. There’s no magic button for cops or firefighters to press to disengage a car. Even if you get inside it, if you push the disengage button, it’s not going to do anything because you haven’t done the internal software command.

Half of us don’t really do that much. But we’re hired for our capacity to do labor and not for our labor itself.

Current: So how driverless would you say these cars are? How autonomous are they really vs how Waymo markets them?

Robotaxi Handler: L2s are the drivers. They all go to McKinnon [depot], and that spot is mostly for setting up cars that are going out on a mission with an L2.  A lot of their job is just sitting in the car while it’s in autonomous mode. If they feel like the car is about to mess up, then they can disengage it on the fly and then take control of the car to make sure it doesn’t crash. The fact that there are still a lot of those workers means that there’s still a lot of issues to work out and to gather data for. 

There are so many people at these depots. Half of us don’t really do that much. But we’re hired for our capacity to do labor and not for our labor itself.

There’s another group called WRA and their whole job is to go out. Sometimes it’s literally just to close the door all the way, or it could be that it needs a tow.

Current: You’ve mentioned a couple depots — 14th, Mission, McKinnon — do you always work at the same ones?

Robotaxi Handler: No, it’s completely random. You get a notification on your phone of where you’re going to work two hours in advance. So you have no idea where you’re going to be working in San Francisco until two hours before you work.

Current: That’s so shitty. I keep thinking you work for Waymo but you really work for Transdev. Can you tell us a bit more about Transdev and the relationship it has with Waymo?

Robotaxi Handler: One of the biggest things with Transdev, one of the main conditions for their contracts to be upheld, is that they don’t have more than three crashes per quarter inside the depot.

We have a pre-brief every morning for 20 minutes, and during that time they chastise us about how many crashes have occurred in the depot. But they have 500 people they’ve hired over the past six months [with] a week of training and then are somehow upset when they make mistakes. The grace that’s given to Transdev is very little, but at the same time, Transdev doesn’t take the precautions necessary to have a stable workforce.

On top of that, the turnover is crazy high. They want as many people as possible so that they can meet their head quota and get as much money from Waymo as possible. But at the same time, they don’t want to mess up the metrics of Waymo. It feels like they have unrealistic expectations and Transdev just needs to fulfill those in any way possible.

In terms of working there on the ground floor, the other biggest thing is interpersonal things with coworkers. Transdev really likes snitches and they have this group of people who are the manager snitches. These people take videos of their coworkers and send them to management so that management can then reprimand those people, even though they’re nowhere near the situation and have no idea what happened. Or they will decide their opinions of people based on what their in-group thinks about other people even though they haven’t investigated those situations. 

One time there were two pig heads in the backseat of the car...they were just rolling around in the back of the car.

Current: How much does an L1 make an hour? And what could your shifts look like?

Robotaxi Handler: A morning worker and a swing shift worker make $29 an hour. You get a $2 bump if you’re an overnight worker, 10pm to 6:30am. So overnight workers make $31 an hour. You get an extra dollar on top of that if you work both Saturday night and Sunday night.

Current: Because those are the busier nights. Is that when the job is the hardest, cleaning puke, weekend nights?

Robotaxi Handler: Yeah, typically that’s when there’s the most throw-up, the most disgusting things in the back. Even poop, there’s a lot of cleaning up poop.

Current: A lot?

Robotaxi Handler: Way more than you think. One time there were two pig heads in the backseat of the car and the cleaner had to clean it up. I assume they just went to the market to make a stew or something, but they forgot their pig heads. They were just rolling around in the back of the car.

Current: Wow. And then would Waymo use data to blacklist those people?

Robotaxi Handler: In some way, those are the customers: the people that want to smoke weed in the car and leave their joints all over the place. Obviously that’s bad for the next customer, but that happens a lot. So I feel like the more they whittle down accounts, that’s got to severely mess up their margins in some capacity. I don’t know, maybe not, maybe I’m overthinking it. But yeah, I have no idea. I wish I knew because I’m very curious about that.

Current: Waymo’s customers want to poop in a car. Great. Whenever I see a Waymo, I just see a camera or a sensor or whatever it is. I see a surveillance apparatus. So I was going to ask about surveillance at these depots of workers.

Robotaxi Handler: There are cameras literally everywhere, but at the same time, they don’t really check the cameras that much. They really rely on people who want to move up and become managers to bootlick and to snitch on their coworkers, even when it’s kind of been proven that they don’t even get any benefits from it. They just hired a bunch of new managers and none of them are the people who have been consistently snitching on people.

Current: There will always be bootlickers, unfortunately. And a lot of poop you all have to clean at the depots, apparently. 

Current: Anything else you’d like to add?

Robotaxi Handler: If there’s some anti-Waymo movement, the best thing to do is to get everybody to poop in one at the same time. That would be the best.

Current: Thank you.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Transdev declined to provide comment for this article. Waymo did not provide comment.