Amazon has set a very high standard for ease in ordering and speed in delivery of products. It has forced other companies to raise their standards in order to compete.
By understanding what actually takes place in an Amazon distribution center, we can better evaluate the quality of the jobs being projected at the Churchill site.
As a consumer, that ease is addictive, in that, in hindsight, impulse purchases with one click ordering lead to spending that is not necessary or practical.
At least 5 books have been written by people who have worked at the Amazon facilities. If time allows each will be reviewed on the Churchill Future website.
But we must also understand the true costs for that convenience.
Why sweatshop conditions continue to be tolerated at the lowest levels of Amazon when the corporate level is among the very best compensated in all US industries. Some may not agree with the term sweatshop, preferring to think it only occurs in third world countries, but after reading stories from just 23 different media sources below, the choice of term is pretty accurate.
We’ll relate a few characteristics that until the cry became so loud in 2018, was kept hidden from the public by a wall of secrecy and reprisal that still exists today for anyone who criticizes anything about Amazon.
In a separate article, we shall review the real reasons that Amazon raised pay to the $15/hour level, and it was not because Jeff Bezos felt generous or embarrassed by previous minimum wage pay.
When talking about the working conditions at Amazon, and unless it just changed, employees are allowed only twenty minutes of “time off task” over a ten-hour shift. If you took more than your 20 minutes, and Amazon knows because it tracks employees every minute, you collected demerits and risked being docked pay or being terminated.
Forklift drivers are supposed to get through a truck in only fifteen or twenty minutes’ If goods come in loose, they still have to be manually palletized, but the time constraint still remains because every single minute of dock time is reserved 24 hours in advance.
The pallets are brought in to the “water spiders” who would distribute to the work stations. We’ll talk more about the internal operations in other articles as time allows.
Amazon is constantly searching for a way to eliminate slack, It has two patents for a wrist band that can track workers’ every move, and even alert them via a vibration if it detected that they were going off task.
Amazon has an automated system to track performance, productivity, time off task and the system will flag you for termination if you lagged. That is, you can be fired by an algorithm. All without input from a supervisor. And there are cameras everywhere.
Amazon kept its internal warehouse operations totally secret until employees went public about the injuries and working conditions being experienced. Then they scheduled carefully choreographed tours for the media, just as they do when OSHA inspectors visit, all scheduled in advance, and all Potemkin villages.
Even the New York Times was distracted by the show and tell façade as seen below.
Warehouse stories from 2005 keep being repeated up to 2021, so in reality, very little has changed over the years.
Amazon only responds when criticism becomes too great to suppress, and then it modifies and makes distracting claims contradicting reality. Every negative is reinterpreted as a positive.
Amazon spokespeople deliberately divert attention away from any negative comments or criticisms.
Amazon’s object is to persuade potential recruits that there’s no better place to work. The reality is less rosy. Many Amazon warehouse employees struggle to pay the bills, and more than 4,000 employees are on food stamps in nine states.
(Bloomberg)—Amazon.com Inc. job ads are everywhere. Plastered …
There is a whole department within Amazon whose job is to find and update articles, or to discredit the article, and or to create counter articles whenever anything negative is published about the company.
Even the national media outlets below nearly all had Amazon contact them and “update” the content.
Murray Bilby
SOURCES
This article is composed of 156 pages of content from the following media sources on working conditions at Amazon warehouses and distribution (fulfillment) facilities
Some relate to the Covid 19 period, but the actual work and comments are applicable today.
Direct links for verification are posted above each article.
Below is a summary of those sources so that you can see the quality of media covering the Amazon activities.
https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/
https://www.washingtonpost.com
https://www.businessinsider.com
https://www.cityandstateny.com
‘I’m not a robot’: Amazon workers condemn unsafe, grueling conditions at warehouse
Wed 5 Feb 2020 03.00 EST
Rina Cummings has worked three 12-hour shifts every week at Amazon’s gargantuan New York City warehouse, called JFK8, on Staten Island since it first began operations in late 2018. As a sorter on the outbound ship dock, her job is to inspect and scan a mandated rate of 1,800 Amazon packages an hour – 30 per minute – that are sent through a chute and transported on a conveyor belt before leaving the facility for delivery.
Workers such as Cummings helped Amazon achieve its best ever Christmas this year. Faster shipping drove Amazon’s revenues to $87bn for fourth quarter of 2019, adding another $12.8bn to founder Jeff Bezos’s $128.9bn fortune. Amazon has just signed a deal to take another 450,000 sq ft of warehouse space on the island to speed delivery to its New York-area consumers.
But while New York customers, and Amazon’s shareholders, may be happy, some workers are not. In November, as the holiday rush got into full swing, Cummings was one of 600 workers at the Amazon warehouse who signed and delivered a petition to management calling on Amazon to improve working conditions.
The petition called on Amazon to consolidate workers’ two 15-minute breaks into a 30-minute one. Workers say it can take up to 15 minutes just to walk to and from the warehouse break room. Workers also called for Amazon to provide more reliable public transit services to the warehouse. They also called attention to reports of high injury rates at the facility there, which were found to be three times the national average for warehouses, based on the company’s injury reports to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
Cummings first became involved with Amazon worker organizing efforts after witnessing several cases where, she claims, her colleagues were treated unfairly – and the safety concerns she works through during her own shifts at Amazon.
A worker sorts through items and places orders at the Amazon fulfillment center on Staten Island. Photograph: Kathy Willens/AP
“There are days I say I’m just at the mercy of God,” said Cummings. She said the only changes Amazon implemented after the high injury report was published was to install video monitors around the warehouse that tell workers safety is the company’s number one priority.
“There has been no real change. There are still injuries. They were saying the report is not accurate, but it’s just a way for them to avoid responsibility,” she said.
Cummings said injuries are common among her colleagues, and she often experiences close calls. A few weeks ago, a pin sticking out of the conveyor belt tore off one of her work gloves, almost taking her hand with it. She also said some packages that drop on to her conveyor belt from the chute are either too large to be on it or improperly packaged, so the package’s contents burst open on the belt, which she said recently injured one of her colleagues.
When packages, especially envelopes with liquid, burst on the conveyor belt, Cummings often has to stop the belt to clean up the mess, but is still expected to hit her hourly rate. She’s been written up once for missing her rate because several of these incidents happened in the same week.
“People get fired regularly,” she said. “It just takes two or three write-ups, depending on the severity. You can get fired for anything.”
Cummings has impaired vision and is required by law to receive disability accommodations for her job. But she said new managers consistently try to place her in other departments she is unable to do the work in.
“I had a manager ask me: are you sure you can’t see?” said Cummings. Her mobility counselor sent Amazon a detailed email with suggestions on safety improvements, such as painting safety lines in the warehouse brighter colors and installing yellow safety strips on all stairs. But Cummings said all the suggestions were ignored.
An Amazon spokesperson said the company has a comprehensive medical accommodations process.
Raymond Velez worked as a packer at the Amazon JFK8 warehouse from October 2018 to November 2019. He was required to pack at a rate of 700 items per hour. He said workers are regularly fired for missing rates.
“That’s all they care about. They don’t care about their employees,” Velez added. “They care more about the robots than they care about the employees. I’ve been to Amcare [the company’s on-site medical unit] a couple times for not feeling well, and you’d get an aspirin and sent back to work.”
Juan Espinoza, who worked as a picker at the Amazon Staten Island warehouse, quit because of the grueling working conditions.
‘They don’t care about their employees. They care more about the robots than they care about the employees.’ Photograph: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images
“I was a picker and we were expected to always pick 400 units within the hour in seven seconds of each item we picked,” said Espinoza. “I couldn’t handle it. I’m a human being, not a robot.”
Ilya Geller, who worked as a stower, told of the pressure workers face from being surveilled by computers to ensure productivity rates are met.
“You’re being tracked by a computer the entire time you’re there. You don’t get reported or written up by managers. You get written up by an algorithm,” said Geller. “You’re keenly aware there is an algorithm keeping track of you, making sure you keep going as fast as you can, because if there is too much time lapsed between items, the computer will know this, will write you up, and you will get fired.”
An Amazon spokesperson told the Guardian in an email: “Like most companies, we have performance expectations for every Amazonian and we measure actual performance against those expectations.”
The spokesperson said coaching is provided to under-performing workers.
Jimpat Lacewell started working at Amazon in Staten Island in November as a sorter, but quit after three days because it reminded him of prison – not least because of the 20-minute wait to get through security in and out of the facility.
“I would rather go back to a state correctional facility and work for 18 cents an hour than do that job,” Lacewell said. “I’m sure Mr Bezos couldn’t do a full shift at that place as an undercover boss.”
Other Amazon workers at the New York City warehouse were reluctant to speak on the record for fear of retaliation, but also reported unaddressed safety concerns and frequent worker injuries.
“I’ve been out of work twice in the past year due to knee pain,” said an Amazon order picker. They explained their second injury was a result of their manager ignoring medical restrictions from surgery on his right foot.
Another order picker said they are constantly dealing with chronic lower back pain and knee pain due to the job.
“I take Tylenol or Aleve two to three times a week,” the worker said. “Almost every night when I wake up, I have really bad, sharp, needle-like lower back pain. I’ve had to use my paid time off a lot just to recover or work half days.”
An Amazon associate who transferred to the New York City warehouse to help train the new workers said they transferred to a different warehouse because their safety concerns and suggestions were repeatedly ignored by upper level managers.
“It has terrible safety for powered industrial truck (PIT) operators and pedestrian traffic, which is why I left,” said the worker.
“I reported several violations to safety there – only to get brushed off and pushed aside.”
They characterized the PIT lane as a highway for equipment such as forklifts and electric pallet jacks.
‘They know us better than we know ourselves’: how Amazon tracked my last two years of reading
An Amazon spokesperson said the company recently installed guard rails across the dock at JFK8 to eliminate all pedestrian interaction with the PIT lane.
The spokesperson added: “It’s inaccurate to say that our FCs are unsafe and any effort to paint our workplaces as such based on the number of injury recordings is misleading given the size of our workforce. While many companies under-record safety incidents in order to keep their rates low, Amazon does the opposite – we take an aggressive stance on recording injuries no matter how big or small.
“We believe so strongly in the environment provided for fulfillment center employees, including our safety culture, that we offer public tours where anyone can come see for themselves one of our sites and its working conditions first-hand.”
- This article was amended on 27 July 2020 to remove some personal information.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/technology/amazon-workplace-warehouse-coronavirus.html
By Karen Weise
Photographs by Ruth Fremson
- Published June 9, 2020Updated June 10, 2020
What It Looks Like Inside an Amazon Warehouse Now
KENT, Wash. — After months of being embattled over its response to the coronavirus, Amazon is working to convince the public that its workplaces — specifically, the warehouses where it stores everything from toys to hand sanitizer — are safe during the pandemic.
The giant internet retailer has started running television ads that show that its warehouse and delivery employees have masks and other protective gear. It has pushed out segments to local news stations touting its safety improvements. It has asked journalists to visit its warehouses to see for themselves.
Boxes are stacked inside the fulfillment center in Kent, Wash., 20 miles south of Seattle.
Amazon is spreading its safety message after a period that Jeff Bezos, the company’s chief executive, has called “the hardest time we’ve ever faced.” As the coronavirus swept through the United States, Amazon struggled to balance a surge of orders with the health concerns of the one million workers and contractors at its warehouses and delivery operations.
In hundreds of its facilities, workers became ill with Covid-19, and many blamed the company. At the height of its crisis, one Amazon executive said he had quit over the firings of workers who raised questions about workplace safety during the pandemic.
While Amazon has rolled out safety changes, many workers and officials said the measures were unevenly deployed and came too late.
But in recent weeks, workers said, some conditions inside the warehouses have improved. And the company, which was in emergency response mode in March and April, has resumed a more regular rhythm of business.
Amazon recently invited reporters into a fulfillment center in Kent, Wash., 20 miles south of Seattle, where the company is based. The New York Times agreed to tour the facility to see the changes that Amazon and many workers around the country had described.
Plexiglass, Tape and Sanitizer Stations
Image
When employees arrive at the warehouse, their temperature is taken. A large sign indicates a station for handing out masks.
Lanes have been created to help employees maintain social distance while they work.
The facility, which opened in 2016, stretches across more than one million square feet. The squat, largely windowless structure sits in an industrial park surrounded by parking lots. Inside, a vast web of conveyor belts crisscrosses the building, moving between areas where workers stow products into robotic shelves and areas where the workers pick items up from the shelves. There are also workstations where people package the items for shipping.
On a typical shift, 600 to 800 employees work there. Much of the building naturally has little human interaction because the work areas are spaced far apart.
A member of the human resources department now works behind a plexiglass divider.
Hand sanitizer and sanitizing stations can be found throughout the center.
But some high-traffic areas have changed. The human resources desk has put up walls of plexiglass so people can still talk face to face, with a layer of separation. There is tape throughout the warehouse marking out six-foot increments for social distancing. Sanitizer stations are common; before they were rare.
The biggest transformation is at the building’s entryway, a wide lobby area with tall turnstiles. Workers would previously pass through the turnstiles and start their shift. Now when they arrive, they are channeled past thermal cameras, manned by colleagues, to take their temperatures. At a small stand enclosed in plexiglass, a worker stands with a stack of masks, which are handed out using long tongs.
Editors’ Picks
Workers’ temperatures are taken at the entrance to the warehouse.
The Testing Lab
Amazon has set up a lab in the warehouse where employees take Covid-19 tests.
After workers pass through the temperature checks, they see a glass-walled room that previously was used for training. The room is part of an Amazon pilot program to test warehouse employees for Covid-19, part of the $4 billion that the company has said it plans to spend in the next few months to respond to the virus.
When workers enter the makeshift testing center, they scan their company badge. They are handed, via forceps, a test kit for the virus. The small plastic bag, which is marked with a biohazard symbol, contains a swab and test-tube-like container. Workers can go to one of several areas with tables to follow instructions on how to administer the test. Then they seal their test kit and place it in a green bin.
An employee of Concentra, a company that provides workplace health care, is on hand to give the medical oversight needed for self-administered tests.
Amazon said more than 1,000 of the more than 3,000 workers at the facility had been tested for the coronavirus.
A Thrum of Activity
In a break room, employees eat while socially distancing.
Workers still come and go. They grab lunch in the break room and have a smoke outside. Those are signs that business is getting back to normal.
In the early stages of the pandemic, Amazon focused on shipping critical products, like hand sanitizer and diapers. But the Kent warehouse also packed products to meet shoppers’ other whims — outdoor lights, blenders, car-washing supplies and more.
Amazon has hired 175,000 temporary workers — including about 1,000 at this warehouse alone — to stand in for employees who stayed home during the early phase of the pandemic and to help meet demand that rivaled its peak holiday season. Now the majority of those workers have been given permanent roles.
An Amazon worker inside the fulfillment center.
Emilie Deschamps, a worker whom Amazon authorized to talk publicly, joined the warehouse in October. She said the biggest change hadn’t been physical but, rather, how Amazon had adjusted break times to stagger them and reduce congestion. The company also gave people extra time to wash their hands, she said.
“Honestly, it’s been OK so far,” Ms. Deschamps said.
Even with work stations spaced far apart, employees pass closely by each other at times, just as you might see at a grocery store or on a sidewalk.
Employees handling boxes for shipping items.
Slogans are common throughout the warehouse.
Online shoppers should be aware of Amazon’s grueling working conditions
April 28, 2020 12:29 am by Teegan Oshins, CORRESPONDENT
Amazon workers should not have to endure COVID-19 exposures and hazardous work environments. SPECIAL TO THE ORACLE
With millions of Americans staying home, many are turning to online shopping to meet basic needs or make “comfort purchases.”
According to Content Square, a digital analytics company, online traffic for retail companies like Amazon has increased by 15 percent on a global scale since the beginning of January, when the COVID-19 pandemic was starting to present itself as an international problem.
While people are allowed to shop however they please, they should also consider the effects increased online retail shopping has on workers. Many of these companies have unethical labor practices that put workers at risk.
Amazon warehouses, for example, have been an unsafe place to work even before the pandemic, according to former employees. For each 10-hour shift, employees have only two 15-minute breaks.
The Atlantic magazine and Reveal, an investigative journalism organization, interviewed an Amazon warehouse employee who disclosed her stressful quotas.
The employee was required to scan an item every 11 seconds, which is over 300 items each hour. If she missed her quota, Amazon would know, since the company was tracking employee scan rates.
These demanding conditions can lead to a high rate of workplace injuries. At the Staten Island, New York, warehouse, the cause of injuries ranged from falling boxes to tripping over ladders, according to a 2019 Gizmodo article. Bruises and sprains are considered common injuries for an Amazon worker.
In November 2019, New York City warehouse employees produced a petition for Amazon to increase their break times and safety regulations.
The 600 workers who signed the petition had cited a high risk of injury, at 12 injuries per 100 full-time employees. These rates are three times the national average, according to figures reported to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Workplace injuries could worsen further as employees try to keep up with the higher demands the pandemic is requiring.
Now, over 130 Amazon warehouses have had employees test positive for COVID-19, and more than 300 employees have pledged to not show up to work in protest. Workers have complained about feeling as if they are not being considered when it comes to safety regulations and are asking for paid sick leave during this time.
Now more than ever, we need to be aware of where our products are coming from and the work that goes into delivering them. This requires taking action to show support for Amazon workers.
While warehouse conditions are awful, Amazon employees still require a paycheck to make ends meet. A helpful way to respect Amazon employees while still providing them with an income is to support their demands for better working conditions.
This includes signing petitions that urge COVID-19 exposed facilities to shut down, standing in solidarity with workers by not shopping on Amazon when they go on strike and limiting the purchases of nonessential items.
A Facebook group called “Prime Member Solidarity with Amazonians United” sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos demanding paid sick leave, childcare pay and subsidies, 1.5 times hazard pay among other things for COVID-19 workers.
After criticisms from lawmakers and public officials, an April 10 Wired article said Amazon now allows its employees to use a two-week emergency paid sick leave if they suspect to have COVID-19.
It makes sense to shop online at this time, but every consumer needs to be conscious of the effects their purchases have on the people who produce them. Essential workers, like those who work in Amazon warehouses, deserve to be recognized and respected for going to work and risking their health for our easement.
“You’re Just Disposable”: New Accounts from Former Amazon Employees Raise Questions About Working Conditions
FEBRUARY 14, 2020 by Patrice Taddonio
In recent weeks, Amazon has stepped forward to promote the company as a force for good in the American economy, and tout its treatment of workers at the sprawling network of warehouses where millions of packages are prepared for delivery each year.
But in interviews for a new FRONTLINE documentary, former Amazon employees who worked in the company’s warehouses — which it calls “fulfillment centers” — describe a work environment in which they felt pressured to pick and pack items at productivity rates they say are “unrealistic.” Their stories echoed the more than 50 interviews FRONTLINE conducted with similar workers across the country.
“The part they don’t talk about is the safety rules that you have to ignore to make rate,” one former Amazon fulfillment center employee tells FRONTLINE producer and director James Jacoby in the above excerpt from Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos. “It’s not just that you go in and you do your job and that’s it … it’s incredibly hard to meet rate while following all the safety procedures.”
In the documentary, which was released Feb. 18 and is now streaming online, the former employees say the pressure they feel is heightened by Amazon’s use of technology to gather data on what’s happening — and how quickly — in its warehouses.
“We’re not treated as human beings, we’re not even treated as robots,” one former employee says in the above scene. “We’re treated as part of the data stream.”
Amazon has recently come under similar criticism from a group of 15 Democratic senators — including presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — who sent a letter to Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos condemning what they said was the company’s “dismal” record on worker safety, and calling for change to its “profit-at-all costs culture.”
In the FRONTLINE documentary, Jeff Wilke, one of two CEOs under Bezos, strongly defends the company’s treatment of workers and its commitment to safety.
“From the moment I arrived 20 years ago, I made it very clear to our operations teams that we will not compromise the safety of our employees to do anything else,” Wilke says in the above clip. “So we have a culture that if we are asking people to do something that they have to do too fast to be safe, they can raise their hand and say, ‘this isn’t right,’ and we’ll fix it.”
Wilke stresses that the company has become an industry leader in training its workforce for career advancement, and says its hourly workers — for whom Amazon’s minimum wage is double the federal standard — are offered the same benefits Amazon executives receive.
“These are great jobs,” he says.
For the full story, watch Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos:
Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos premiered Tuesday, Feb. 18 on PBS stations. The full documentary is now streaming in this story, in FRONTLINE’s collection of more than 250 streaming films, on the PBS Video App, on YouTube and on-demand.
This story has been updated.
https://nypost.com/2019/07/13/inside-the-hellish-workday-of-an-amazon-warehouse-employee/
Inside the hellish workday of an Amazon warehouse employee
July 13, 2019 | 9:57am | Updated
The labor can be so grueling at Amazon that one worker in Kentucky said she needs four pain meds just to get through the workday. REUTERS
It took just three days of working full time at an Amazon “fulfillment center” outside of Louisville, Kentucky, for Emily Guendelsberger’s body to break down.
She’d been warned by her supervisors that it would be physically demanding. She’d be on her feet for 12-hour shifts, walking a total of 15 to 20 miles through a 25-acre warehouse — as long as seven New York blocks — looking for merchandise to fulfill online orders.
One Amazon training video included a testimonial from an employee who claimed she’d lost 20 pounds from all the walking, “posing it as a benefit,” says Guendelsberger.
She expected to be tired as an “Amazonian” — the official name for full-time employees — particularly as she’d joined the company in November 2015, just before the Christmas season. But this was a whole other level of pain.
“It feels like I’ve been hit by a garbage truck,” she writes of the experience in her new book, “On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane” (Little, Brown), out Tuesday.
The book documents her experiences over two years, between 2015 and 2017, taking on service-industry jobs not just at Amazon, but also Convergys, a customer service call center in Hickory, North Carolina, and a McDonald’s franchise in downtown San Francisco.
Her goal wasn’t just to report on what she saw, but to “get an idea of what the modern experience of low-wage work feels like.”
Guendelsberger, 35, only decided to join the blue-collar workforce after losing her job as a senior staff writer at the (now defunct) Philadelphia City Paper. It was part necessity — she needed an income — and part curiosity.
Enlarge Image“On the Clock” author Emily Guendelsberger smiles in her work pass photo for Amazon, not realizing the job would lead to excruciating pain.
Other than a few service jobs in her teens and early 20s, she’d never held employment that didn’t involve sitting at a desk. What Guendelsberger learned, she writes, is that she’s “embarrassingly unprepared for what ‘normal’ means outside the white-collar world, and I’ve grossly misjudged what $10.50 an hour is worth to a lot of people.”
Her biggest surprise, she tells The Post, is not just how much abuse her co-workers were willing to endure, but how they remained optimistic and grateful despite often staggeringly brutal conditions.
When Guendelsberger hit her pain threshold at Amazon and ran out of the Advil she’d been popping like candy, she sought out one of the company-supplied medicine vending machines “stocked with single-dose foil packets of pills.”
With the swipe of her ID badge, the pain could go away for at least a little while. But when the vending machine didn’t recognize her badge, a female co-worker (Guendelsberger never learned her name) offered to help.
“Let me guess, it’s your first week,” the woman said, with pity in her Kentucky drawl.
After helping Guendelsberger get pills and warning her about building a tolerance — the co-worker claimed she needed at least four pain meds just to get through the day — she assured Guendelsberger, “It gets easier. It really does.”
But Guendelsberger found no evidence that this was the case.
“On the Clock” author Emily Guendelsberger smiles in her work pass photo for Amazon, not realizing the job would lead to excruciating pain.
The work in factories and minimum-wage facilities hasn’t exactly got harder in recent decades, Guendelsberger says. It’s that the jobs have become unreasonably more stressful, mostly due to advanced monitoring technology that meticulously tracks every second of every day for many employees.
The reason, weirdly enough, is that their productivity is being compared to robots.
Because of automation, human workers increasingly have to compete with computers and algorithms, Guendelsberger writes. But robots are still lacking when it comes to fine motor control and empathy. So many industries want a workforce that can “think, talk, feel and pick stuff up like humans — but with as few needs outside of work as robots.”
These so-called “cyborg jobs” demand that low-wage laborers “crush those unuseful human parts of themselves down to atomic size.” And this type of employment is becoming increasingly common, with Oxford University estimating in 2013 that cyborg jobs could account for 47 percent of the US workforce.
At Convergys, Guendelsberger was “lectured about how using the bathroom too often is the same thing as stealing from the company.” Every bathroom visit was clocked from the moment she left her cubicle, and a daily report of her bathroom time was sent to a supervisor for approval.
Amazon workers carry around a scan gun, similar to what you might see at a grocery-store checkout, with an LCD screen listing tasks and a timer counting down exactly how many seconds remain to complete each one, according to the book.
“It also tracks your location by GPS — and you take it everywhere with you, even the bathroom,” writes Guendelsberger. “Failure to stay ahead of the countdown was grounds for termination.”
Products stacked on shelves are seen at the Amazon fulfillment center in Baltimore, Maryland.REUTERS
At fast-food franchises like McDonald’s, employees are often pushed to work at such dizzying speeds — “like a Benny Hill video on fast forward”— that injuries are inevitable, Guendelsberger explains.
Brittney Berry, who worked at a McDonald’s location in Chicago, told Guendelsberger that while trying to keep up with the pace, she slipped on a wet floor and severely burned her forearm on a grill to the point of nerve damage. “The managers told me to put mustard on it,” Berry told Guendelsberger.
(The Post reached out to Amazon, Convergys and McDonald’s for comment on Guendelsberger’s claims but did not hear back from the last two of press time. An Amazon spokesperson responded: “For someone who only worked at Amazon for approximately 11 days, Emily Guendelsberger’s statements are not an accurate portrayal of working in our buildings. We are proud of our safe workplaces and her allegations are demeaning to our passionate employees, whose pride and commitment are what make the Amazon customer experience great.”)
Data on the emotional state of modern workers is, at best, confusing.
On the one hand, engagement seems to be up. According to a Gallup poll from last year, it’s at an 18-year high, with 34 percent of American workers claiming they’re enthusiastic about and committed to their jobs.
But that conflicts with a recent Workplace Democracy Association/Zogby Interactive survey, in which 25 percent of US workers compare their workplace to a dictatorship.
The message seems to be this: Workers have never been more committed to their jobs while at the same time recognizing that work today is more punishing than ever.
‘It’s become so normalized to be treated like garbage at work and clamp down on your self-respect and dignity’
The workers that Guendelsberger met exemplified these conflicting traits. They described Amazon as an “existential s–thole” but also “accepted that this was just the way things were. They knew they weren’t being treated right, but they tried to look on the bright side.”
She met women like Akasha, Blair and Hailey — Amazon employees determined to see the positive in their working conditions. (Some but not all of the names were changed to protect their identities.)
“I felt like someone was always watching in case I screwed up,” Guendelsberger writes. “They felt like someone’s taking note of the good work they do.”
Blair, a young working mom, was especially determined to see how far she could push herself during the randomly announced “Power Hours.” This special incentive challenged workers to fulfill 100 orders in just an hour, with the reward of “a dollar coupon for some — but not all — of the vending machines in the building,” writes Guendelsberger.
“I’m mainly doing it for the thrill of the hunt,” Blair told her. “I want to know if I can win; I want to know I can conquer. And I want to be noticed, hopefully, by management.”
Blair’s belief that people who work the hardest and prove their potential will rise to the top “is an idea that’s deep in the American psyche,” Guendelsberger says. “Many of them believe they deserve it because if they’d just been better and worked harder, they’d be rewarded.”
It’s a grim reality that most workers have just learned to live with. “They don’t have an expectation of being treated like human beings,” Guendelsberger says. “It’s become so normalized to be treated like garbage at work and clamp down on your self-respect and dignity.”
In each job, she learned how to get “harder and more pragmatic, like my co-workers. Like a robot.”
Guendelsberger believes that change is not only coming to the workplace but is also inevitable.
The constant hustle and stress of the modern economy are making people crazy, she says.
“It’s making us sick and terrified and cruel and hopeless.”
Human beings aren’t robots, she says.
“They need to go to the bathroom, take sick days, take Mom to a doctor’s appointment, attend funerals. Stay up until 4 with the baby.”
But any meaningful shift in what’s considered normal work conditions has to start at the bottom, with the undervalued workers who’ve let themselves believe that “the things that make humans less efficient than robots are weaknesses — moral failings.”
Guendelsberger has faith that many of the people she met during her brief two years could someday break through and demand more from their employers. But she won’t be among them.
“Oh, God no,” Guendelsberger says when asked if she’ll ever engage in minimum-wage employment again. “I’m not that strong. I’m going to stick with writing.”
How America works
80%: of US workers feel stressed on the job
46%: claim their stress is caused by “workload”
75%: believe there’s more job stress than a generation ago
1 million: workers stay home every day because of stress
$125 to $190 billion: spent annually treating job burnout-related ailments
42%: claim verbal abuse is common at their workplace
34%: of workers can’t sleep because of work stress
https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/life-and-death-amazon-temp/
The Life and Death of an Amazon Warehouse Temp
What the future of low-wage work really looks like
sun went down, Jeff Lockhart Jr. got ready for work. He slipped a T-shirt over his burly frame and hung his white work badge over his broad chest. His wife, Di-Key, was in the bathroom fixing her hair in micro-braids and preparing for another evening alone with her three sons. Jeff had been putting in long hours lately, and so the couple planned a breakfast date at Shoney’s for when his shift ended around dawn. “You better have your hair done by then,” he teased her.
As he headed out the door, Jeff, who was 29, said goodbye to the boys. He told Jeffrey, the most rambunctious, not to give his mom a hard time; Kelton, the oldest, handed his father his iPod for the ride. Then Jeff climbed into his Chevy Suburban, cranked the bass on the stereo system he’d customized himself, and headed for the Amazon fulfillment center in nearby Chester, Virginia, just south of Richmond.
When the warehouse opened its doors in 2012, there were about 37,000 unemployed people living within a 30-minute drive; in nearby Richmond, more than a quarter of residents were living in poverty. The warehouse only provided positions for a fraction of the local jobless: It currently has around 3,000 full-time workers. But it also enlists hundreds, possibly thousands, of temporary workers to fill orders during the holiday shopping frenzy, known in Amazon parlance as “peak.” Since full-timers and temps perform the same duties, the only way to tell them apart is their badges. Full-time workers wear blue. Temps wear white.
That meant Jeff wore white. He’d started working at the warehouse in November 2012, not long after it opened. It was the first job he’d been able to find in months, ever since he’d been laid off from his last steady gig at a building supply store. By January, peak season had come and gone, and hundreds of Jeff’s fellow temps had been let go. But he was still there, two months after he’d started, wearing his white badge. What he wanted was to earn a blue one.
Jeff and Di-Key with their children, Jervontay, Jeffrey and Kelton (left to right). Family photos courtesy of Di-Key Lockhart.
At the warehouse, Jeff was a picker, fetching orders to be shipped to Amazon customers. A handheld scanner gun told him what he needed to pull and the exact aisle and shelf where he would find it. Since the Chester facility covers 1.1 million square feet, the equivalent of roughly 18 football fields, the right shelf might be just around the corner, or it might be 100 yards away. Once he pulled the item, his scanner would give him his next assignment, and off he’d go, wherever the gun took him next. He got a kick out of this peculiar window into the desires of the American consumer. Once, he stumbled on a small soccer set and made a note to buy it for Jeffrey when spring arrived. Another time, he filled an order for a mysterious item that turned out to be a butt plug kit. “I’m telling you,” he later told Di-Key, laughing as he showed her the listing online, “this thing was as big as my fist.”
Being a picker was a demanding job for a man of Jeff’s size. He was built like an offensive lineman—6-foot-3 and 300 pounds, with a flowing, dirty-blonde beard, wire-rimmed glasses and a head shaved almost completely bald. Since workers at the Chester facility were typically expected to pull 100 items or more per hour, a picker could expect to walk more than 12 miles over the course of a shift. The handheld scanners allowed managers to track precisely how long it takes workers to fulfill an order, and those who failed to “make rate” could lose their jobs. Jeff moved quickly up and down the aisles alongside men and women half his size, earning the nickname “Tornado.” “If I gave him a directive, he took care of it,” said Tim Taylor, a supervisor at the warehouse. “You didn’t have to explain it—he just knocked it out.”
“He liked it, and it exhausted him,” says Jeff’s father, Jeff Lockhart Sr. “He’d come over here on the weekends when he could. He wouldn’t sit there long and he’d fall asleep.” As a big guy, Jeff was mindful of his weight—he didn’t want to develop diabetes later in life. He’d taken up jogging and was eating better at home. After he started working at the warehouse, his family noticed that he was shedding pounds. “He dropped two, almost three pant sizes,” Di-Key says.
Sometime around 2 a.m. that January morning, Jeff took his 30-minute “lunch break.” Most days, he would clock out and go out to his Suburban in the parking lot. He would pull his lunch from his cooler and grab his phone, which, under warehouse policy, wasn’t allowed on the floor. He always at least texted Di-Key, who found it hard to sleep while her husband was away at work. On this particular morning, he called her. He asked how her braids had come along, told her that he loved her and that she should get some sleep. Then he said he needed to get back to work.
Less than an hour later, a worker found Jeff on the third floor. He had collapsed and was lying unconscious in aisle A-215, beneath shelves stocked with Tupperware and heating pads.
In the years since Amazon became the symbol of the online retail economy, horror stories have periodically emerged about the conditions at its warehouses—workers faced with near-impossible targets, people dropping on the job from heat or extreme fatigue. This isn’t one of those stories. Jobs at Amazon are physically demanding and the expectations can be high, but the company’s fulfillment centers are not sweatshops. In late September, I visited the Chester warehouse for an hour-long guided tour. Employees were working at a speed that seemed brisk yet reasonable. There were no idle moments, but no signs of exhaustion, either.
At the same time, we are living in an era of maximum productivity. It has never been easier for employers to track the performance of workers and discard those who don’t meet their needs. This applies to employees at every level, from warehouse grunts to white-collar workers like those at Amazon headquarters who were recently the subject of a much-discussed New York Times piece about the company’s brutally competitive corporate culture. The difference is that people like Jeff don’t have the option of moving to Google, Microsoft or a tech startup eager to poach managers and engineers with Amazon on their resume.
When it comes to low-wage positions, companies like Amazon are now able to precisely calibrate the size of its workforce to meet consumer demand, week by week or even day by day. Amazon, for instance, says it has 90,000 full-time U.S. employees at its fulfillment and sorting centers—but it plans to bring on an estimated 100,000 seasonal workers to help handle this year’s peak. Many of these seasonal hires come through Integrity Staffing Solutions, a Delaware-based temp firm. The company’s website recently listed 22 corporate offices throughout the country, 15 of which were recruiting offices for Amazon fulfillment centers, including the one in Chester.
“It was sort of like a class warfare kind of thing,” says Lisa Vacula, who worked at an Amazon warehouse in Pennsylvania.
This system isn’t unique to Amazon—it pervades the U.S. retail supply chain. Many companies choose to outsource shipping work to so-called third-party logistics providers, which in turn contract the work to staffing companies. At some of Walmart’s critical logistics hubs, multiple temp agencies may be providing workers under the same roof. The temp model also extends far beyond retail. The housekeeper who cleans your room at a Hyatt hotel may not work for Hyatt, but for a temp firm you’ve never heard of, for less money and fewer benefits than a direct hire. “It’s the standard operating model,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “The entire service economy is based on this kind of hyper-flexibility. If you don’t have it, it sends costs way up.”
1 The workers argued they were owed money for the time it took to go through mandatory security screenings, which could be as long as 20 minutes, according to the lawsuit. The justices ruled unanimously in Integrity’s favor.
For employers, the appeal of this system is obvious. It allows companies to meet demand while keeping their permanent workforce at a minimum, along with all the costs that go with it—payroll taxes, benefits, workers’ compensation costs and certain legal liabilities. 1 (When Amazon warehouse workers around the country claimed they were victims of wage theft in a Supreme Court case last year, Integrity, not Amazon, was named as the defendant.) For employees, though, it means showing up to work every day with the knowledge that you are always disposable. You are at least one entity removed from the company where you work, and you are only as good as your last recorded input in a computerized performance monitoring system. In the event that something goes wrong in your life—illness, injury, a family crisis—you have few, if any, protections. And yet for Americans like Jeff, this precarious existence now represents one of the only remaining potential paths to a middle-class life.
Jeff Lockhart took a warehouse temp job because it was the best opportunity he could find. He had graduated from high school in nearby Petersburg, where he met Di-Key while working at a local Wendy’s. The two dated for a while—Jeff even gave her a promise ring—but later drifted apart. After high school, Jeff hoped to make a career in electronics, and left for Ohio to get a degree at DeVry, the for-profit college. He wound up returning to Virginia with student debt and few job prospects. Unemployment in Petersburg is high—the jobless rate is still over 9 percent. First, Jeff loaded pastries onto trucks for a vending company. Later, he landed a job at a building supply store where his father worked.
He and Di-Key reconnected in their early 20s. The two made a striking couple—a tall, imposing white guy and his petite African-American girlfriend. “I had a really tough childhood,” says Di-Key. “I didn’t think anyone could love me, but he showed me differently.” She had left school at 17 and had two sons from previous relationships—the oldest, Kelton, is legally blind. “I had a hard time finding a job, and ended up going on assistance,” she says. But after she and Jeff got together, they slowly started to build a more secure life. Jeff pushed Di-Key to get her GED. They had a child together and got married, and Jeff adopted Di-Key’s sons. “He always treated those boys just like they were his own,” says Jeff’s sister, Laura Lockhart. Di-Key worked a series of jobs in retail and office cleaning, and Jeff stayed on at the building supply store. Eventually, they even managed to buy a house—a three-bedroom starter in Hopewell for $86,000. Then, not long after the housing crash, the building supply store closed down, and both Jeff and his father lost their jobs.
Jeff went on unemployment and started hunting for work with his usual dedication. “He was putting in application after application,” Di-Key says—for everything from building supply to TV cable installation to mall retail. But callbacks were hard to come by. Jeff helped his father run a kettle corn concession stand, while Di-Key baked and sold cakes for birthdays and weddings, finding customers through word-of-mouth and Facebook. Being unemployed shook Jeff’s sense of himself. He had always taken a lot of pride in providing for his family, and after months of fruitless searching, he became anxious and depressed. He got up later and spent more time hanging around the house. “Me being the breadwinner hurt him. He wanted me staying with the boys, going to football and soccer practice,” says Di-Key. “When he got Amazon—OK, this is something he can retire from. Something he can work his way up.”
The arrival of an Amazon warehouse in Chester felt a bit like the opening of a Ford plant might have a century earlier. At the time, Amazon was aggressively expanding its logistics network to speed up delivery to customers. Bob McDonnell, Virginia’s Republican governor at the time, called it “a tremendous win for the greater Richmond region.” Word quickly spread that there was a major new employer in the vicinity. “That was the only place around here that was really hiring,” says Jeff’s best friend, Johnathan Evans, who has also struggled to find a steady job in recent years. “In this area there’s like two factories, and that’s it.”
Jeff interviewed at Integrity’s local office, which is sandwiched between a Papa John’s and a nail salon. Amazon isn’t especially picky when peak rolls around. Job seekers had to pass a background check and be willing to work overtime. Jeff was offered a temporary job on the overnight shift for roughly $12 per hour. He wasn’t sure he would enjoy warehouse work. But it was the only place that had called him back so far, and he liked the idea of being around during the day for Kelton’s doctor’s appointments.
By all accounts, Jeff viewed the job as an audition for a permanent position with Amazon. He was angling for what warehouse workers call “conversion”: the moment when you graduate from being an Integrity temp to a full-time “Amazonian.” “He knew that once they’re done with the season, they let the stragglers go and keep the best men,” says Di-Key. “He was determined not to be let go like everybody else.”
Over the past year and a half, I interviewed more than 50 current and former temporary and full-time Amazon warehouse workers from around the country. Most of the temp workers I spoke with said they were told that if they performed well, there was a decent chance Amazon would hire them full-time. (Of the roughly 80,000 seasonal employees brought on last year, Amazon says “tens of thousands” secured full-time spots.) For temps hired outside of peak, the probability of converting was reasonably high, many workers said. But many of the temps hired for the busy season told me they lost their jobs with little or no notice.
Within the warehouse, a quiet caste system separated the Integrity temps from the full-timers. Integrity workers technically answer to Integrity managers and receive Integrity paychecks. Amazon employees receive basic benefits, but the temps typically said they did not. (Integrity says it offers health care coverage in line with the Affordable Care Act, as well as other supplemental insurance plans, though for many temps the cost of participating would likely have represented a sizeable portion of their wages.)
There were other differences, too. “Integrity is a lot harder on you,” says Tiffany Hios, who worked for both companies in Virginia and said she generally enjoyed her time at the warehouse. “Amazon will give you chances. Integrity will not. Amazon will give you time to work up to your rate. Integrity will ride you until you get to your rate. It is a lot easier to lose your job with Integrity.” “It was sort of like a class warfare kind of thing,” says Lisa Vacula, who worked for more than three years at an Amazon warehouse in Pennsylvania before she was recently let go, she said, for productivity reasons. Vacula added that she thought her Amazon experience had made her a tougher worker: “When I got the blue badge, I felt proud that I earned that bitch.”
After surviving most of the cutbacks, Jeff told friends and family that he would soon be wearing a blue badge. He hadn’t gotten an official offer, but he was confident it was coming soon. Around Christmas, he put a deposit down on a customized cane for Kelton. The handle of the cane would be carved to look like the head of Kelton’s favorite comic-book character, Spiderman. It was the kind of small indulgence that seemed newly within reach.
Whoever found Jeff on the third floor apparently alerted Amcare, Amazon’s in-house medical team, which is staffed with EMTs and other medical personnel. In the event of a health issue, Amazon instructs workers to notify security before calling emergency services. An employee brochure from a facility in Tennessee, obtained through a public records request, reads: “In the event of a medical emergency, contact Security. Do Not call 911! Tell Security the nature of the medical emergency and location. Security and/or Amcare will provide emergency response.”
The Amcare employee found that Jeff had “a rapid heartbeat but limited respirations,” according to a confidential Amazon report obtained through a public records request. He began performing CPR and put Jeff on an electronic defibrillator, a device that can save a life during cardiac events when deployed quickly. Someone called 911, and county EMTs rushed Jeff to John Randolph Medical Center. Di-Key got a call from Integrity telling her Jeff had been taken to the hospital, where she was met by a manager. At 4:06 a.m., Jeff was pronounced dead. “They came in four or five doctors deep and told me that he’s gone and there’s nothing they can do,” says Di-Key. Aside from a brief obituary, Jeff’s death never made the local papers. I learned about it through public records requests for safety investigations of Amazon facilities.
2 The audio file of the 911 call was erased a few months later, per department protocol.
It isn’t clear from any of the official reports on Jeff’s death—Amazon’s, the county’s or the state’s—how quickly Jeff was found and treated. The Amazon report says that he was discovered at “approximately 2:30 a.m., which is within one minute of his last reported pick.” Yet according to a county EMS report, the 911 call came in at 2:39 a.m., suggesting he may have been down for several minutes before he was found. 2 Amazon said CPR and the defibrillator were “quickly provided” by its in-house team. However, the ambulance didn’t get there until 2:49 a.m.—nearly 20 minutes after his last apparent pick, a significant amount of time in a cardiac emergency.
The aisle where Jeff collapsed. Photo from the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry.
The state’s medical examiner pinned the death on “cardiac dysrhythmia,” commonly known as an irregular heartbeat. Di-Key and Jeff’s father say they were not aware that Jeff had a potential heart problem, and don’t know whether he knew of any, either. The examiner found no prior documentation of an irregular heartbeat, although there was a “verbal report” of one during a physical Jeff received at a previous job, according to the autopsy.
I asked Theodore Abraham, a cardiologist who directs the Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Center of Excellence at Johns Hopkins, to review Jeff’s autopsy. Abraham said that the report doesn’t contain enough information to conclusively explain Jeff’s death. There is no evidence his size was a factor (though the examination shows that he had an unusually large heart). But it’s also impossible to know for sure whether the fast-paced nature of Jeff’s work contributed to his collapse. However, Abraham observed, the autopsy doesn’t suggest that Jeff died of an ordinary heart attack. If he was exerting himself when he collapsed, Abraham added, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy would be “high on the list” of possible causes. This condition, known to sometimes kill young athletes in the middle of competition, causes the heart to beat out of rhythm, frequently during strenuous activity. The disease is often genetic and is the leading cause of sudden cardiac death in people under 30. Still, even if Jeff did suffer from the condition, he could have died from it at any time.
3 Employers can legally ask potential employees to undergo a physical, though they generally do so after a job offer has been made to avoid charges of discrimination.
Mike Roth, vice president of North American operations for Amazon, said the company ensures employees are working at a safe pace. “We do have goals for employees in regards to performance metrics,” he says. “We have a team that regularly looks at the metrics to ensure they are safe, fair and attainable.” Like many warehouse staffing companies, Integrity doesn’t require workers to take a physical to work in an Amazon facility. 3 However, the company said it provides prospective employees with extensive information, including a video, so they understand the physically taxing nature of the work. “IT’S GOING TO BE HARD,” one brochure warns. “You will be on your FEET the entire shift and walking upwards of 12 MILES per shift. (yeah, that’s really far!) … YOU WILL HAVE TO: LIFT, BEND, SQUAT, REACH & MOVE (there are no sit-down positions.) DON’T BE AFRAID; YOU CAN DO IT.” Applicants are also quizzed on their ability to perform basic requirements. If an employee has a medical condition, Integrity says it will allow for more frequent breaks or lifting restrictions.
A former supervisor at Jeff’s warehouse described the safety culture as “very, very methodical,” with “exceptionally high standards.” Amazon, she said, required Amcare to call 911 in certain situations even when there was no obvious emergency —say, if a worker’s blood pressure reached a certain level. Still, she said, some workers were clearly unprepared for the pace. “We had people who were bookkeepers or laid-off accountants or other desk-type jobs,” the supervisor said. “We tried to be very, very upfront. … I said, ‘You are going to hurt after the first week. … You are going to crawl into bed and pray you can get out in the morning.’”
In 2011, the Morning Call, a Pennsylvania newspaper, published an extensive report on the physical pressures inside an Amazon warehouse in Lehigh Valley. The paper revealed that Amazon’s private medical teams regularly tended to Integrity temps sick with heat and exhaustion. One worker told officials from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that 15 people had collapsed in a single day.
At the time of Jeff’s death, the Chester warehouse had been open for four months. The local fire and EMS department had dispatched personnel to its address at least 34 times during that period, according to data obtained through a public records request. In its first two and a half years of operation, more than 180 calls were placed to 911, many of them for patients in their 20s and 30s. The most common issues cited were difficulty breathing, chest pains, cardiac problems, spells of unconsciousness or other undefined illnesses. The frequency of calls tended to climb during peak season.
Amazon and Integrity say the vast majority of emergency calls are prompted by existing health issues. Integrity said in a statement that “less than 5 percent of ambulance visits over the past [two] years for Integrity Associates have been related to work events.” (Integrity’s complete response to a detailed list of questions can be read here.) Amazon’s Roth told me that “the safety and security of employees is our top priority and we are proud of our safety record.” He pointed out that the illness and injury rate among the Chester facility’s thousands of employees, who have worked 12.5 million hours since it opened, is 42 percent lower than that for general warehousing. It’s worth noting that these rates, however, are based on numbers that companies self-report to OSHA. 4
4 Former Amazon workers in a 2012 Seattle Times report claimed they were encouraged to underreport injuries.
The EMS dispatch reports do suggest that some people may have been trying to work while ill. During the peak season of 2012, a 26-year-old woman was experiencing stomach pains and vomiting. “Been going on for the last 48 hrs,” the report reads. About a year later, a 24-year-old woman was reported to be suffering an asthma attack at the warehouse, even though she’d been diagnosed with bronchitis at the hospital earlier that morning. In another case, the Amcare clinic appeared to be understaffed. Amcare was tending to a 21-year-old woman who was between 24 and 36 weeks pregnant with twins. She’d been in labor pain for 20 minutes, and the 911 dispatcher apparently asked Amcare to take her to the front entrance. The Amcare paramedic was “unable to facilitate” that request: “There is another patient in the clinic and [the paramedic] is the only one working.”
Tim Taylor, a staff trainer at the warehouse, was working on the first floor when Jeff collapsed. He said he saw warehouse personnel take Jeff off the freight lift on a cart. Taylor was a true believer in the company—he’d worked his way up from a warehouse grunt—and he and Jeff had become friends. They worked the same hours and both liked to detail cars in their spare time. Sometimes, they got breakfast after work and discussed what Jeff needed to do to earn a full-time position. When we talked, Taylor was on temporary leave after having back surgery, although he said his problems had nothing to do with his warehouse work.
The day Jeff died, Taylor said that he couldn’t find a supervisor to ask permission to go to the hospital, so he worked the rest of his hours. A staffer from human resources called and asked him if he was all right, and workers on his shift were told to alert a manager if they didn’t feel well. A grief counselor was made available. Amazon and Integrity say they notified employees immediately, though at least one employee told me he never heard a formal announcement. Stephen Hicks, another worker, said a manager informed his department about Jeff’s death about a week after it happened and told employees to drink plenty of water. Hicks found this advice impractical. “If you hydrate, eventually you’ve got to use the bathroom,” he says, explaining that he didn’t like to do that outside official breaks, for fear that it would hurt his rate.
Otherwise, Taylor said, everyone seemed to quickly move on. “Word didn’t get around. It was really odd,” he said. “This was a situation that happened, and then all of the sudden it just disappeared.” A few weeks after I spoke to him, in June 2014, Taylor also died unexpectedly, of complications stemming from his back surgery. Like Jeff , he left behind a family—a fiancé and a 7-month-old baby daughter. But unlike Jeff, his status as a full-time Amazon employee gave him certain benefits. He had a life insurance policy through his job, with his fiancé and daughter listed as beneficiaries. It was enough to cover the cost of his funeral, as well as some of the lost income due to his death.
While working at the warehouse, Jeff sometimes got ideas for presents for his kids.
Jeff’s death left his family in a shaky financial state. When he’d been unemployed, Jeff had paid for a life insurance policy out of pocket for a while. But he and Di-Key had cancelled it not long before he’d started at the warehouse and used the extra money to get through the holidays. Jeff didn’t get life insurance or health insurance through Integrity, his family said. (Integrity wouldn’t comment on Jeff’s benefits, citing privacy concerns.)
Jeff’s hope, of course, was that he would soon become a fully fledged Amazonian, bringing real benefits within reach. It’s not clear why he believed his conversion was imminent, although Amazon’s internal report described him as “a consistently high performer.” But even if Jeff had been told he was going to be made a full-time employee, that was hardly a guarantee that it would actually happen, according to numerous temps who have cycled through the Chester warehouse.
Phyllis Branch 55, says she worked at the facility in late 2013 and early 2014. She’d recently resigned from her job at a college bookstore where she didn’t get along with her manager. “I was led to believe I would be [at the warehouse] permanently,” she told me. She said she was even given her “conversion papers.” “No sooner had I gotten online to do the conversion, Integrity leaves me a message on my phone that my job has ended,” she said. Amazon told her to speak with Integrity about it; Integrity told her to speak with Amazon. What Branch believed to be her long-awaited promotion turned out to be her layoff, she said.
Antonio Miller was a temp at the Chester facility in 2013, after graduating from Radford University with a bachelor’s degree in political science. He, too, said he was given the impression he would be made permanent after a few months. It never happened, due to production penalties he said he disputed. After the high season, he was let go via voicemail message. “It was basically a weeding process,” said Miller. “Whoever thought of it is genius. The way it runs, you get all the work you can out of people, and you don’t have to manage them. It’s brilliant.”
Both Integrity and Amazon say they tell prospective employees that peak work is short-term. “[W]e make every effort to clearly communicate the nature of the employment,” Integrity said. Roth, of Amazon, says, “[W]e clearly advertise that positions for seasonal employees are temporary roles, although there is a possibility to stay on in long-term positions.”
After Jeff died, his father went to the warehouse and asked managers what the companies were going to do for his son’s family.
Yet some temps have shown up to the Chester warehouse for scheduled shifts only to discover that their badges no longer grant them access to the building, according to former workers and an Integrity manager who helped staff Amazon warehouses. Integrity said that this is “not a common practice,” and that it is “highly unlikely that an associate would not be contacted.” Vacula, the former employee from Pennsylvania, said she witnessed this situation at her facility. “They just shut the badge off,” she says. “They make you waste your bus fare. It could be the last three dollars you have … just to show up there and learn you don’t work there anymore.”
After Jeff died, his father went to the warehouse and asked managers what the companies were going to do for his son’s family. “They were getting ready to make him full-time anyway. Could they kick in some benefits now?” The response, Lockhart Sr. recalled, was, “We’ll see what we can do.”
Integrity says that in the days following Jeff’s death, its local office reached out to Di-Key to see how the company could help. “Our plan was to provide additional assistance to Mrs. Lockhart and her children. We had various supportive services to offer the family,” the company said, adding that it has helped pay for the funerals of other employees who have died, and even those of their family members. (Di-Key said she recalls the company’s condolences but not the offers of assistance.) Amazon said it “closely partnered with Integrity Staffing who supported Mr. Lockhart’s family.” The general manager of the warehouse, Sean Loso, says, “We were deeply saddened by the passing of Mr. Lockhart. The loss of a life at such a young age is a tragedy.”
In its official investigation, the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry did not fault Amazon or Integrity, and no fines or citations were issued. The state’s medical examiner deemed Jeff’s death the result of natural causes. Jeff’s family never seriously considered a lawsuit, not knowing whom, if anyone, was to blame. And the ambiguous nature of his death meant that his family was unable to obtain other forms of assistance, such as workers’ compensation benefits. If a worker dies on the job, the burden tends to lie on the employee’s estate to prove the death was work-related—and the bar is high for deaths that involve cardiac events.
Jeff’s wake and funeral were held at a chapel in Hopewell, not far from the house he’d bought. Di-Key fixed her hair in the same micro-braids she’d worn the night that Jeff died. After the funeral, his body was taken three hours north to the family plot in Maryland, where he was given a working-man’s burial. He was laid to rest in a Dickie’s button-down shirt, his favorite shorts and a new pair of Adidas sneakers. Inside the casket were the promise rings he and Di-Key had given each other years earlier, plus a set of high-quality speakers thrown in by his friends. Evans led the procession out of the cemetery, driving Jeff’s Suburban with the windows down and the stereo blaring Young Jeezy’s “Put On,” which Jeff considered his personal anthem.
Not long after the funeral, Di-Key received a condolence card in the mail. It was signed by people she assumed worked at the warehouse, and included a prepaid gift card with a few hundred dollars on it, as well as a small personal check from a stranger. She figures the workers pooled it among themselves.
This May, Jeff’s friends gathered at a racetrack near Petersburg for their annual celebration of his life, the Jeff Lockhart Memorial Bass Competition. The two-day show draws hundreds of car audio enthusiasts from up and down the East Coast, giving them the opportunity to show off their stereo setups. In some cars, the bass is forceful enough to move hair.
Jeff served as vice president of Team Deadly Hertz, the audio club that hosts the event. Many of the tricked-out cars in the parking lot have Jeff Lockhart stickers in their rear windows, and there are T-shirts for sale bearing his name. “If you wanted to work on your stereo in the middle of the night, he would wake up and come do it,” said Brandon Hockenberry, one of his friends. Adam Carter, who got to know Jeff through their audio club, told me, “No matter what came out of his mouth, whether you liked it or not, it was fact. He was a leader. He demanded respect without asking for it.”
Di-Key and her sons hung around Jeff’s Suburban throughout the show, chatting with well-wishers. Di-Key has kept the SUV just as Jeff left it. “It feels like my husband,” she said. “Especially when the bass drops, and everything vibrates. I look at it as his heartbeat.”
At the moment, Jeff’s family is getting by mostly on Social Security survivor benefits. Last year, the bank foreclosed on Jeff and Di-Key’s home, and these days the kids split time between Di-Key’s rental and Jeff’s parents’ home nearby. Di-Key told me that she doesn’t blame Amazon or Integrity for Jeff’s death. What bothers her most is how expendable her husband seemed to be inside the warehouse system. She believes that had he not died as a second-class temp worker, his family might have been in a better position to sustain the loss. “Just feeling like he wasn’t human, like he was just a piece of paper,” she said. “You know, [they] can dispose of you. It kind of hurt.”
Jeff at the hospital with Di-Key when his youngest son, Jeffrey, was born.
Johnathan Evans was also at the competition, wandering around the cars. He told me that he had spoken with his friend the day before he collapsed. The two had talked about getting together to put a new alternator in Evans’ car, so he didn’t have to take it into the shop. “Things ain’t been the same since he passed,” Evans said. “At first it was really, really hard for me. The only way that I could really deal with it was alcohol. Then it got to a point where [it was like], ‘Let’s not think about the sad memories. Let’s remember the things that make you smile.’”
Evans took comfort in knowing his friend died in an honorable way, doing his best to support his family. But he’s still troubled by unanswered questions about Jeff’s death. “I think that the way that he passed, it was messed up,” he said.
That makes what Evans did last year all the more surprising. He was still unemployed, with child support to pay. He needed work badly. So he headed down to the Integrity office in Chester. He was given a white badge with his name on it, and soon he was hustling through the warehouse, scanner in hand. On most shifts, he wore a T-shirt with photo of his best friend’s face and the years of his birth and death: 1983 to 2013. But not long after he started, Evans began to feel pain in his knee. He left the warehouse after a few weeks. He’s currently looking for work.
Here’s What It’s Like to Work in an Amazon Warehouse Right Now
Convenience comes at a price 8-20-2020
experience as an Amazon warehouse worker was, at best, completely mediocre. I didn’t love it. I didn’t hate it. Sometimes I liked it. Sometimes I didn’t like it. I’ve had worse jobs — at Walmart, I was paid a lot less for a more difficult job as a booster team stocker. At Walmart, it was always a puzzle to find out where an item went on the shelves. At Amazon, a computer tells you where something goes. There’s no guessing. Most of the time, however, it was both boring and extremely isolating, since it’s just you at your station 90% of the time.
I was hired at Amazon very quickly and conveniently. I am a teacher, and when I didn’t get hired to work at summer school I was bummed — and I knew that I had to find some work, and very quickly.
At Amazon, my job was as a picker. There are also stowers, packers, tote runners, counters, people who organize totes at downstack (where totes are prepared for the station), people who repair malfunctioning Kiva robots, and people who take items off the floor. There are janitors, security guards, and social distance enforcers. The managers I’ve worked with had all treated me very kindly, save the couple of times I was caught using my phone while picking, but that was polite reprimanding that I deserved.
I don’t know if this is the kind of job I could have handled for the long term. I’m lucky I only worked there this summer, and my more experienced co-workers showed me the ropes whenever I was having trouble. I had to switch out my shoes after about two days of work — my feet were killing me. I was more tired and was not able to keep up running as much as I’m used to.
There is no one universal experience in the warehouse. It’s kind of like the military — there are a lot of different responsibilities you can have. The facility is absolutely huge and easy to get lost in. There are two metrics that Amazon uses to evaluate a warehouse picker: units per hour and takt time (the amount of time it takes you to process one item). Luckily, I had learning ambassadors, experienced employees who teach you the job, who taught me how to pick fast. But the only time I really interacted with managers was if my rate was too slow and they needed to tell me to speed up. The goal was to pick 350 units per hour and have a takt time of seven seconds.
At first, I really struggled with my rate. I was picking about 250 units per hour, and saw it as flat-out impossible to get a takt time of 11 seconds on a good shift. Someone came to talk to me about my rate and examined my picking to see why I was going so slow. She showed me a couple of tricks to pick faster and said that there were no repercussions because I was new, but that management was going to start writing up people who were working too slow.
I guess something just clicked one day during my third week of work, where I picked about 400 units per hour and had a takt time of around eight seconds. I still don’t totally understand how some people pick so fast, but like any job, you get better at it over time.
The fact that these pods malfunction so regularly makes me optimistic that these warehouse jobs aren’t going to be automated any time soon.
On many shifts, I would get messages on the computer at my station, some that ranked my performance amidst my co-worker pickers. At first, my performance was horrible. I was consistently in the 20th to 30th percentile of pickers. I would also get messages that my takt time was too slow. Fortunately, I got better and ended the job consistently in the 80th percentile of pickers on my floor. I know this might sound brutal to some, but for me it was easy to just not pay too much attention to it. I saw it as nothing more than a message on the computer. Experience made me better at the job, but I also couldn’t help but feel like ranking the productivity of your workers was a little problematic.
Despite the fact that I was considered “experienced” just four weeks into the job, a big item that was both heavy and the size of the entire bin would still kill my takt rate, as did any missing items. Sometimes, an object fell onto the floor and the Kiva pods (self-driving car robots that carry big bins) stop moving. We create tickets on the computer called “andons” which is just a fancy technical term for reporting technical difficulties. The fact that these pods malfunctioned so regularly made me optimistic that these warehouse jobs aren’t going to be automated any time soon. However, I did wish a malfunctioning pod or missing item didn’t reflect so poorly on your rate, which is the ultimate determination of your performance. And most of the time, there’s simply nothing you can do about either.
There’s a rumor I hear about Amazon warehouses that management doesn’t let you go to the bathroom. I got two 30-minute breaks, but that might differ from warehouse to warehouse. No manager was going to penalize me if I went to the bathroom when I wasn’t on one of my 30-minute breaks, as long as I was able to keep up my rate.
I’ve always tried to make sure I was doing well enough and working fast enough before I took a bathroom break, so there’s certainly a lot of productivity pressure imposed to not go to the bathroom unless you’re in a place where you can sacrifice part of the speed of your rate.
I’ve only worked at an Amazon warehouse during the coronavirus pandemic, so I don’t know what they’ve changed exactly from pre-Covid times. I think Amazon handled it as best as they could. There is no shortage whatsoever of cleaning supplies. You didn’t have to go far at all to find disinfecting spray and hand sanitizer, which were placed at every station, every break table, and at all the water dispensers.
On one day, we had to carry around social distance trackers that beeped when we were within six feet of another person. That was just one day, though, so it seems like they were just beta-testing the trackers. However, there were employees designated in hot spots like break rooms who strictly enforced social distancing. I don’t envy the job of trying to police human behavior, but they did a very good job and were firm in making sure everyone is six feet apart in those hot spots. Masks were required, but I didn’t see any enforcement and I can tell you that it’s not easy to keep a mask on for that many hours of physically demanding work. Plus, during breaks, you had to take off your mask to eat. If you didn’t have a mask coming in, they provided you with a disposable mask.
After you enter through the Amazon gates, there are monitors that checked your distance to someone else. If you were flashing red on the monitor, you were too close to someone else. If you were flashing green, you were good. After you enter, there are temperature checks. If there’s anything wrong or abnormal, there are employees at the entrance who will double-check your temperature. If your temperature is over 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, you are sent home, and I can only hope that workers who have been sent home are paid normally, but according to Business Insider, some employees say that they aren’t being completely paid for time off.
The only thing I think Amazon can do better in terms of social distancing is the entrance. I have never seen as big of a crowd in the warehouse as at 6 p.m. every single day, at the end of my shifts, where hundreds of people were in a hurry to get home as soon as possible, while other hundreds of people were rushing through the doors from the other direction to clock in on time.
To be clear, I’m trying to get home as fast as possible too, and the parking lot at that time is a big logjam. I had been stuck in the Amazon parking lot for 30 minutes before I was able to begin my commute home. Other workers were running as fast as they could to make the bus.
The fact that one big wave of shifts was ending and another big wave of shifts was starting is probably the biggest reason why crowding happens at the entrance. A temporary solution would be to simply better stagger shift times.
I never hated the job as much as the time I was asked to be in charge of taking the totes off of the manual pick and stow stations. Sometimes, there are too many pickers and everyone doesn’t get assigned a station. Some pickers are left on “standby,” which means they have free time until they’re assigned to a station. I’m not going to lie, but I really didn’t mind being on standby.
There are automated pick stations at Amazon where pickers’ totes automatically go into the conveyor and to the packers, and then there are manual stations for pickers and stowers, where we were required to bring full, heavy totes to the conveyors.
I did this one day, and I was the only person on my floor loading and pushing full flatbed carts of extremely heavy totes to the conveyor. Every time I unloaded over 60 full totes on the conveyor, I would go back to the manual stations and see more full totes piled up — it was like a never-ending Sisyphean toil. Another person probably would have helped, but that’s the job I never wanted to work in the warehouse again.
It made me realize how privileged I was, to both have been a seasonal employee and to have had one of the easier jobs in the warehouse on most days.
I didn’t love this job, but my experience wasn’t nearly as bad as some of the horror stories I’ve read in the media. But what most people don’t know is the isolation of the job in the first place. I had whole days where I didn’t talk to anyone (unless there was a problem). I wish there was more social interaction as a picker, but considering the pandemic, maybe it’s good that there isn’t. Still, the isolating nature of the job is a benefit to Amazon since it’s part of what makes it so difficult for warehouse workers to organize.
All my interactions with other workers had been extremely cordial. My managers were very friendly, helpful, and understanding. I feel like most people genuinely wanted to support me and help me succeed. And while I’m sure that varies from fulfillment center to fulfillment center and manager to manager, I’ve really enjoyed interacting with all the people at my warehouse. They share similar concerns about making ends meet as well as similar complaints about malfunctioning robots or demanding performance rates.
Amazon has its issues with forcing its workers to be more productive, but an untold villain that people don’t want to hear about is the customer. The customer wants convenience, with free shipping and packages sent within a two-day time period.
What people don’t like to think about is that convenience has a human price. After working at Amazon, I realize the biggest difference I can make toward better treatment for workers is to stop shopping there.
Not shopping at Amazon seems like a doomsday proposal to me — which just goes to show how Amazon, as a company, has taken a larger-than-life presence in our digital marketplace. Covid-19 has certainly exacerbated that and raised the demand for e-commerce.
Putting pressure on the company to give better pay, provide better benefits, accept unionization, and establish less demanding working conditions comes by hurting Amazon fiscally. If enough people stop shopping at Amazon, the company might react by laying off employees in response to lower demands. But if Amazon is hurt fiscally, it might have no other choice but to give in to public demand, like any big international corporation.
We have decried working conditions for Amazon workers, and those complaints are valid — however, what we often fail to realize is that part of the reason Amazon has succeeded is because customers are addicted to convenience. But that convenience comes at a price for warehouse workers. I wish that I would have been more patient when an Amazon package didn’t arrive on a given day, now that I know what goes into getting that package to me.
Amazon wants to please the customer by whatever means necessary. That philosophy is what helped make it the biggest company in the world. It’s on us, as consumers, to change that.
Top of Form
Amazon warehouse reports show worker injuries
Bottom of Form
Updated at 6 p.m. ET on December 5, 2019.
This story is a collaboration between The Atlantic and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. Sign up to read more stories from Reveal.
When candice dixon showed up for her first day of work at an Amazon warehouse in Eastvale, California, she stepped into a wonder of automation, efficiency, and speed. Inside the sprawling four-story building in Southern California’s Inland Empire, hundreds of squat orange robots whizzed across the floor, carrying tall yellow racks.
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As a stower, her job was to stand in a spot on the floor, like hundreds of others in that million-square-foot warehouse, and fill an unending parade of merchandise racks. Another worker, known as a “water spider,” would bring her boxes upon boxes of goods—jars of protein powder, inflatable unicorn pool floats, laptops, makeup, Himalayan sea salt, vibrators, plastic toy cars. She’d grab each item out of a box, scan it, lift it onto the rack, and scan its new location. She’d use a stepladder to put things on the top of the rack. For heavy items—she remembers the cases of pet food in particular—she’d have to squat down to hoist them in, then pop back up to grab the next item. As soon as she’d filled a rack, she’d press a button, and one robot would zip it away while another robot would bring a new one to fill.
The moment an Amazon customer clicked “place your order,” a robot would haul one of those racks to a picker, who would grab the right item for the order and send it on a series of long conveyors to a packer, who would stuff it in one of those familiar, smiling cardboard boxes.
The clock was always ticking on Amazon’s promised delivery time. Dixon had to scan a new item every 11 seconds to hit her quota, she said, and Amazon always knew when she didn’t.
Dixon’s scan rate—more than 300 items an hour, thousands of individual products a day—was being tracked constantly, the data flowing to managers in real time, then crunched by a proprietary software system called ADAPT. She knew, like the thousands of other workers there, that if she didn’t hit her target speed, she would be written up, and if she didn’t improve, she eventually would be fired.
Amazon’s cutting-edge technology, unrelenting surveillance, and constant disciplinary write-ups pushed the Eastvale workers so hard that in the last holiday season, they hit a coveted target: They got a million packages out the door in 24 hours. Amazon handed out T-shirts celebrating their induction into the “Million Unit Club.”
Rachel de Leon / Reveal
But Dixon, 54, wasn’t around for that. She started the job in April 2018, and within two months, or nearly 100,000 items, the lifting had destroyed her back. An Amazon-approved doctor said she had bulging discs and diagnosed her with a back sprain, joint inflammation, and chronic pain, determining that her injuries were 100 percent due to her job. She could no longer work at Amazon. Today, she can barely climb stairs. Walking her dog, doing the dishes, getting out of her chair—everything is painful. According to her medical records, her condition is unlikely to improve.
So this holiday-shopping season, as Amazon’s ferocious speed is on full display, Dixon is at a standstill. She told Reveal in mid-October that her workers’-compensation settlement was about to run out. She was struggling to land a new job and worried she’d lose her home.
“I’m still too young to feel like I’m 90 years old,” Dixon said, sitting in the living room of her Corona, California, home, which was decorated with inspirational sayings (“You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have”). “I don’t even know how I’m going to make it in a couple of months.”
Amazon’s famous speed and technological innovation have driven the company’s massive global expansion and a valuation well over $800 billion. It’s also helped make Amazon the nation’s second-largest private employer behind Walmart, and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, one of the richest humans on Earth. Now an investigation by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting has found that the company’s obsession with speed has turned its warehouses into injury mills.
Reveal amassed internal injury records from 23 of the company’s 110 fulfillment centers nationwide. Taken together, the rate of serious injuries for those facilities was more than double the national average for the warehousing industry: 9.6 serious injuries per 100 full-time workers in 2018, compared with an industry average that year of 4.
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While a handful of centers were at or below the industry average, Reveal found that some centers, such as the Eastvale warehouse, were especially dangerous. Dixon’s was one of 422 injuries recorded there last year. Its rate of serious injuries—those requiring job restrictions or days off work—was more than four times the industry average.
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“According to Amazon’s own records, the risk of work injuries at fulfillment centers is alarmingly, unacceptably high,” said David Michaels, the former head of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, who is now a professor at George Washington University’s public-health school. “Amazon needs to take a hard look at the facilities where so many workers are being hurt and either redesign the work processes, replace the top managers, or both, because serious-injury rates this high should not be acceptable to any employer.”
Amazon officials declined repeated interview requests. Instead, a company spokesperson, Ashley Robinson, provided a written response to some of Reveal’s questions. Robinson said Amazon’s injury rates are high because it’s aggressive about recording worker injuries and cautious about allowing injured workers to return to work before they’re ready.
“We know that by making a conservative choice to not place an injured associate back into a job, we are elevating restricted and lost time rates as a company, but with the intent to benefit the associate,” Robinson wrote.
Many workers said that was not their experience. They spoke with outrage about having been cast aside as damaged goods or sent back to jobs that injured them further. Dixon said she had doctor orders not to pull or lift heavy objects and to alternate between sitting and standing, but she wasn’t given a chair and heavy boxes kept coming her way.
“For Amazon,” Dixon said, “all they care about is getting the job done and getting it out fast and not realizing how it’s affecting us and our own bodies.”
The company does instruct workers on the safe way to move their bodies and handle equipment. But several former workers said they had to break the safety rules to keep up. They would jump or stretch to reach a top rack instead of using a stepladder. They would twist and bend over to grab boxes instead of taking time to squat and lift with their legs. They would hoist extra-heavy items alone to avoid wasting time getting help. They had to, they said, or they would lose their jobs. So they took the risk.
Then, if they got hurt, they would lose their jobs anyway. Even some workers who loved the pace, camaraderie, and compensation at Amazon’s fulfillment centers told Reveal that they were quickly replaced as soon as their bodies broke down.
The problems Reveal uncovered go far beyond common sprains, strains, and repetitive stress injuries. When a gas leak inundated the Eastvale warehouse where Dixon used to work, managers wouldn’t slow down, several workers said, even though they were dizzy and vomiting. They were told that they’d have to use personal time off if they wanted to leave.
And when disaster struck at one Indiana warehouse, Amazon’s economic might may have helped the company evade accountability. When a maintenance worker was crushed to death by a forklift there, state officials in Indiana, which then was jockeying for Amazon’s second headquarters, sided with the company over their own investigator. “When you order something from Amazon and you’ve worked inside Amazon, you wonder, ‘Hey, is ordering my package going to be the demise of somebody?’” said one former safety manager, who had worked at multiple Amazon facilities.
The root of Amazon’s success appears to be the root of its injury problem, too: the blistering pace of delivering packages to its customers.
Amazon’s busiest season, which the company calls “peak,” begins with the run-up to Black Friday. Amazon said it shipped Prime members more than a billion items last holiday season. This year, Amazon has a new promise: free one-day delivery for Prime members.
It’s also crunch time for the human body. Employees face the exhaustion of mandatory 12-hour shifts, and warehouses are crammed with seasonal workers unaccustomed to the grind. The company’s 2018 logs show that weekly injury counts spiked at two distinct moments when Amazon offered special deals: Cyber Monday and Prime Day.
Read: What Amazon thinks you’re worth
Robinson, the Amazon spokesperson, said total injuries do go up during those peak times, but that’s only because the company brings on more workers then. Robinson said the rate of injuries historically has stayed steady, or even decreased, at peak times. Amazon declined to provide data to back up that claim.
As ever-increasing production targets flow down from corporate, regional managers lean on warehouse directors, who put pressure on the supervisors, who oversee all those water spiders, stowers, pickers, and packers. And the key to advancement is great production numbers.
“It incentivizes you to be a heartless son of a bitch,” said a former senior operations manager who had leadership roles at multiple facilities.
The former senior operations manager described going from the omniscient ADAPT system to an Amazon competitor, where he had to search occasionally updated Excel spreadsheets to find productivity numbers.
Marc Wulfraat, president of the supply-chain and logistics consulting firm MWPVL International, described Amazon as more aggressive than any other industry player in what the company expects from workers. “And they will not waste time hanging on to people who can’t perform,” he said.
The Amazon tenure of Parker Knight, a disabled veteran who worked at the Troutdale, Oregon, warehouse this year, shows the ruthless precision of Amazon’s system. Knight had been allowed to work shorter shifts after he sustained back and ankle injuries at the warehouse, but ADAPT didn’t spare him. Knight was written up three times in May for missing his quota.
The expectations were precise. He had to pick 385 small items or 350 medium items each hour. One week, he was hitting 98.45 percent of his expected rate, but that wasn’t good enough. That 1.55 percent speed shortfall earned him his final written warning—the last one before termination.
“You are expected to meet 100 percent of the productivity performance expectation,” the warning reads. Days later, the company informed him he was being fired because of an earlier confrontation over workers’-compensation paperwork.
Robinson said Amazon has performance expectations “like most companies.”
“We measure actual performance against those expectations,” she said. “Associate performance is measured and evaluated over a long period of time—at least six weeks—as we know a variety of things could impact the ability to meet expectations in any given day or hour.”
The company’s aggressive production demands have overwhelmed its safety teams’ efforts to protect workers, according to five former Amazon safety managers, who oversaw safety at fulfillment centers around the country and spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation.
One of them, a former senior safety manager, said it’s well known internally that the injury rates are too high, but there’s no way Amazon will slow down. “It’s not a conversation that can be had,” the former manager said. “We’re never going to fix safety at Amazon, because we’re never going to fix what the real issue is.”
Amazon is fond of showing off its industry-changing innovation: The fleets of robots, it claims, not only speed up production; they also make employees’ jobs easier and safer. Instead of having to walk miles of warehouse floor every day, pickers stand in one spot as robots come to them.
But injury records and interviews with three of the former Amazon safety managers suggest the introduction of the robots led to even more injuries. Of the records Reveal obtained, most of the warehouses with the highest rates of injury deployed robots. One robotic facility in Kent, Washington—which a senior operations manager boasted was “the flagship of fulfillment,” as one of the few centers in 2016 to ship a million packages in a day—logged 292 serious injuries last year, for a rate of about 13 serious injuries per 100 workers.
(Jason Raish)
After Amazon debuted the robots in Tracy, California, five years ago, the serious-injury rate there nearly quadrupled, going from 2.9 per 100 workers in 2015 to 11.3 in 2018, records show.
Jonathan Meador watched the transition from his position loading boxes into big-rig trailers. The robots at the Tracy warehouse were so efficient that humans could barely keep up. Suddenly, the pickers and packers were expected to move more products every minute, and more boxes shot down the conveyor belt toward Meador.
“Before robots, it was still tough, but it was manageable,” he said. Afterward, “we were in a fight that we just can’t win.”
The Oregon facility where Knight worked opened with robotics in August 2018 and had the highest serious-injury rate Reveal found: nearly 26 per 100 employees, more than six times the industry average.
New warehouses sometimes are rushed to open before they’re ready, said two of the former safety managers, leading management to skimp on training and start operations without full safety teams in place.
Robinson declined to comment on the elevated injury rates at robotic warehouses. But she said Amazon doesn’t launch new buildings until they are “ready and safe for employees.”
Injury records are supposed to be one way of holding companies accountable for their safety culture. The U.S. Department of Labor under the Obama administration proposed posting them online, but under President Donald Trump, the agency has reversed course and also fought public–records requests. And Amazon has resisted making its own safety records public.
Reveal filed multiple requests to OSHA for injury records from Amazon facilities in more than a dozen states, many of which were released with critical information redacted; Reveal has filed suit to challenge those redactions.
Still, by law, employers must provide complete injury records to any current or former employee who requests them. Reveal reached out to Amazon warehouse workers past and present and explained how to request records for their work site, ultimately receiving 2018 records for 23 fulfillment centers in 14 states. Two of the injury logs came from a collaboration of worker advocacy groups, including New York Communities for Change and Make the Road New York.
Reveal now is seeking to compile the remaining injury logs. (If you’ve worked for Amazon, here’s how you can get the records and share them with Reveal.)
In at least a dozen cases, Amazon either ignored these employee requests or provided only partial records, in apparent violation of federal regulations. Amazon told some workers that they were entitled only to the records for the time period they worked there; an OSHA spokesperson, Kimberly Darby, said that’s incorrect. And when Amazon did provide records, warehouse managers used identical language to call them confidential and request they be kept secret. Yet OSHA guidance says, and Darby confirmed, that employers are not allowed to restrict workers from sharing the records. Some workers said they felt intimidated by the notice, fearing they might get sued by Amazon for sharing the records with a news organization.
Several years ago, according to three of the former safety managers, Amazon had a policy for systematically hiding injuries. A former safety specialist in a warehouse confirmed their account. He said higher-ups instructed him to come up with justifications for not recording injuries that should have been counted by law.
After OSHA cited Amazon for failing to record dozens of injuries at a New Jersey warehouse in 2015, Amazon changed the practice, and the former safety managers said the company became more diligent about counting injuries. (OSHA requires companies to record work-related injuries on official logs only when they result in days away from work, job restrictions, or medical treatment beyond first aid.)
Robinson said that Amazon never had a policy for underreporting injuries but that in 2016, it implemented a policy change after recognizing the challenge of ensuring “consistency and accuracy.”
“Amazon took the decision to shift to a fully transparent reporting model as we would rather over-report and lead in this space for our associates’ safety than optimize for optics,” she said.
The former senior safety manager said some warehouse managers still found ways to avoid directing workers to the on-site health clinic—such as sending them to the break room instead—so their injuries wouldn’t get recorded. A few workers said supervisors would get upset if they reported injuries or sought medical treatment.
The logs Reveal obtained are scattered with lacerations and concussions and fractures, but most of the injuries are labeled as sprains and strains. The pain from these injuries can be debilitating. About a third of the injured workers had to take off more than a month to recover.
A handful of the injuries were far worse.
In september 2017, Amazon announced a search for a second headquarters, saying it would invest more than $5 billion and bring as many as 50,000 jobs to whichever city won the sweepstakes.
Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb got the news while on a trip to Japan. He returned home on a Friday night and spent the weekend in deliberations. On Monday, he announced his state would join the bidding war. He put the Indiana Economic Development Corporation in charge of putting together a package of local and state incentives.
“We are doing what Amazon has asked us to do: coordinating efforts with all interested regions of the state to put our best bid forward,” he said in the statement.
He had tough competition. Arlington, Virginia, offered $550 million in cash and a helipad. Atlanta dreamed up an exclusive airport lounge with free parking for Amazon executives. Maryland’s Montgomery County dangled $6.5 billion in tax incentives.
The efforts of Indiana state officials to vie for Amazon’s interest were about to intersect with the life of one local Amazon employee, 59-year-old Phillip Lee Terry.
Terry had been at Amazon for about two years. He started as a picker in a Plainfield fulfillment center, then moved to the maintenance department. He had a background in an unrelated field—marketing—but quickly took on the task of handling complicated industrial equipment.
Terry made a surprisingly strong impact on his co-workers, even at a big, busy warehouse. He’d chat them up and make them laugh whenever he could, said Jennie Miller, who worked picking orders with Terry.
“There’s only kind of a few people that you ever meet in your life that have those kinds of sparkling personalities,” she said.
On September 24, just a few days after he’d been eating ice cream and watching college football with his grandkids, Terry showed up for work and was sent to do maintenance on a forklift. He walked under the machine’s forks and metal platform to work on it with a wrench. Suddenly, the 1,200-pound piece of equipment dropped down and crushed him.
His body lay there for nearly two hours before a co-worker noticed the pool of blood.
The next day, a safety inspector with Indiana OSHA headed to Amazon to investigate.
Safety was the family business for John Stallone. His father had worked his way up to become director of enforcement for the Alaska state branch of OSHA. Years ago, when Stallone joined the U.S. Air Force and served in Afghanistan, his father told him that wherever his career took him, to always get involved in safety work. And so he did, volunteering on safety committees in the military, then working in industrial safety in oil and gas fields. On a shelf near his front door, he keeps a collection of hard hats from his safety work around the globe.
As he surveyed the site of the accident, Stallone quickly figured out the problem: A tall pole, lying just feet away, should have been used to prop up the forklift during maintenance. In a recording he made of his inspection, Stallone asked an Amazon manager whether there was any written documentation of Terry being trained on that.
“No, sir,” the supervisor says on the recording. He told Stallone that Terry had been informally trained by a co-worker.
Stallone interviewed a co-worker of Terry’s, who put the blame on Amazon’s safety culture coming in second to production demands.
“The safety issues I’ve brought up have been dismissed and not dealt with,” the worker said in a signed statement. “I want to see the safety culture in Amazon change and ensure the maintenance workers have the appropriate amount of training. There’s no training, there’s no safety, it’s ‘Get ’er done.’ ”
Stallone (Rachel de Leon / Reveal)
Stallone repeatedly pressed Amazon to provide records showing Terry had been trained on that piece of equipment. In the end, he found that Amazon failed to provide adequate training, exposing Terry to a fatal hazard.
Indiana OSHA issued four serious safety citations, for a total fine of $28,000. Stallone sought more, but he was getting pushback. On November 20, 2017, Stallone joined his boss, Indiana OSHA Director Julie Alexander, as she called Amazon officials. He secretly recorded the conversation, which is legal in the state, and shared the recording with Reveal.
During the call, Alexander told the Amazon officials what she’d need from them in order to shift the blame from the company to “employee misconduct,” according to the recording.
And she walked them through how to negotiate down the fines. “We sometimes like to consider grouping citations to lower the penalty amounts,” she said.
She suggested Amazon could partner with her agency as a “leader in safety” to kick off a program promoting best practices in the logistics industry.
After hanging up with Amazon, Alexander said: “They’re wanting to probably take this offer and go back and look and say, ‘Hey, we’re partnering with Indiana. We’re going to be the leader.’”
She told Stallone, “I hope you don’t take it personally if we have to manipulate your citations.”
Amazon had said it would appeal the citations and had further information that it would share in confidential settlement negotiations. Alexander wondered what it could be. Then she speculated out loud that the information might be about Terry himself, saying, “I’m guessing the guy was probably on drugs or something.”
By this point, a coroner had found nothing in his blood except nicotine and caffeine.
Stallone said he was disgusted. But the pressure to placate Amazon didn’t stop there.
Some days after the conference call with Amazon officials, Stallone said Indiana Labor Commissioner Rick Ruble pulled him into his office. The governor was there, too, standing by the commissioner’s desk, according to Stallone.
He recalled that Holcomb told him how much it would mean to Indiana if the state won the Amazon headquarters deal. Then, Stallone said, the commissioner told him to back off on the Amazon case—or resign.
Later, in early December, while the Amazon citations still were being appealed, Stallone said he was called into a meeting by his supervisors and told that he was going to be terminated over alleged job-performance issues. Stallone and a colleague with knowledge of the matter told Reveal that the job-performance claims were baseless and likely a pretext, levied in retribution for his pressing for the safety citations against Amazon. The meeting took place just three months after Stallone had received two awards at a staff retreat for his safety work.
Stallone said he resigned that same day; the governor’s office asserts that he was fired. Indiana state personnel records list his departure as a termination for failing to “successfully complete [a] probationary period.”
On December 6, 2017, shortly after his departure, Stallone sounded the alarm to a federal OSHA official. In an email he shared with Reveal, Stallone told the federal official that “someone higher than Director Alexander” wanted the Amazon case to go away “in the hopes it would keep Indianapolis in the running for their new HQ location.”*
The governor’s office denied the meeting with Stallone and the labor commissioner took place, with Press Secretary Rachel Hoffmeyer writing, “The Governor never gets involved in Department of Labor cases.”
The same day Stallone sent his whistle-blower email, Amazon’s corporate offices in Seattle gave a $1,000 campaign contribution to Indiana’s governor. It was years before Holcomb would next face reelection, and Amazon hasn’t donated to him before or since.
A year after Terry’s death, Indiana officials quietly signed an agreement with Amazon to delete all the safety citations and fines. The agreement said Amazon had met the requirements of an “unpreventable employee misconduct defense.” The official record now essentially blames Terry for his own death.
At that point, Indianapolis was one of 20 finalists for the Amazon headquarters deal. Three and a half weeks after the citations were deleted, Amazon held a small-business roundtable event in Indianapolis. Holcomb was there, sitting next to a company representative.
“Our tax and regulatory climates are very—not just attractive, but enticing,” he told a local TV reporter at the event. “And we want to grow together.”
Ultimately, Indiana didn’t win the big sweepstakes; Amazon chose Arlington for its second headquarters. Federal OSHA declined to investigate Stallone’s complaint.
Derek Thompson: Amazon’s HQ2 spectacle isn’t just shameful—it should be illegal
The governor’s office and Indiana labor officials declined interviews. The Indiana Labor Department, which oversees the state OSHA, responded to questions about Stallone’s account of the meeting and Alexander’s statements by email, writing that, “The allegations are nothing short of bizarre and fantastical—in addition to being absolutely false.”
In a later statement, the department said it couldn’t prove Amazon should have known Terry wouldn’t properly prop up the forklift. A Labor Department spokesperson, Stephanie McFarland, said Amazon produced proof that Terry was properly trained, including a video of Terry handling the equipment the right way another time. But the agency did not provide any documentation of Amazon’s evidence or any records that would corroborate the department’s account.
Two of the former Amazon safety managers who were aware of Terry’s death at the time faulted Amazon for failing to use formally trained maintenance professionals. One of them, the former senior safety manager, said Amazon had a systemic problem, vividly recalling a report from another warehouse in which a maintenance worker also had failed to properly brace a forklift while working on it, months after Terry’s death.
“If there was any misconduct there, it’s putting a person that has little to no experience [to work] on this piece of equipment,” said the other former safety manager, who has worked at multiple facilities. “Whoever allowed that to happen—that’s the misconduct.”
Ashley Robinson, the Amazon spokesperson, would not comment on the circumstances surrounding Terry’s death, citing privacy concerns.
Stallone was so troubled by the incident that he attended Terry’s funeral.
(Courtesy of the Terry family)
“Someone died on the job because they don’t have a good safety culture,” Stallone said. “I think Amazon was given a pass, and they were able to walk away from this fatality incident with no blood on them.”
More than two years later, Terry’s son, Zach, still thinks about his dad each day.
“I have a lot of anger built up because of everything that’s happened,” he said. “He wasn’t an accident. He was the patriarch of our family.”
Candice dixon remembers her excitement when the Amazon warehouse opened in Eastvale in March 2018. The new fulfillment center would help make Amazon the Inland Empire’s largest private employer, offering a decent wage and health benefits—with no experience necessary. That fall, an Amazon executive, Dave Clark, chose the Eastvale warehouse to make the announcement that Amazon’s new minimum wage would be $15 an hour. The hundreds of workers crowded around him broke into cheers and applause.
But the jobs, Dixon soon found, came with a brutal work pace. She and other Eastvale workers said nothing was allowed to stand in the way of Amazon’s delivery targets.
On New Year’s Day 2019, the smell of gas wafted through the giant warehouse and workers started to fall ill.
A call came in to the local 911 dispatcher just after midnight on January 2, five and a half hours into the night shift.
“There’s a lot of people sick,” an Amazon worker said.
The person on the line, Christina Van Vorce, a robotics floor monitor, had been smelling gas since the start of her shift. Some workers had been moved to another part of the building, and others were sent briefly to a break room, but the warehouse had not been evacuated, according to accounts by Van Vorce and four others at work that night. After seeing pickers throwing up into trash cans, Van Vorce clocked out to dial 911. She told the dispatcher she didn’t want Amazon to know she had called.
“Where I was at on my floor, pretty much everyone on that side felt sick,” she can be heard saying in the recording. “Two associates that I know for sure that were vomiting. One girl almost completely passed out. She had to be taken by a wheelchair. And then everyone else has got, like, headaches and the burning in the chest and the nose.”
The dispatcher said everyone should evacuate the building. Robinson told Reveal that Amazon shut down the site for about an hour and a half while a maintenance team repaired the leak. But Van Vorce told the dispatcher that management wouldn’t stop operations.
“They’re trying to tell us we have to use our personal time if we want to leave,” she says in the 911 recording.
Another worker called 911 with a similar report, saying she and her co-workers smelled gas and she had clocked out with a headache, but management wouldn’t evacuate. The fire department arrived and found that wind had damaged a gas line, funneling gas into the building.
One current Eastvale worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation, said a friend drove her to a hospital in Upland, where she spent several hours on oxygen, an account the friend confirmed. The friend said she herself ended up out of work for weeks with dizziness and headaches. Amazon’s injury logs did record one worker’s “respiratory irritation” that day.
Robinson said that before firefighters arrived, gas was shut off to the building and its safety team “assessed we had fresh air entering the building and there was no risk” to workers. She insisted that no one was hospitalized.
Van Vorce and other workers said Amazon docked their personal time off for leaving work during the leak, though Robinson told Reveal that was against company policy. She confirmed that anyone docked time off got it reversed if they complained.
“It was all about numbers,” Van Vorce said in an interview. “They didn’t want to stop production.”
If Amazon’s Eastvale leadership wouldn’t pause production for a gas leak, they certainly didn’t pause for something as mundane as a trip to the bathroom.
Bathroom visits are tracked carefully at Amazon fulfillment centers, according to multiple current and former workers and managers, with each gap in scanning labeled as “time off task.” Too much time off task can trigger a write-up, and workers describe being caught between wanting to stay hydrated and trying to avoid long treks across a giant warehouse to the bathroom.
Robinson said Amazon ensures every worker has access to a restroom a “short walk” away “whenever needed.” But she did not address whether workers are docked for such trips as time off task. It was that threat that sparked some workers to devise workarounds.
Adam Kester, who worked as a picker at a fulfillment center in Phoenix until last year, said he and other workers would bring customers’ orders into the bathroom with them to scan midway through. “It sounds disgusting,” he acknowledged.
Kristi Shrum, who worked as a stower until 2018 at another Amazon warehouse in Southern California, said she sometimes would have friends scan items for her while she went to the bathroom to make it look as though she were working. Still, she said she got multiple urinary tract infections.
“You have to hold your pee or not make your rate. Which one you want to do?” Shrum said. “I had to make my rate.”
Faith Gerdon of Anaheim said she developed urinary tract infections while working as a stower at the Eastvale warehouse last year. At one point, she got so upset that she told her supervisor, “I’m happy to bring puppy pads and pee here on the floor.”
As Eastvale—a member of last year’s Million Unit Club—again gears up for the frantic holiday season, Gerdon won’t have a chance to earn all that overtime.
Last December, injuries to both of her thumbs and wrists put her off work, according to Amazon’s logs. She hasn’t worked since.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, meanwhile, is focused relentlessly on his customers.
“We are ramping up to make our 25th holiday season the best ever for Prime customers—with millions of products available for free one-day delivery,” he said in an October 24 press release about Amazon’s most recent earnings report. “Customers love the transition of Prime from two days to one day—they’ve already ordered billions of items with free one-day delivery this year.”
Rachel de Leon, Byard Duncan, Melissa Lewis, Katharine Mieszkowski, and Hannah Young contributed reporting.
* These three paragraphs were updated after Indiana’s State Personnel Department released information from the Indiana OSHA safety inspector John Stallone’s personnel record to Reveal. The circumstances of Stallone’s departure from his job became a matter of public dispute November 29, when Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb issued a cease-and-desist letter to Reveal and the Indianapolis Star in response to the publication of this story.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/13/amazon-workers-fired/
Amazon fires two tech workers who criticized the company’s warehouse workplace conditions
The workers had been outspoken critics of the e-commerce giant’s climate policies and were previously warned about making public comments about its business
April 14, 2020 at 6:59 p.m. EDT
SEATTLE — Amazon has fired two employees who were outspoken critics of its climate policies and who had publicly denounced the conditions at its warehouses as unsafe during the coronavirus pandemic.
The virus has spread widely, infecting workers in at least 74 warehouses and delivery facilities across the country, according to Amazon and media reports. Some warehouse workers have staged small demonstrations in response.
And Amazon acknowledged Tuesday that a manager in its Hawthorne, Calif., warehouse died on March 31 from covid-19, the first reported coronavirus-related death among its workers.
One of the fired workers, Emily Cunningham, a user experience designer who is part of the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, had offered on Twitter to match donations up to $500 to Amazon warehouse workers. In that tweet, she wrote that a lack of safe and sanitary working conditions “puts them and the public at risk.”
Cunningham said late Monday that she was fired Friday afternoon.
Maren Costa, a principal user experience designer who is also part of the employee climate group, said she also was fired Friday. Costa has retweeted criticism from Cunningham, as well as from groups supporting the activist warehouse workers, about Amazon’s policies on protecting warehouse staff. Costa, too, offered via Twitter to match donations up to $500 for warehouse workers “while they struggle to get consistent, sufficient protections and procedures from our employer.”
Amazon employees launch mass defiance of company communications policy in support of colleagues
Separately, Amazon confirmed Tuesday it fired a worker at a Minnesota warehouse who had been an activist calling for safer working conditions.
Amazon fired the tech workers for “repeatedly violating internal policies,” spokesman Drew Herdener said in a statement.
“We support every employee’s right to criticize their employer’s working conditions, but that does not come with blanket immunity against any and all internal policies,” Herdener said.
Amazon’s external communications policy prohibits employees from commenting publicly on its business without corporate justification and approval from executives. Herdener previously said the policy did not allow employees to “publicly disparage or misrepresent the company.”
(Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
“Because of how effective we’ve been in getting Amazon to take leadership in the climate crisis, they’ve wanted me gone for a while,” Cunningham said.
Costa believes she was fired for her outspokenness as well.
“They were targeting the most visible leaders in an attempt to silence everyone,” Costa said Monday night.
Amazon fired Costa in a video call while she worked at home, with her 13-year-old son in the next room. After the call, her son asked if she’d been fired for her climate activism, she said. When she told him she was, he asked if she regretted it.
“I said, ‘No, I don’t. Not at all. I’m doing this for you,’” Costa said.
The 35-year-old California worker who passed away was an operations manager. Business Insider first reported his passing.
The Minnesota warehouse worker fired, Bashir Mohamed, was involved in labor organizing and had been advocating for more rigorous measures to protect against the transmission of the coronavirus, according to BuzzFeed, which first reported his firing.
Amazon spokeswoman Kristen Kish said the fired was not retaliatory, but rather the “result of progressive disciplinary action for inappropriate language, behavior, and violating social distancing guidelines.”
Last month, Amazon fired Chris Smalls, a warehouse worker in Staten Island, after he raised concerns to several media outlets, including The Post, about working conditions. New York Attorney General Letitia James called the firing “disgraceful” and asked the National Labor Relations Board to investigate the incident, and five U.S. senators, including former Democratic presidential candidates Cory Booker (N.J.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), sent Bezos a letter raising concerns about Smalls’s firing.
Amazon said the dismissal was related to Smalls’s ignoring a request from his manager to stay home after contact with a worker who tested positive for the coronavirus.
Amazon threatens to fire critics who are outspoken on its environmental policies
Cunningham has been a vocal critic of Amazon’s climate policies, criticizing them at the company’s shareholder meeting last May. Subsequently, she condemned Amazon’s work with oil and gas companies on social media and in news reports.
Late last year, Amazon warned Costa, who also denounced the company’s climate practices, that she risked being fired for “speaking about Amazon’s business in a public forum.”
In January, more than 350 employees engaged in a mass defiance of company communications policy to support Costa and others, calling out Amazon for its climate policy, its work with federal agencies and its attempts to stifle dissent in a post on Medium.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), an outspoken critic of Amazon’s use of the federal tax code to generate a net benefit while earning $11 billion in 2018, ripped the company and Bezos for leaving its employees to raise funds for colleagues as they work in warehouses.
“That is obscene,” Sanders told The Post. “Maybe — just maybe — the wealthiest man in the world can afford to provide a safe and dignified existence to all of his workers and end Amazon’s involvement in fossil fuel extraction, instead of just firing employees who are demanding justice and an end to the hypocrisy.”
In criticizing Amazon’s warehouse policies, Cunningham and Costa joined a chorus of politicians, unions and others clamoring for Amazon to improve workplace conditions.
For the past month, warehouse employees in Europe and the United States have sounded alarms that the company wasn’t taking enough steps to protect them from the virus. Workers complained about policies that push them to meet the per-hour rate at which the company wants orders fulfilled, a practice that they worry discourages safe sanitary practices such as washing hands after a cough or sneeze. Others have complained about “stand-up” meetings, where workers stand shoulder-to-shoulder at the start of each shift.
Amazon has since taken steps to address those issues, including giving warehouse workers masks and checking the temperatures of employees as they begin shifts, sending workers home for three days if they register 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit or higher, the company said.
Despite losing her job, Cunningham said she has no regrets.
“I know I’m going to be okay,” she said. “These times are going to require us to be our bravest, best selves.”
31 Amazon Employees Share Their Working Conditions As A Response To Jeff Bezos’ Wealth Continuously Growing
Ilona Baliūnaitė and Rokas Laurinavičius
Jeff Bezos is the richest person on the planet. As of 2020, the Amazon owner is worth approximately 175 billion USD. However, not all of the 798,000 people at the company enjoy hearing about his success.
A viral Twitter thread has Amazon employees sharing stories about their poor work environment, sub-par safety standards, and unfair pay, calling Bezos an autocrat and suggesting that he’s accumulating his wealth at their expense.
This exchange on Twitter kicked off a viral thread, where Amazon employees explain why Jeff Bezos’ wealth isn’t worth celebrating
#1
Hans 7 months ago
The maternity protection laws in the US are merely ridiculous.
Austin, an ex-Amazon employee who agreed to tell Bored Panda about his experience at the company, worked there for about 2 years. “I worked every position besides the manager, all shifts, days and nights,” he said. “I decided to leave after my mental health was deteriorating due to being locked basically in this giant steel building with fluorescent lighting.”
“I couldn’t talk to anyone, we were constantly hounded to go faster and push harder and to push out extra volume. I began to hate my day to day life because all I got to do was the same exact thing as yesterday. It was incredibly stressful worrying about losing your job every day and if you wanted a personal day, then you better not get sick because you will lose your job.”
Looking back, Austin does not regret leaving. “It showed me the shitty side of capitalist America and how much our employers don’t give a flying f about us. It’s all about rates and money for them,” he explained. “I’d like to add that I’d like people to think about how capitalism is the root of all evil. I’m not saying communism or socialism is the answer but obviously capitalism isn’t it.”
#2
In August, ex-Amazon worker Christian Smalls even led a protest of the corporation’s coronavirus standards outside CEO Jeff Bezos’ $16 million apartment in New York City.
A few dozen people reportedly showed up, demanding that Amazon allow employees to unionize and “a federal wealth tax on the top 3% of earners in the United States,” according to a press release from Smalls’ group, the Congress of Essential Workers.
“I have workers [who] contact me all the time. They’re not protected still,” Smalls told FOX Business before the protest. “There are cases in buildings, people are still contracting the virus. … Some people are bringing the virus home, and relatives are dying. It’s an unfortunate situation they’re putting their workers in.”
Smalls was fired in March after organizing a small walkout over conditions at a Staten Island warehouse. He quickly gained media spotlight after calling for Amazon’s JFK8 fulfillment center to be shut down for deep cleaning and accusing the corporation of lying about how many workers have tested positive for the virus.
“It cost me my career. Guess what? I have no regrets,” Smalls said.
#3
Jeff Bezos, on the other hand, talked up the perks of a job at Amazon in a letter to shareholders in April, proudly stating that the lowest paid Amazon worker makes more than 40 million Americans in the US, earning $15 an hour versus the US federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
The company raised its minimum wage to $15 in 2018. “It had an immediate and meaningful impact on the hundreds of thousands of people working in our fulfillment centers,” Bezos said. We want other big employers to join us by raising their own minimum pay rates, and we continue to lobby for a $15 federal minimum wage.”
However, Austin doesn’t think that makes up for anything. “When I started, it was $13 an hour, and then it went up. I think it is ridiculous to be proud of that. That should be an industry standard to provide survivable wages. I think [he’s just embarrassing himself]. If I got paid $25 an hour, I’d reconsider, but I didn’t even get to go to the bathroom when I needed to. And honestly, $15 an hour is still barely scraping by.”
Something tells me other people featured in this list would agree with Austin, too. Do you? Let us know in the comments.
#4
A occasional 12 hour shift does not sound strange to me. I have worked 16 hour shifts when it was needed. Proper compensation and a good work climate are what counts.
#6
That’s what the bosses want worker ants no independent thinkers!
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#30
When the employer does not have to foot any future medical bills, well, yes, then they can work you ’til you break. They will then replace you with the next victim. So, folks, isn’t it convenient to use Amazon? The blame is on you!
#31
Warehouse workers say their safety concerns are being ignored. Here’s their cautionary tale for reopening.
by Wallace McKelvey of PennLive | The Patriot-News, Updated: May 5, 2020
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In mid-April, Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration ordered all businesses that were allowed to remain open during the coronavirus pandemic to increase safeguards for their employees.
But within the cavernous expanses of Pennsylvania’s warehouses — a booming industry that employs tens of thousands of workers — some say they’ve yet to see much difference. They face an increasingly stark choice: Quit, risk losing their job by speaking out, or resign themselves to the fact that they’re at high risk for the virus.
“Reopen?” said one employee at an Amazon fulfillment center in Luzerne County, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the media. “We never closed. Plain truth: No one cares about us.”
The workplace safety order that took effect April 19 — a full month and a half after the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Pennsylvania — requires employers to provide masks, stagger work times, and “enforce social distancing of at least six feet” to prevent worker illnesses. As of Monday, cases topped 50,000 with 2,458 reported deaths.
Asked about worker concerns last week, Wolf said it’s up to employees to make their concerns known, and up to their employers to rectify issues. But workers said their complaints were largely ignored by managers and federal regulators. What’s more, the state hasn’t proactively enforced the safety order.
And yet, as Pennsylvania begins the reopening process, success will in part hinge on how well workplaces follow social distancing and other safety protocols. Workers across the state in businesses that never shut down — including warehouses, meatpacking plants, and other facilities — are sounding the alarm about how that might go without more oversight.
“I’m thankful I have a job, but it was stressful enough already,” said a worker at an Apple fulfillment center in Cumberland County run by Syncreon. “Now there’s a threat of exposure [to COVID-19]. It’s flat-out greed.”
Interviews with eight warehouse workers from three companies — Amazon, Hudson’s Bay Co., and Syncreon — described similar stories of a slow response to the pandemic, a lack of transparency from their employers, and, in some cases, ongoing deficiencies in providing safety equipment, promoting proper distancing, and sanitizing work spaces.
They spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal. In a few cases, workers said they were warned they would face disciplinary action or lawsuits if they spoke publicly.
Amazon employees noted that as part of their training, they were warned not to speak publicly about the company. They described a culture in which management threatens reprisal against anyone who criticizes the company. In recent weeks, Amazon fired a New York warehouse worker who staged a protest and two white-collar employees who circulated a petition denouncing the treatment of workers during the pandemic.
In a statement, Amazon said it has a “zero tolerance policy for retaliation” but that “we firmly believe that … direct communication is the most effective way to understand and respond to the needs of our workforce.”
Following early cases at warehouses and meatpacking plants in the Lehigh Valley and Northeastern Pennsylvania, workers say they’ve struggled to learn the true rate of infection among their coworkers.
At Amazon’s AVP1 fulfillment center near Hazleton — which was under federal investigation because of an early spike in cases — workers say management stopped sharing that information. They started their own unofficial tally, which at last count was 64 and growing.
“Why [am] I going to expose myself for people getting stupid things like sexual dolls, grills, bed frames, exercise machines?” said one Amazon employee, who took unpaid leave from a warehouse outside Scranton. “I put my life first.”
An Amazon spokesperson, Rachael Lighty, declined to provide specifics on worker infections, but rejected the employees’ claims. She said the company has “worked closely with health authorities to proactively respond, ensuring we continue to serve customers while taking care of our associates and teams.” The company employs 10,000 people at more than a dozen fulfillment centers and offices statewide.
A Hudson’s Bay Co. spokesperson said its warehouses follow all health guidelines, noting that “associates are under no pressure to work if they are uncomfortable.” Hudson’s Bay owns Saks Fifth Avenue. Syncreon did not respond to requests for comment.
To Marielle Macher, a workers’ rights advocate and executive director of the Community Justice Project, these complaints are commonplace.
“We’ve been hearing really horrific stories from warehouse and meat processing workers,” she said. “It really is just impossible to truly socially distance.”
Indeed, workers’ stories demonstrate how warehouses would have to be radically altered to allow for the type of distancing needed to ensure worker safety — a change that seems unlikely.
An employee of Syncreon’s warehouse near Carlisle, which stores and ships Apple electronics, described an area recently dubbed “Corona Alley” by some workers. It’s one of several choke points where between five and 10 workers move packages between two sets of pallets.
“It’s a madhouse,” he said. “People on top of people.”
The employee said the company took steps to encourage social distancing in its break room but other areas remained all but impossible to correct.
At a warehouse near Pottsville run by Hudson’s Bay that ships orders for Saks, an employee said management provided personal protective equipment. But the company would have to fully redesign the facility to allow for the advised six feet of distance between workers on the conveyor belts.
“Time is of the essence,” said the employee, who believes the facility should shutter until it’s safe to reopen. “No one’s going to stop and sanitize everything they’ve touched and somebody’s always going to be coming up against one another in close quarters.”
Even in the best of times, these workers faced significant workplace hazards and little recourse for their complaints with rates of illness and injury on par with coal mining and farming, according to national data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nearly all of them are at-will employees lacking union protections.
The state has no single entity designated to handle workplace complaints, and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has historically been overburdened and underfunded.
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Elizabeth Rementer, a spokesperson for Wolf, said workers who believe their employers aren’t following the order can file a complaint online through the Department of Health and with their local police department. The health agency has the authority to send letters and issue fines, she said, and local and state police can issue warnings or citations that come with a maximum fine of $300.
Department of Health spokesperson Nate Wardle said the agency has sent letters but couldn’t provide figures or copies.
Workers said they have complained to little effect.
“Believe me — we’ve complained and complained and complained,” said an employee at AVP1, who pointed to the lack of enforcement behind Wolf’s order closing all non-“life-sustaining” businesses. “What does it mean? What will they actually do?”
So far, the state police have issued just one citation against a nonessential business for violating Wolf’s March 19 shutdown order. That business was warned twice. Since the safety order took effect April 19, troopers have issued 25 warnings and no citations.
The Hudson’s Bay employee said she repeatedly called both the Department of Health and OSHA with complaints about working conditions. When she called OSHA, she said, a regulator commiserated with her plight but said the agency wasn’t going to send an inspector.
“Nobody was really going to be checking to see if the businesses were following the CDC guidelines,” she said. “If you’re in a workplace that didn’t close, you didn’t have anybody to turn to.”
Some local officials are taking enforcement of workplace protection into their own hands. That includes Hazle Township in Luzerne County, home of AVP1.
“We knew early on from the enormity of the situation that the state and federal government wouldn’t have people available to check,” said Jim Montone, who chairs the township’s board of supervisors. “We’re trying to be proactive and help the people who work there.”
Montone said the township is dispatching code enforcement officers when it receives a workplace complaint but he concedes it doesn’t have much power to ensure equipment like masks are provided. They’ve found cooperation nonetheless, he said.
OSHA confirmed that it received three complaints from AVP1, which were deemed “resolved” after regulators corresponded with Amazon. The agency can issue fines for violating workplace safety rules but has thus far shown deference to employers dealing with the pandemic.
“OSHA standards haven’t changed,” U.S. Department of Labor spokesperson Emily Weeks said in a statement.
Weeks said employers are required to protect workers from recognized hazards, including the coronavirus. That could entail steps like cleaning, disinfection, and engineering controls, like partitions to separate workers from one another and from customers.
As of April 23, the most recent data available, the agency had received 2,609 coronavirus-related complaints nationally, she said. All complaints are investigated and of those received, 1,527 had been closed.
Still, many workers have taken unpaid leave out of fear of infection due to what they see as an absence of proper precautions and lack of information about the spread of COVID-19. Some warehouses, including Amazon’s, allowed workers with preexisting conditions to use paid time off or unpaid leave.
Amazon’s unpaid leave policy, however, expired Thursday. Communications from management shared by employees indicated that anyone who didn’t return to work after that date would be terminated.
The Hudson’s Bay employee took leave from her job in mid-April out of concern for her health as several of her coworkers came down with COVID-19. But that wasn’t the end.
Although her employer allowed her to take leave, she’s spent hours on the phone navigating the state’s unemployment compensation backlog.
When her leave expires, she plans to return to work, although she doesn’t feel any safer.
“Honestly, the reason I want to go back to work is so I don’t have to deal with unemployment and all the worries,” she said. “It’s just easier.”
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Senators are demanding answers from Amazon about how it treats warehouse workers
Pressure is mounting on the company to better protect its workers during the coronavirus pandemic.
By Shirin Ghaffary Apr 8, 2020, 7:20pm EDT
A group of US senators led by Cory Booker is intensifying pressure for Amazon to improve working conditions for its warehouse employees during the coronavirus pandemic.
On Wednesday, Booker and Sens. Robert Menendez, Sherrod Brown, Richard Blumenthal, and Kirsten Gillibrand sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos that questioned the company’s decision to fire an employee who demanded better health protections at the company’s facilities.
“We write to express our continued concern about working conditions at Amazon as well as recent actions Amazon has taken, including the recent firing of an Amazon warehouse employee,” reads the letter, which goes on to ask Bezos a series of questions about his company’s treatment of its US workforce. The senators are the latest to join a growing chorus of politicians, regulatory agencies, and employees who are questioning the company’s commitment to protecting its own workers during this international public health crisis.
While Amazon warehouse working conditions have long been scrutinized, the pandemic has amplified those concerns. During an unprecedented time when millions of Americans — or at least those who can afford to — stay home to try to slow the spread of the disease, Amazon warehouse and delivery workers are still laboring to send food, supplies, entertainment, and other items to Amazon’s customers.
And some of these employees say the company isn’t doing enough to protect them. In particular, they — as well as some of the company’s corporate employees — are criticizing company leadership for attempting to discredit a fired warehouse worker who was sounding the alarm bell about safety concerns. In the past few weeks, Covid-19 cases have been confirmed for workers in 50 out of some 500 Amazon warehouses in the US, according to reporting from the New York Times.
In response to the concerns raised in the letter, Amazon spokesperson Kristen Kish sent the following statement, in part:
“Our employees are heroes fighting for their communities and helping people get critical items they need in this crisis—we have nearly 500,000 people in the U.S. alone supporting customers and we are taking measures to support each one. … Like all businesses grappling with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, we are evaluating and making changes in real-time and encourage anyone to compare our overall pay, benefits, and speed in which we’re managing this crisis to other retailers and major employers across the country.”
In the last month, Amazon has upped its efforts to help employees by raising US warehouse worker pay by $2 an hour, doubling the hourly rate for overtime, staggering workers’ entries and exits, and providing two weeks of paid sick leave for employees with Covid-19 who have been placed under quarantine, among other efforts. But some Amazon workers on the front lines are still reporting overcrowding at facilities, a shortage of protective supplies such as gloves, and that workers are being denied paid time off when they fall ill.
Those concerns only increased when Amazon fired Chris Smalls, a warehouse worker in Staten Island, New York, who led one of several Amazon worker strikes around the country in recent weeks, demanded better health protections and pay. Amazon said that the company fired Smalls for returning to work after being asked to self-quarantine — a claim that Smalls denies. Soon after Smalls’s firing, a report from Vice News revealed the company’s top lawyer had referred to Smalls as “not smart, or articulate,” in a meeting attended by Jeff Bezos, and implied that executives should use his perceived weaknesses to help squelch worker unionization efforts.
As Recode previously reported, the leaked plans to discredit Smalls set off a wave of shock and anger within the company’s corporate ranks, some of whom openly critiqued their superiors on internal email lists visible to thousands of colleagues. This is a notable departure from the company’s usual culture of not airing internal disagreements in workplace forums.
Now, the senators behind this letter are asking Amazon’s CEO pointed questions — such as how many other employees besides Smalls were told to self-quarantine and what criteria Amazon is using to decide whether to shut down a warehouse after a worker tests positive for Covid-19.
Here’s the full list of the senators’ questions:
- When did the fired employee come into contact with the diagnosed employee? When did Amazon ask them to self-quarantine?
- How many other employees at the Staten Island location were told to self-quarantine and when were those employees told?
- Will Amazon assure the public and its employees that they will allow their workers to freely and publicly address concerns they have in the workplace without fear of retribution?
- What criteria is Amazon using to decide whether to shut down a warehouse after a worker tests positive? Will Amazon agree to temporarily shut down a warehouse whenever a worker tests positive?
- How does Amazon plan on improving transparency during instances in which a worker tests positive? Will Amazon agree to let their employees know whenever a worker at their worksite tests positive?
- How is Amazon ensuring that there are adequate essential supplies at their facilities, including disposable gloves and masks as well as essential supplies like hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes?
Last month, Sen. Booker and a group of other US senators, including Bernie Sanders, sent Amazon a similar letter expressing their concerns and asking questions about warehouse working conditions.
Other politicians have also raised concerns. New York State Attorney General Letitia James called Amazon’s firing of Smalls “disgraceful” last week and urged the National Labor Relations Board to investigate the company. On the same day, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered the city’s Commission on Human Rights to investigate whether Amazon violated workers’ rights in firing Smalls.
It remains to be seen if Amazon will answer these senators’ questions, or if this will lead Amazon to make some of the changes its workers have been calling for.
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https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2020/12/18/amazons-warehouse-workers-struggle-to-make-ends-meet/
Amazon’s warehouse workers struggle to make ends meet
Bloomberg News | Dec 18, 2020
Amazon’s object is to persuade potential recruits that there’s no better place to work. The reality is less rosy. Many Amazon warehouse employees struggle to pay the bills, and more than 4,000 employees are on food stamps in nine states.
(Bloomberg)—Amazon.com Inc. job ads are everywhere. Plastered on city buses, displayed on career web sites, slotted between songs on classic rock stations. They promise a quick start, $15 an hour and health insurance. In recent weeks, America’s second-largest employer has rolled out videos featuring happy package handlers wearing masks, a pandemic-era twist on its annual holiday season hiring spree.
Amazon’s object is to persuade potential recruits that there’s no better place to work. Amazon is No. 1 in the 2020 Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000.
The reality is less rosy. Many Amazon warehouse employees struggle to pay the bills, and more than 4,000 employees are on food stamps in nine states studied by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Only Walmart, McDonald’s and two dollar-store chains have more workers requiring such assistance, according to the report, which said 70% of recipients work full-time. As Amazon opens U.S. warehouses at the rate of about one a day, it’s transforming the logistics industry from a career destination with the promise of middle-class wages into entry-level work that’s just a notch above being a burger flipper or convenience store cashier.
Union workers who make comfortable livelihoods driving delivery trucks and packing boxes consider Amazon an existential threat. While labor tensions have simmered for years, the stakes have risen sharply amid the pandemic, which prompted Amazon to hire more than 250,000 people to keep up with surging demand from home-bound shoppers. Risking infection while toiling in a crowded warehouse for $15 an hour has many Amazon workers asking if they’re getting shortchanged.
A Bloomberg analysis of government labor statistics reveals that in community after community where Amazon sets up shop, warehouse wages tend to fall. In 68 counties where Amazon has opened one of its largest facilities, average industry compensation slips by more than 6% during the facility’s first two years, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In many cases, Amazon quickly becomes the largest logistics player in these counties, so its size and lower pay likely pull down the average. Among economists, there’s a debate about whether the company is creating a kind of monopsony, where there’s only one buyer—or in this case one employer.
While Amazon’s arrival coincides with rising pay in some southern and low-wage precincts, the opposite is true in wealthier parts of the country, including the northeast and Midwest. Six years ago, before the company opened a giant fulfillment center in Robbinsville, New Jersey, warehouse workers made $24 an hour on average, according to BLS data. Last year the average hourly wage slipped to $17.50.
Wages often tick higher in subsequent years, but don’t reach their pre-Amazon level till five years after a new facility opens—meaning that industry workers, on average, find themselves no better off half a decade after Amazon’s arrival.
“Bloomberg’s conclusion is false—it violates over 50 years of economic thought, and suspends the law of supply and demand,” a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Hiring more, by paying less, simply does not work. Many of our employees join Amazon from other jobs in retail which tend to be predominantly part-time, reduced benefit jobs with substantially less than our $15 minimum wage. These employees see a big increase in pay per hour, total take-home pay, and overall benefits versus their previous jobs. What surprises us is that we are the focus of a story like this when some of the country’s largest employers, including the largest retailer, have yet to join us in raising the minimum wage to $15.”
CEO Jeff Bezos, whose wealth grew about 65% this year as his company posted record sales and profits, has so far managed to keep unions out of his U.S. operations. Now that’s being challenged. In November, representatives of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union quietly filed paperwork with the National Labor Relations Board, proposing to form a union on behalf of 1,500 workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, fulfillment center. On Wednesday, the NLRB gave workers the greenlight to put the proposal to a vote, which promises to be the biggest referendum to date on the retail giant’s fraught relationship with its frontline workers.
“The concern isn’t so much ‘the robots are coming, and they’re going to put everybody out of work,’” says Ben Zipperer, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “It’s more that the jobs being created by extremely profitable companies have either poor pay or poor working conditions, or are not the kind of jobs that you would expect an extremely rich country, and rich company, to be able to provide.”
Breaking down pallets or hauling cartons of lettuce is hardly the stuff of American business mythology. Warehouses, featureless rectangles located in exurbs and commercial districts, are far from the plant-filled orbs and office perks of Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. But for many Americans, the logistics industry has long provided a path into the middle class, particularly for those who didn’t attend college.
Warehouses have typically paid less than factories but more than retailers. These haven’t been highly skilled jobs, but do require a certain level of ability—whether managing inventory or driving a forklift without damaging goods and hurting anyone. As recently as the early aughts, municipal officials in southern California looking to replace vanishing aerospace manufacturing jobs settled on the logistics industry, believing it would give lower-skilled workers the opportunity to move up.
Since then, industry wages have come under pressure amid a push to carry less inventory and to subcontract work to lower-cost middlemen. But logistics really started to change with the rapid acceleration of e-commerce. And no company has done more to reshape how products are warehoused, packed and shipped than Amazon, with its strong focus on customer service.
Shipping orders directly to consumers from an inventory of millions of products required redesigning not just the physical buildings but the jobs of the people working inside. After 20 years of trial and error, Amazon has turned its fulfillment centers into finely tuned assembly lines, often grueling workplaces that have been the subject of frequent media reports over the years, including investigations probing injury rates and pay practices.
Most of the labor in Amazon’s largest fulfillment centers is divided into simple, repetitive tasks: receiving goods arriving in trucks, placing items into mesh shelving, or retrieving and speeding them along a conveyor belt in yellow plastic bins to be boxed and shipped. Most jobs are marketed to high-school graduates—no resume required, start as soon as next week—who spend 10-hour shifts standing at a single station, cogs in a giant machine built for speed and efficiency. Workers receive about one day of training and are put on the line to see if they have what it takes.
Matt Giannini, who spent five years at a warehouse in New Jersey, says Amazon’s genius lies in simplifying most tasks to the point but where anybody can do it. “They’ve gotten it to such a science,” he says. “Every single process is very simple.”
But job satisfaction can be elusive when most workers are interchangeable cogs. Quality of life in the warehouse, Giannini says, often breaks along a very simple divide: people who spend their days standing by a computer terminal that tracks their every move, and those with less scrutiny and more freedom.
Bloomberg interviewed 42 employees in 20 states. Some enjoy the work and say news reports of workplace travails can be overblown. Many joined to get health insurance, a rare perk for entry-level jobs, and came to Amazon from lower-wage employment in retail or logistics.
But most say there’s little opportunity to move up in a highly automated environment where a handful of people per shift oversee an entire facility. One worker in the Midwest was hoping to rise quickly because he had previous management experience. “It’s the greatest company in the world right now,” he recalls thinking. “I’m going to be able to get in there and move up.” Three years later he’s still at the entry level, picking items.
Amazon touts a training program for promising workers and says it issued more than 35,000 promotions in its logistics operation this year. Ron Delosreyes, who joined Amazon in 2018, says the first step up added responsibility and no raise. But today he’s a salaried supervisor at a Staten Island, New York, warehouse. “I’d like to stay and keep advancing my career,” he says. “Up and up.”
While 35,000 promotions sounds like a lot, it represents 3.5% of the more than 1 million people who worked in Amazon’s logistics group this year. That’s well below the 9% promotion rate for the industry, as calculated by the payroll processing firm ADP.
Many Amazon workers quit or are fired for safety and productivity infractions within a year or two of starting—a high rate of turnover even in an industry where people change jobs frequently. Studies have shown worker churn rises when Amazon moves to town. And workers say the company does little to encourage long tenure.
The relative few who do last more than a year or two often struggle economically.
Courtenay Brown was hired at an Amazon grocery distribution hub in Avenel, New Jersey, three years ago. For several months after joining Amazon, she and her sister, who also works there, were homeless, bouncing from one motel to another while trying to save a deposit for an apartment. They found places they could afford, but landlords denied their applications because they didn’t make enough, she says. With motel rooms eating up about $600 a week, the sisters missed meals and slurped down free coffee and cocoa at work. Eventually, a charity paid their first month’s rent and security to get them established in their current apartment. Brown, 30, was excited to have a washing machine to rid her clothes of the cigarette smell that often permeated the motels.
Fulfillment operation improvements will outlive the pandemic
Nov 20, 2020
About half of her take-home pay covers her share of the rent. The balance mostly covers food, utilities and the cost of commuting, which includes frequent $50 Uber rides when she has to work late and misses the final van shuttle home. Brown pays about $200 a month for the van shuttle. She usually arrives at work at 5:30 am and works until close to 6 pm. She spends her vacation time doing errands or resting at home in her pajamas because she can’t afford to go anywhere.
Brown finally got the promotion she’d been hoping for in the fall and a $2 hourly raise, but it will last only through the holiday season while she helps train new workers and open facilities. She’ll find out in January if she goes back to her old job and previous pay rate of about $17 per hour or if Amazon has a permanent promotion for her.
“Me and my sister, the last thing we want to do is lose our job because we’ll go back to being homeless and having nothing,” says Brown, who joined community groups advocating for Amazon workers despite colleagues’ warnings she could be fired for speaking out. “We’re in a tough situation, and this is all we can find that’s stable. Amazon comes to places when people are desperate.”
Similar jobs at unionized logistics companies typically pay twice as much—enough for workers to pay the bills and save.
Joey Alvarado, 42, makes almost $30 an hour moving boxes filled with pet food, shampoo, canned goods and other items sold by Stater Bros. Markets, a southern California supermarket chain. His wife stays home with their three children, and the family eats out twice a week, has a boat called Penny Lane and a travel trailer. They vacation on Lake Havasu and the Colorado River. They’re buying a 2,000-square-foot home on half an acre about 30 minutes from the San Bernardino warehouse where he works. Down the street is an Amazon warehouse where people earn far less. “I don’t see how a big company like Amazon can be so greedy,” he says. “The CEO is already a billionaire. What does he want to be a trillionaire? It’s just greed.”
Alvarado belongs to the Teamsters Local 63, which he sees as the difference between what he is paid and what Amazon workers are paid. He has been on the job 19 years and plans to remain. He doesn’t pay any premiums for medical benefits for himself and his family members and has a pension. “This job, you bust your butt, but you get paid,” he says. “No one leaves. You’d be stupid to leave.”
Jeff Fretz, 49, was working part time for United Parcel Service Inc. and attending community college to pursue a career in law enforcement. A full-time UPS truck driving job opened up, and he picked that over becoming a cop. Now he spends his days maneuvering trailers around a UPS warehouse in Bethlehem Township, Pennsylvania, and looks forward to retiring and moving south in seven or eight years with a Teamster’s pension. The job gave him a stable income and good life. He owns a home in Easton and took vacations with his wife and son in Cape May.
Fretz gets disgusted hearing about working conditions at Amazon because UPS pays its workers so much more and is still a profitable company. “A human body is not a machine,” he says. “I can’t do now what I did when I was 25. Working in a union shop protects you for a career.”
Now the unions fear that Amazon will do to the delivery business what it did with warehousing. The number of Americans employed as delivery drivers and couriers, outside of U.S. Postal Service work, has surged by 22% in the last two years, driven partly by the expansion of Amazon’s nationwide network of contract delivery firms and partly by the advent of new grocery delivery services. Wages in the industry fell last year by half a percentage point, the biggest decline in more than 20 years, according to BLS data.
Amazon, which has long sought to reduce its dependence on UPS, Federal Express and the U.S. Postal Service, now ships most of its own customer orders. Many of those deliveries are handled by Amazon’s network of delivery service partners, contract firms that work exclusively for Amazon and lease the trademark blue delivery vans. Driver salaries average $16 an hour, according to recruiting sites, a couple bucks an hour less than the national average for frontline delivery service workers, and roughly half the pay package of an experienced UPS driver.
How retailers work to make fulfillment sustainable with thoughtful packaging and slower shipping
Nov 10, 2020
Amazon also borrowed the gig-economy tactics pioneered by Uber with Flex, a service that relies on people making deliveries in their own vehicles. The idea was to boost delivery capacity without having to buy thousands of vehicles and hire people. Drivers download the Amazon Flex app and can accept assignments that typically pay about $50 for three hours. Once they factor in the cost of a vehicle and fuel, drivers say, the pay is closer to minimum wage.
UPS started a similar service for seasonal work a year after Amazon. But the drivers are employees, get 57 cents per mile, a $5 daily smartphone stipend and belong to the Teamsters union. One driver says he can easily earn $1,800 a month working part-time, about 80% more than he ever made doing Flex routes. He can also count on regular work rather than competing against other Flex drivers, who spend hours watching their phones in the hopes of getting work that sometimes never materializes. The seasonal UPS job is a step up for Amazon Flex drivers. UPS’s full-time drivers see it as a step down, depriving them of overtime and potentially undermining their wages.
They have reason to be worried. Amazon’s growth in the logistics industry is undermining union clout. Union membership in transportation and warehousing dropped to 16.1% in 2019 from 21.3% a decade earlier, by far the biggest decline of any industry, according to BLS data. The slide was driven by the rapid growth of non-union jobs at places like Amazon, not a loss of union work.
Now, the RWDSU, an activist unit of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, is campaigning to organize the Alabama facility, which opened in March. A website for the union drive says employees are seeking safer working conditions and protection from arbitrary dismissal, among other things. “I thought Amazon was more like a Google,” one employee says in a video posted to the site. “The bigger the company, the more benefits, the more loyalty to the worker. But nah, it didn’t go like that.”
Now that the federal labor regulator has approved the union’s proposal, a vote is likely some time next year.
Amazon Working Conditions: Urinating in Trash Cans, Shamed to Work Injured, List of Employee Complaints
BY NINA GODLEWSKI ON 9/12/18 AT 4:42 PM EDT
An Amazon logo hangs on a wall outside an Amazon fulfillment center in Hemel Hempstead, north of London, on November 25, 2015. An undercover investigation in the U.K. revealed warehouse employees resorted to urinating in bottles and trash cans so they wouldn’t miss the company’s strict time targets.ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Rumors about the working conditions at Amazon warehouses and on the delivery routes have circulated for years. Time off around the holidays, adequate breaks on shift and appropriate wages are all reportedly missing from the lives of some Amazon employees.
Some workers for the company are allegedly on food stamps and receive other federal assistance, but Amazon, like other large companies, doesn’t cover the cost of that assistance, and Senator Bernie Sanders wants that to change.
Sanders introduced a bill on September 5 that would tax employers, like Amazon, when their employees need federal benefits, like Medicaid and food stamps, to help cover the cost of those services. The bill is called the “Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act” or the “Stop BEZOS Act,” just like the Amazon CEO’s last name.
The lack of a living wage—the multibillion-dollar company pays some employees as little as $11 an hour Sanders said—is just one of the working conditions employees have revealed about the company.
“In the U.S., the average hourly wage for a full-time associate in our fulfillment centers, including cash, stock, and incentive bonuses, is over $15/hour before overtime,” Amazon told Newsweek in a statement. That $15/hour is not the average wage, it’s total compensation, Amazon clarified, meaning other factors like bonuses and stock options were factored in, in addition to actual wage. It’s also specific to full-time employees.
Workers at Whole Foods, which was recently acquired by Amazon, are moving to unionize in the face of the acquisition due to Amazon’s reputation. Fear of layoffs, job automation, benefits and fair pay rollbacks were all factors that drove the decision to try to unionize, a letter from organizing employees said.
Amazon workers in the U.S. and around the world have also staged strikes on some of the biggest days for the company, like Black Friday and Amazon Prime Day.
While some employees do reap the benefits of the booming company, with health insurance, a living wage and paid sick leave, many part-timers do not. Employees have started posting their experiences working in Amazon warehouses to YouTube sharing first-hand accounts of the conditions.
Below are some of the conditions employees have revealed experiencing.
Holidays
In 2015, a part-time employee at the Stoughton, Massachusetts, Amazon warehouse told WBZ that employees weren’t given the day off for Thanksgiving. The company operates as a shipment transportation hub, so it is not required to give employees the day off under the state’s Blue Laws like retailers would be.
Other employees have reported mandatory overtime, especially around the holiday season.
Deadlines So Tight, There’s No Time for Bathroom Breaks
An undercover investigation in the United Kingdom revealed that warehouse employees resort to urinating in bottles and trash cans around the warehouse so that they won’t miss their strict time targets.
After that investigation was published, more people came forward with similar stories. Some also told of their experiences with the lack of time for bathroom breaks, or even speaking to co-workers, according to Business Insider. Drivers have also reportedly used their vans as improvised bathrooms, urinating and defecating in them to meet their lofty delivery goals deadlines, the New York Post reported.
“We use our Connections program to ask associates a question every day about how we can make things even better, we develop new processes and technology to make the roles in our facilities more ergonomic and comfortable for our associates, and we investigate any allegation we are made aware of and fix things that are wrong,” Amazon said in a statement in reference to allegations about working conditions in its warehouses.
Workers in Amazon’s Staten Island facility who were pushing for a company-wide union said they were under pressure to pick up an item to package once every seven seconds, averaging 400 items per hour, The Guardian reported. Another worker at that facility reported working 60 hours during Prime week and getting in a car accident after falling asleep behind the wheel after a long shift.
A former Amazon employee who worked in an Amazon call center in Winchester, Kentucky, is suing the company for allegedly firing him over frequent bathroom breaks. The former employee, Nicholas Stover, says he suffers from Crohn’s disease, an illness that he disclosed to Amazon during his initial hiring and that causes him to need bathroom breaks more frequently than Amazon permitted, he said.
Points-Based Systems of Attendance
Amazon has stated to publications that it no longer uses a points-based system for attendance. But as of May, one person who said they worked for Amazon at the time told Business Insider that the point system was still in place.
Injuries on the Job
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Many employees worldwide have reported getting injured on the job. Some have pushed through while others have been taken away by ambulance. A reporter for the Mirror, Alan Selby, went undercover for five weeks and reported employees collapsing at work, suffering panic attacks, pulling muscles and more. A driver for a shipping company used by Amazon told Business Insider that when he accidentally slammed his hand in his van door, he was shamed at work and asked to finish his deliveries before seeking medical care.
The company has programs in place to train employees in safe work practices, it said. “While any serious incident is one too many, we learn and improve our programs working to prevent future incidents. We are proud of safety record and thousands of Amazonians work hard every day innovating ways to make it even better,” Amazon said in a statement to Newsweek.
0n December 5, 2018, 25 warehouse workers at a New Jersey facility had to be transported to nearby medical facilities after a canister of bear repellant was punctured by one of the robots working in the warehouse. Workers now wear vests that can alert the robots working in the Amazon facilities to the immediate presences of human workers who could potentially be injured, Tech Crunch reported.
A woman in Illinois is suing the company on behalf of her husband who died on the job of a heart attack in January of 2017, the Chicago Tribune reported. The lawsuit Linda Becker filed said her husband, 57-year-old Thomas Becker, collapsed at work at the Joliet warehouse and that it took 25 minutes for anyone to call emergency services for medical attention for him.
This story was updated with information from Amazon.
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-describe-peak-2019-2
Amazon warehouse employees speak out about the ‘brutal’ reality of working during the holidays, when 60-hour weeks are mandatory and ambulance calls are common
Isobel Asher Hamilton and Áine Cain
Feb 19, 2019, 8:38 AM
- Business Insider spoke with 30 current and former Amazon workers across the US, the UK, and Europe about what it’s like to work during peak season, from Black Friday to Christmas.
- Amazon’s unseen army of hundreds of thousands of warehouse employees ensures millions of parcels are delivered every day during peak.
- They described a “brutal” reality of long hours, physical labor, fears about taking time off, workplace injuries, and the pressure to keep the wheels turning, even when the weather is treacherous.
- Business Insider obtained figures showing that ambulance callouts to three Amazon warehouses in the UK increased during the company’s busiest weeks of the year.
- There were conflicting accounts about Amazon’s $15 minimum-wage hike. Some workers said the wage boost benefitted them, while others said they were worse off during peak because bonuses were axed.
- Workers also described an internal currency known as “swag bucks” designed to boost productivity during Amazon’s most intense periods of activity.
- Amazon said it was proud of its “great working conditions, wages and benefits, and career opportunities.”
Nick Oates didn’t feel like digging his car out of a heap of snow on Cyber Monday 2018. That’s why, as a blizzard barreled toward Kansas City, the Amazon associate decided to hunker down in the warehouse’s parking lot.
The storm ended up dumping more than a foot of snow on parts of Kansas, prompting the governor at the time, Jeff Colyer, to declare a state of emergency on November 25, asking people to stay off the roads.
As other Kansans were stocking up on supplies and bracing for power outages, Oates and his fellow Amazonians were receiving the news that they’d still be required to report for their Cyber Monday shifts. The fulfillment center would forgive workers who clocked in late because of the storm, but everyone scheduled to work still had to show up.
Oates was living in his car and working at the Kansas City fulfillment center at the time, a routine he’d maintained since June 2018 after taking medical leave from Amazon for depression.
He told Business Insider that he typically parked in front of his gym at night but made an exception on account of the storm. “Just imagine having to pry your car out of tons of snow and ice,” Oates said. “Then you have to risk your life going home, just to come back on Cyber Monday.”
Amazon said staff members are told to stay at home if they feel it’s not safe to travel, and can do so without fear of retribution. Oates said his experience is an extreme example of how far employees will go to keep Amazon’s giant wheels turning during its busiest months of the year.
His is just one of the countless stories from Amazon’s unseen army of hundreds of thousands of warehouse employees, who make sure millions of parcels are delivered on time, every day, all wrapped in Amazon’s signature smiley logo.
Scarcely has the plight of these workers been so in the spotlight.
Horror stories of shop-floor working conditions have flooded the news, strikes have raged across Europe, and lawmakers like US Sen. Bernie Sanders have lobbied for pay raises — all this on the watch of Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, whose “obsessive-compulsive focus on the customer” has turned Amazon into a $790 billion company and made him the richest man in the world.
The holiday season is a hectic and crucial time for all retailers, not to mention a chaotic, trying time for retail workers who have to deal with Black Friday stampedes or ramped-up online orders in the run-up to Christmas. But Amazon occupies a unique spot in the retail industry, thanks to its size and influence.
Business Insider interviewed more than 30 current and former Amazon workers about what it’s like to work at the front lines of the company during peak, the period it generally defines as Black Friday, which traditionally falls on the Friday after Thanksgiving, to just before Christmas.
The majority of these employees worked in 18 warehouses across the US, the UK, and Europe, while others held roles in other departments, including compliance and customer services.
More than 20 workers spoke with Business Insider without Amazon authorization through a mix of on- and off-the-record conversations. They verified their Amazon employment in documentation sent to BI. Eight other staff members spoke in the presence of an Amazon representative, both on the floor of a British warehouse and over the phone from a facility in New Jersey.
Signs with “a big peak thank you” in the UK warehouse that Business Insider’s reporter visited. This one was on a table in a break room. Isobel Hamilton/Business Insider
Through the interviews, a picture emerged of grueling long hours, physical labor, fears about taking time off, workplace injuries, and the pressure to keep the wheels turning, even when the weather is treacherous.
“It gets brutal,” one worker said.
There were also conflicting accounts about Amazon’s $15 minimum-wage hike. Some workers said the wage boost benefitted them, while others said they were worse off during peak because bonuses were axed.
Underneath it all is bubbling rage from unions, which flared up in strikes and demonstrations across Europe late last year to protest working conditions. UNI Global Union, which has 20 million members globally, has an overarching tagline for its Amazon campaign: “We are not robots.” But Amazon does not recognize unions.
“In country after country, Amazon workers report brutal conditions,” UNI Global Union General Secretary Christy Hoffman told Business Insider in a statement. “A company that respects its employees listens and negotiates with them.”
Robots in a UK Amazon warehouse. Isobel Hamilton/Business Insider
Amazon said it was proud of working conditions for its lowest-paid employees. In a statement, a spokeswoman said:
“We strongly disagree with these unsubstantiated comments and laundry list of allegations. Cobbled together, they have created a false narrative around our employer practices and misrepresented the experiences of the hundreds of thousands of associates.
“We are proud of the great working conditions, wages and benefits, and career opportunities we provide for our associates all year round. Everyone is encouraged to come and see for themselves what it’s like to work in an Amazon fulfilment centre and have the ability to talk to associates directly by booking one of our tours across Europe and the US.”
Mandatory overtime means employees work up to 60 hours a week
Multiple sources told Business Insider that the arrival of Black Friday heralded the beginning of mandatory overtime.
Last year’s Black Friday and the following Cyber Monday were Amazon’s biggest on record, with the company saying it sold “millions” more products than it did in 2017. The more products sold, the more pressure to fulfill orders.
A former sort-center employee, whose job was to bring pallets of Amazon packages to dock doors so drivers could take them for delivery, said that on a normal day 70,000 to 90,000 packages might be put out for delivery. During peak, this would increase by 50%, potentially even doubling on its busiest day.
Sources told Business Insider that through most of the year, associates — who the company calls its fulfillment-center workers — work four 10-hour shifts, totaling a 40-hour workweek. During peak, this jumps to six 10-hour day shifts or five 12-hour night shifts, for a total of 60 hours.
US labor law permits employers to require employees to work unlimited amounts of overtime, as long as they are paid 1 1/2 times their regular rate of pay. Companies have a right to fire workers who refuse.
Amazon employees confirmed to Business Insider that they earn an extra 50% for overtime. A spokeswoman added that “associates are communicated to regularly prior to peak about the expected 40-60 hours work weeks as customer demand requires and there is a clear exceptions process for people who are unable to do so.”
In the UK, warehouse workers Business Insider spoke with said they had 10 hours of compulsory overtime during peak, meaning 50-hour workweeks. UK law dictates that people should not work more than 48 hours a week on average, though there are exceptions.
“You’re a slave for the 60-hour workweek,” Jazzy Williams, a California Amazon associate of more than two years, told Business Insider during the 2018 peak season. “I’m tired and annoyed and irritated.”
Multiple Amazon workers described how physically grueling the work can be, including Vickie Shannon Allen, who worked in an Amazon warehouse in Texas. She said she was evicted and started living in her car after she injured her back at a faulty workstation in October 2017. When Business Insider spoke with her during peak 2018, she was still homeless.
On the specifics of Allen’s injury, an Amazon spokeswoman said: “We have significant disagreements with Vickie over the facts in this matter and do not believe her allegations are representative of working conditions at Amazon.”
“It’s like doing 11 1/2 hours of cardio five days a week … You’re going up and down stairs, squatting down, getting on your knees, getting back up,” Allen said. Another warehouse worker said employees could end up walking up to 20 miles a day during peak.
James Norris, who worked at an Indiana warehouse for 10 months before quitting in October, has never worked a peak season. But he saw the toll it took on his girlfriend, a fellow Amazon employee. “It was like watching a ghost walk through the door,” he said. “She would just come home and collapse.”
One Amazon worker said it’s possible for employees to apply to opt out of overtime in extenuating circumstances — for example, if they have a health problem. Business Insider spoke with a packer in the UK warehouse who had her overtime removed because she was studying.
Amazon said it works with employees one-on-one to ascertain whether they’re eligible to have their overtime removed. “Examples include family care, health appointments, and personal issues,” a spokeswoman told Business Insider.
Holidays are banned
For those clocking regular 60-hour weeks, there’s no respite in a holiday. Multiple sources told Business Insider that in mid-November a ban on asking for time off kicks in — something Amazon confirmed.
“Like many other businesses, Christmas is a busy time of year and holiday embargoes exist, but we understand that there are times when people cannot work, and naturally, exceptions are made,” a spokeswoman said.
An Amazon warehouse in Brieselang, Germany. Getty
Exceptions to the embargo are rare but not unheard of, according to those who spoke with Business Insider. One worker said they were able to take a holiday during peak by booking months in advance.
Amazon workers each year get a certain amount of paid time off and unpaid time off, or UPT. Sources told Business Insider that when workers dip into “negative UPT,” meaning they have taken more than their allotted UPT, Amazon can be ruthless.
“If you go negative, you’re gone. I’ve seen people that have worked there five years, they went negative unpaid time, and they got rid of them just like that,” a Tennessee warehouse worker told Business Insider.
Layla Ahmed, a former Amazon worker in Minnesota, said she was fired on November 26, four days after Thanksgiving, because she went into negative UPT.
Ahmed said she used up much of her unpaid time off last year caring for her grandmother. After a string of 60-hour workweeks, including shifts on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, she came down with a fever.
She called into work, explained why she couldn’t come in, and requested a call back from the fulfillment center’s human-resources department. But Ahmed said the call never came.
When she got back to the warehouse in Shakopee, Ahmed worked two 12-hour shifts before she was called to a manager’s office and dismissed, she said.
“I was shocked,” Ahmed said. “I thought, ‘If they see the reason that I didn’t come in, they’ll understand.’ My manager, I thought he was going to help me out. I thought he would talk to HR and tell them ‘It was a mistake’ and ‘Give her a second chance.’ But he didn’t do anything.”
After over two years at Amazon, Ahmed was escorted out of the building. An Amazon source told Business Insider that when Ahmed appealed the decision, it was upheld by an internal panel at Amazon.
An Amazon fulfillment center in Robbinsville, New Jersey. Sarah Jacobs
Amazon said: “The intent behind UPT is to ensure associates have a bank of time available to handle unexpected issues or emergencies. Full-time associates are allocated up to 80 hours per year of unpaid time (the equivalent of two work weeks), in addition to paid time off for vacation, personal time, and holidays.
“If an associate does run into a negative UPT balance, in each case we have a seek-to-understand conversation to recognize the associate’s situation and any mitigating circumstances.”
Others described Amazon’s ruthlessness, particularly related to seasonal workers. Amazon hired nearly 130,000 temporary workers across the US and Europe last year, and multiple sources told Business Insider they had seen some dismissed by text when work dried up. Their accounts corroborate a Guardian op-ed article by an anonymous Amazon worker in December.
In a statement about the Guardian op-ed article last year, Amazon said that firing people by text is “not company practice” and that it could find “no evidence this actually occurred.” Amazon said it had nothing further to add.
Continuing in treacherous weather
According to three former employees, fulfillment centers often don’t want employees missing work even during dangerous weather conditions. Like Oates, who was asked to report for duty during a storm in Kansas, Ahmed said she was asked to work at her Minnesota warehouse in severely snowy conditions.
“They say they will give a day off if the weather is really bad, but they never did, actually,” Ahmed said. “There was one day that I called in and I said that I could not see the road. For my safety, I told them that I am not going to come in today. So they took hours from my UPT.”
Norris said of his warehouse: “The building’s not going to shut down. If enough employees come to work late because of weather, they’ll excuse time. But Amazon doesn’t stop.”
“The safety of our associates is our top priority and we closely monitor weather conditions to assess if Amazon facilities should temporarily close in areas affected by freezing temperatures and other adverse conditions,” a spokeswoman said.
One way Amazon workers can get time off during peak is by getting sent home. If there’s not enough work to go around, managers will sometimes offer unpaid voluntary time off, or VTO.
“There never seems to be a problem in getting enough people to take voluntary time off. That in itself speaks a lot, that people are willing to leave early and not get paid,” a warehouse worker told Business Insider in mid-December, adding that the previous day they’d seen management give people VTO three times during a day shift.
Amazon emphasized to Business Insider that VTO is entirely voluntary. “We offer associates voluntary time off to provide additional flexibility and associates choose whether to take this time off, or to work their regular schedule,” a spokeswoman said.
Injuries and electrolyte popsicles
Two Amazon warehouse workers told Business Insider that the rate of injuries goes up during peak. Five more said they thought physical exhaustion, plus the chaos of peak season, was bound to affect injury rates. Others said they noticed no real difference between peak and the rest of the year.
Amazon said that the rate of injury does not go up during peak. “Because of our robust safety management and diligent record-keeping, we know for a fact that recordable incidents do not increase during peak,” said a spokeswoman, who declined to provide records.
But not all workers make their health concerns known. “You’ve got these health and safety rules, but when you’re exhausted and you’ve been standing and crouching all day, you’re in pain,” a UK warehouse worker said.
The worker said employees have to handle potentially dangerous objects, including unpackaged knives and mousetraps, adding that during a career of more than 30 years, including time spent in slaughterhouses, they had never seen so many ambulances called to one place. “This is the one place where I feel the most unsafe,” the source said.
Amazon disputed the placement of dangerous unpackaged objects. “We have a dedicated team in our fulfillment center where staff wrap, protect and check all products before they are stowed in bins,” a spokeswoman told Business Insider.
Business Insider submitted freedom-of-information requests to UK ambulance services to determine callout rates during Amazon’s peak period. The callouts pertained to all medical emergencies, not just physical injuries.
Amazon’s warehouse in Rugeley, England, made eight emergency calls in November and December, according to the West Midlands Ambulance Service. Two of these were eventually canceled, but it was an average of one call a week. Amazon told Business Insider that Rugeley has more than 1,000 workers.
The ambulance service provided a monthly breakdown of callouts to Rugeley over the past three years. It showed a spike in incidents in November.
The rate of ambulance callouts to Amazon Rugeley. West Midlands Ambulance Service/Business Insider
Information in a previous, publicly available FOI document showed that in 2015 there were 19 ambulance callouts to the warehouse in November and December.
In another example, the North West Ambulance Service provided a breakdown of callouts from the Manchester warehouse, which has more than 1,200 workers. According to 27 months of data, up to last December, the facility made an average of 1.2 emergency calls a month, rising to 2.1 during November and December. The FOI document for Manchester noted that the data may contain incidents from other buildings in the same postcode area. The number of workers in the Rugeley and Manchester warehouses roughly doubles over peak.
In a third example, the Welsh Ambulance Service revealed emergency-call numbers from the Swansea warehouse, which also has more than 1,200 workers. Over the past three years, the facility made an average of 1.6 calls a month, rising to 3.6 during November and December. The number of incidents attended was slightly lower, with a three-year average of 1.1 per month and 2.8 during peak.
Brittany Turner, who worked in a Florida facility until June 2017, said she noticed ambulances arrive at her fulfillment center about once a month. “It was actually kind of a joke,” she told Business Insider. “We would get our little 15-minute break before and after lunch. I would go outside to smoke cigarettes with some people from my team. The ambulance would show up, and we’d be like, ‘Oh, Amazon claimed another.'”
Amazon said ambulance numbers do not give a good overview of health and safety during peak. “Using absolute ambulance numbers to suggest that a workplace is not safe is simply wrong because it does not take into consideration hours worked, population-size and whether the requests were work-related or not. If you want a true assessment of Amazon’s safety record, then according to the UKs Government Health & Safety Executive (HSE) Amazon has over 40% fewer injuries on average than other transportation and warehousing companies in the UK.” a spokeswoman said.
Amazon fulfillment-center workers in Robbinsville. Sarah Jacobs
Oates said his back gave out on one shift during last year’s peak season. He said the blame was partly on his warehouse’s faulty conveyances that malfunctioned and forced him to manually lift containers.
“They didn’t want to let me go home, even though I was in really bad pain,” Oates said. “All they did was ice my back and ask what pain level I was at.”
In November, Oates said, he fell ill while living in his car. He said that when he reported to AmCare, Amazon’s onsite first-aid department, to request to leave his shift early, he was given an electrolyte-rich popsicle and told to get back to work.
Amazon said AmCare does not have the power to send workers home.
“Amazon associates would never be sent directly home due to an illness or injury at the direction of our AmCare leadership teams. Associates have the ability to use their UPT at their discretion and can request to seek outside medical services at any time, which may then result in time away from work,” a spokeswoman said.
“We rely on the direction of medical professionals to define whether an employee can/cannot perform or to what degree they can perform their job duties and our UPT and personal time benefits provide what would be called ‘sick time’ in other organizations.”
A minimum-wage hike led to slashed bonuses
Amazon raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour in November, a move seen as Amazon acceding to public pressure from politicians such as Sanders. Amazon’s senior vice president in charge of operations, Dave Clark, posted a video of warehouse workers jumping and cheering at the news.
A US seasonal worker working in customer service told Business Insider that for them the minimum-wage hike was a real boost. Four workers from the warehouse in Edison, New Jersey — Keion Burgess, Melonie Fabiano, Angelina Tramontano, and Peter-Gideon Okello — also enthusiastically spoke of the pay rise.
“We haven’t really lost anything,” Burgess said on a call in the presence of an Amazon representative. “Actually, we’ve gained more than we’ve lost. It’s been a great addition for us.” Tramontano noted that the minimum wage in New Jersey is $8.85 an hour, $6.15 less than Amazon’s $15 minimum hourly wage.
But other permanent workers told a different story: Slashed bonuses have actually hurt their pay packets.
Previously, staff could earn bonuses in the form of “variable compensation pay,” or VCP, based on attendance and productivity, which usually doubles during peak weeks. VCP got axed along with employee stock options when the minimum wage was raised.
Instead, Amazon offered workers a $100 bonus if they worked all the peak period without taking time off. One worker said that with VCP they’d been able to earn bonuses of several hundred dollars and that in the last quarter they could even get up to $1,000.
“It’s kind of a joke,” they said.
A UK warehouse worker told Business Insider that when they joined six years ago, workers could get four or five shares in stock options that would vest after two years. Back in Febraury 2013, an Amazon share was worth $270. As of Tuesday, a single Amazon share was worth more than $1,600.
“When you think that we’re working for the richest man on earth and you look at the profits they’re making every year, it’s not right, is it?” they said.
Amazon fulfillment center workers in Robbinsville. Sarah Jacobs
A US warehouse worker said that until the stock options were scrapped last year, the company awarded one share to warehouse employees. The source said this was worth “about a dollar an hour for the year.”
In October, when Amazon announced that the minimum-wage rise was on the way, Wired spoke with an Amazon employee who estimated they would lose at least $1,400 as a result. The worker told Wired that the timing of the wage hike was suspect. “November and December were the months where they would double the attendance and productivity bonuses,” they said.
In a statement at the time, Amazon denied that the wage increase would adversely affect workers’ pay packets. “We can confirm that all hourly Operations and Customer Service employees will see an increase in their total compensation,” an Amazon representative said. They did not dispute the anonymous worker’s calculations as presented to Wired.
At the time, the GMB Union, one of the largest worker’s unions in the UK, representing just under 2,000 Amazon workers, also criticized the slashing of bonuses and stock options, calling it a “stealth tax” on Amazon workers.
Amazon’s fourth-quarter earnings showed that its operating costs of $68.6 billion were barely dented by the change, with expenses rising at a similar or slower rate than during the rest of the year. It suggests Amazon swallowed the cost of the pay raises without a significant effect on its outgoings.
“That whole ordeal between Jeff Bezos and Bernie Sanders was nothing but a publicity stunt,” Vickie Shannon Allen said. “When they took away the stocks and the bonuses, you don’t know how bad that hurt the employees. People depended on those bonuses every paycheck to put gas in their car, to buy food for their family, to buy Christmas for their kids.”
Amazon stood by the minimum-wage increase.
“When the $15 minimum hourly wage was implemented, everyone saw an increase in their compensation and for some this was significant. For example, employees at the Staten Island fulfillment center now earn between $17 and $23 an hour,” a spokeswoman said.
“The attendance bonus [of $100] was intended to be an extra incentive on top of the wage increase. Employees have told us for years that they would prefer the predictability and immediacy of cash to other compensation benefits.”
Allen told Business Insider that at the beginning of February she left Amazon.
Working for ‘swag bucks’
In addition to cash, Amazon workers can be rewarded with “swag bucks,” a kind of company currency that can be spent only inside Amazon. The incentives are designed to further increase productivity and are popular with some employees.
The physical description of swag bucks — also known as “Amazon bucks” — varied wildly. Allen said that in her warehouse they looked like a Monopoly bill with Bezos’ face. Brittany Turner, the former associate in Florida, described swag bucks as slips listing specific dollar amounts, cardboard scratcher tickets, or just money to spend in the fulfillment center’s cafeteria.
A German worker showed Business Insider an image of their equivalent, “swaggis,” which are small, red, plastic tokens. While touring the UK warehouse, Business Insider found that they were also called “swaggies.”
A German Amazon “swaggi.” Business Insider
Using swag bucks, workers can buy items like T-shirts, lanyards, and water bottles from Amazon. The company currency is available all year round, but sources told Business Insider there’s more up for grabs during peak, especially during what’s known as “power hours.”
Power hours are when managers try to pump up warehouse workers to work even harder for 60 minutes, sometimes motivating them by saying workers in other departments have been talking smack or outperforming them. At the end of the hour, staff members can be rewarded with swag bucks or prizes.
One worker told Business Insider that in their warehouse, swag bucks look like Monopoly money with Bezos’ face emblazoned on the front. This is an artist’s impression. Dia Dipasupil/Getty; Shayanne Gal/Business Insider
“I’ve personally won a 50-inch television,” Keion Burgess said during the interview organized by Amazon. “It’s been great. We can win power hours in teams, or we can win them individually. It’s a really great thing for us as associates. We love it.”
During that same interview, Angelina Tramontano added: “After you work eight hours and you’re really, really tired, I use it as an incentive to push myself to challenge myself to see if I can do it.”
Tramontano also described witnessing colleagues win TVs, Xboxes, gift cards, and extra breaks. She once won an Echo Dot, Amazon’s best-selling product last year.
A break room in Amazon’s warehouse in Tilbury, England. Isobel Hamilton/Business Insider
Others said they found the incentives less enticing. “It’s insulting, because around this time of year the managers, if their targets are met or exceeded, they get a bonus,” a warehouse worker told Business Insider.
Oates and Allen expressed a similar disenchantment.
“All the new employees that are clueless about the work culture, they buy into that,” Oates said.
“What they’re trying to do is get more work out of you for the same amount of pay,” Allen added.
“They can try to get you going — try to be positive and really upbeat,” a third associate said. “And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s probably what every manager in every job should do. But sometimes it seems a little excessive. I’m not going to get that excited about $16 an hour.”
Hafsa Hassan, an Amazon employee in Minnesota, said workers could also receive scratch-off tickets for excelling in “mini-competitions.” Prizes can include laptops, headphones, or even Chipotle gift cards. Hassan said one manager in her warehouse would list employees’ hourly rate from slowest to fastest to get people “fired up.”
“Some people are OK with it; some people hate it,” she said. “The part that sucks is when someone’s not packing up to the standards of the manager or the rate that’s been put up. I’ve seen the manager make fun of people.”
A small toy Amazon robot available to purchase for swag bucks. Isobel Hamilton/Business Insider
Other incentives are less valuable. Business Insider spoke with a packer in a UK warehouse who had earned enough swaggies in seven months to buy a small foam toy version of Amazon’s robots used to ferry shelves of items around the shop floor.
Another way Amazon tries to boost company morale during peak is through events and competitions. Warehouse workers described games like “Wheel of Fortune” where employees could win swag bucks or gifts. One worker said everyone in the warehouse was surprised with a free lunch one day in December.
“On Thanksgiving Day, they handed us each a pumpkin or apple pie as we walked out the door, to bring home to our families, which was very considerate and kind of them,” said Melonie Fabiano, a warehouse worker who spoke in the presence of an Amazon representative.
Office workers had similar stories. Employees are encouraged to take part in games such as “dress your manager,” in which employees put their managers in whacky outfits.
“It can help, but if after that [peak] they come back to normal and they start pushing people, they start asking questions — ‘Why are you doing this, why are you doing that, what is your target?’ — it’s not going to help,” one former associate said.
The end of peak 2018
Peak 2018 came and went, and Amazon clocked record earnings of $72.4 billion in the final quarter of the year, with net sales increasing by 20%. It marked the occasion with some cheerful posts on its Instagram page.
Touring the UK warehouse in Tilbury, England, Business Insider saw signs saying “a big peak thank you,” as well as ads for a February “post-peak party” — tickets were about $7 and good for three drinks plus food, an Amazon warehouse tour guide told BI.
An ad for the UK warehouse’s post-peak party. Isobel Hamilton/Business Insider
But Oates didn’t stick around to see the end of peak. He told us he ended up quitting for good on December 15. Before he left he weighed requesting a transfer to an Amazon warehouse in California but ultimately decided against it.
He drove away from Kansas City without clocking in for his shift. On the road, he got an email confirming his voluntary resignation due to job abandonment. Amazon’s HR department wished him the best in his future endeavors.
Update, March 22, 2019: Local Los Angeles news outlets are reporting that charges were filed Tuesday against Nicholas K. Oates, who is accused of setting a fire inside the Amazon store at Westfield Century City and pointing a gun at a store employee, prompting a mass evacuation of the shopping mall, and that Oates pleaded not guilty to six counts of arson and one count each of assault with a firearm and burglary.
Ruqayyah Moynihan, INSIDER’s associate translation editor, also contributed to this report.
Do you work at Amazon? Got a tip? Contact these reporters via email at ihamilton@businessinsider.com or acain@businessinsider.com. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.
What’s it like to work at an Amazon distribution center? Pay, benefits, stress
Updated Jan 14, 2020; Posted Jan 14, 2020
By Rick Moriarty | rmoriarty@syracuse.com
Syracuse, N.Y. — A thousand people could be going to work next year in a gigantic distribution center proposed in the Syracuse suburb of Clay.
What will it be like to work there?
That’s hard to say for sure, but if the facility is for Amazon — as experts say it must be — it is possible to get a good idea what it would be like to work in the nearly 4 million-square-foot facility.
Critics of Amazon, including some former employees, question the quality of the jobs. They paint a picture of a high-stress workplace where workers are constantly monitored and required to meet demanding production quotas that leave little time even for bathroom breaks.
A woman who worked at Amazon’s fulfillment center on Staten Island for a month (until she quit) told the New York Post recently that the place was a “cult-like” sweatshop.
“At Amazon, you were surrounded by bots, and they were treated better than the humans,” she said.
On the other hand, it’s a full-time job. The pay at Amazon warehouses exceeds that of many low-wage occupations and comes with a full range of benefits.
The jobs can provide gainful employment for people who lack the college degrees or technical skills sought by many employers and who have not really benefited from the nation’s strong economy.
“Amazon is proud to provide a safe, quality work environment in which associates are the heart and soul of our operations,” company spokesperson Rachael Lighty told Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard in a statement.
“We believe so strongly in the environment provided for fulfillment center employees, including our safety culture, that we offer public tours where anyone can come see for themselves one of our sites and its working conditions firsthand.”
For all the criticism around the country, Amazon has a ready defense: People want its jobs.
The company continues to automate the operation of its warehouses. The Clay center — which would be the company’s biggest facility anywhere — and the Central New York workforce’s response to it will be the ultimate test of that progress.
Pickers, packers and points
Most jobs at Amazon warehouses are those of pickers and packers. Pickers pull merchandise off storage shelves and place them in bins, then put the bins on conveyor belts to be taken to the packers. The packers package up the products, slap a label on them and put them on another conveyor belt to be taken to a waiting truck.
Emily Guendelsberger, a journalist, took a pre-Christmas job at Amazon in 2015 after the newspaper she worked for in Philadelphia closed. She lasted a month. But before she quit, it gave her enough experience to write one of the few first-hand accounts of what it’s like to work in an Amazon warehouse.
At first, she said, she got a certain pleasure from all the running around she was doing as a “picker” at the 25-acre Amazon fulfillment center (Amazon’s name for its warehouses) outside Louisville, Kentucky.
A GPS-enabled, hand-held scanner would tell her what items to pull off the shelves, where to find them and then begin a countdown of the time she was allowed to complete the task. She would place the items in a yellow bin, known as a “tote,” that she would push around with her.
When a bin was two-thirds full, she would push it to the nearest conveyor belt and “send it gliding off to parts unknown, then start a new one,” Guendelsberger wrote in her 2019 book, “On The Clock.”
“All day, I’m charmed that my scanner thanks me every time I drop a yellow tote off at the conveyor belt,” she said. “Watching it sail off into the distance gives me a weird feeling of satisfaction, like I really am helping customers fulfill their dreams.”
As the days wore on, though, her feelings changed. A step counter she attached to her shoelaces showed she was walking up to 15 miles a day at the gigantic warehouse. Guendelsberger described a “stabbing pain” in her swollen feet that “spread up through my legs and hips.”
“Every time the scanner has me squat down to get something from a low drawer, it’s a little harder to force myself back up to standing.”
Amazon employs a point system to decide who keeps a job. Workers are given points for, say, being late to work without an approved exception, failing to show up for work or leaving work before the shift ends, or coming back from a break even a minute late.
“You have six points: if you’re at six points, your assignment with Amazon will end,” a trainer told Guendelsberger, according to her book. “Try to keep your points low – that way you will have flexibility in case of an emergency.”
Amazon responded by saying Guendelsberger only worked about 11 days and her book was not an accurate portrayal of working conditions.
“We are proud of our safe workplaces and her allegations are demeaning to our passionate employees,” the company told the New York Post.
High stress
Other critics say Amazon sets unreasonably high production quotas for its warehouse workers, creating constant stress.
Amazon keeps track of how long it takes pickers to pull items from shelves and put them on a bin. Workers who fail to meet the rates set by the company to pull items risk losing their jobs. That puts a lot of mental and physical pressure on workers, who must worry about taking too much time on breaks, such as trips to the bathroom, Guendelsberger said.
The warehouse work was so stressful, she said, that Amazon installed vending machines with free over-the-counter pain medications, like ibuprofen, for employees to cut down on the lines of workers outside the facility’s AMCARE (nurse’s) office.
“They have very demanding production lines and a lack of breaks,” said Patricia Campos-Medina, extension associate and co-director of the Union Leadership Institute at Cornell University. “There’s a lot of monitoring.”
Lighty, the Amazon spokesperson, said employee performance is measured and evaluated over a long period “as we know that a variety of things could impact the ability to meet expectations in any given day or hour.”
“We support people who are not performing to the levels expected with dedicated coaching to help them improve,” she said.
She said employees are required to take breaks throughout their shift.
“Amazon associates work four days on, three days off, 10-hour shifts with scheduled breaks throughout the day — either two 30-minute breaks or one 30-minute break and two 15-minute breaks,” she said. “However, employees may take short breaks, which include breaks to use the bathroom, grab a drink, or speak with managers, at any time throughout the day — all of which are paid.”
She said there are multiple bathrooms on each floor of its fulfillment centers, as well as multiple break rooms or break areas with seating, vending machines, refrigerators, microwaves and entertainment or leisure activities such as TVs and games such as basketball or foosball tables.
“Simply put, people would not want to work for Amazon if our working conditions truly were as our critics portray them to be in this period of record low unemployment and plentiful job opportunities,” Lighty said. “But 300,000-plus people choose to work for Amazon in hourly roles. In fact, the No. 1 recruiting arm for Amazon is our associates.”
What about here?
It is unlikely that the conditions described at other Amazon facilities would be the same as those at the distribution center in Clay, should it be operated by Amazon.
Rendering shows a proposed five-story, nearly 3.8-million-square-foot distribution center off Morgan Road in Clay, New York. Langan EngineeringLangan Engineering
Trammell Crow told town officials the Clay facility will be highly automated, with a complex system of conveyors bringing products in and out of the building, and up and down its five floors.
Amazon has been investing heavily to automate as much of its warehouse operations as possible, with robots increasingly handling tasks once done by people.
Video from inside an Amazon fulfillment center that opened on Staten Island last year shows robots, not humans, doing most of the running around.
Are they safe?
The New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, a union-backed workers’ rights group, said in a recent report that it found from interviewing 145 employees at Amazon’s Staten Island center that workers experience “harmful working conditions and a workplace culture that prioritizes line speeds over human safety.”
Amazon called the organization’s report “false” and “misleading” and said it was based on interviews with less than 3% of the center’s 4,500 employees.
Reveal, from The Center for Investigative Reporting, reported in November that Amazon’s obsession with speed has turned its warehouses into “injury mills.”
It said internal injury records from 23 of the company’s 110 fulfillment centers nationwide showed that the rate of serious injuries for those facilities was more than double the national average for the warehousing industry: 9.6 serious injuries per 100 full-time workers in 2018, compared with an industry average that year of 4.
Amazon told the news site that Amazon’s injury rates are high because it is more aggressive than many other companies about recording worker injuries and cautious about allowing injured workers to return to work before they are ready.
Lighty said the company provided more than a million hours of safety training to employees and invested more than $55 million on safety improvement projects across the U.S. in 2018 and invested more than $61 million in safety projects in 2019.
“Operational meetings, new hire orientation, process training, and new process development begin with safety and have safety metrics and audits integrated within each program,” she said.
Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon, who has supported Trammell Crow’s plans to build in Clay, declined through a spokesman to talk about the working conditions at the facility because no tenant has been announced yet.
“It would literally be pure speculation at this point,” said the county executive spokesman, Justin Sayles.
He added that, whoever the tenant turns out to be, it will be required to abide by New York’s “robust” labor laws.
No unions
Amazon’s 750,000 U.S. workers are not unionized. Campos-Medina, the Cornell labor expert, said Amazon is good at convincing workers they are better off without a union.
“They’re very anti-union,” she said. “It’s part philosophical: ‘We are family. Amazon takes care of you. You do well, we do well.’”
Zachary Lerner, director of labor organizing for New York Communities for Change, said high employee turnover makes it difficult to get Amazon workers to join a union.
“We’ve seen tons of workers who only last a few weeks,” Lerner said.
The community organization, though not a labor union, has been working with employees at Amazon’s Staten Island facility to demand better working conditions.
Members of Workers United, an SEIU (Service Employees International Union) affiliate, hold a rally outside the Amazon fulfillment center in Robbinsville, New Jersey, on Dec. 18, 2018, calling for safer and better working conditions.Michael Mancuso | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
Unions have not given up trying to organize Amazon workers. Three big ones — the Teamsters, the United Food & Commercial Workers Union, and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union – are talking to Amazon workers, according to media reports.
A handful of Amazon workers went on strike on Prime Day in July at a fulfillment center in Shakopee, Minnesota. It was the first strike by U.S. workers during the company’s annual sales events that started five years ago, and one of several protests in the U.S. in the past year, CNBC reported.
Ann Marie Taliercio, president of the Central New York Area Labor Federation, said the alliance will seek to represent the workers who build the Clay distribution center and those who work there after it is built.
“We’re all hoping we have a friendly face on the other side of the table, whoever the company is,” Taliercio said.
What’s the pay?
Under political and economic pressure to raise the pay for its employees, Amazon in late 2018 announced it would pay its U.S. workers a minimum of $15 an hour, which is more than what many low-wage occupations pay.
That’s close to the wage that Trammell Crow said most workers at the Clay distribution center will be paid. Of the 1,000 jobs at the facility, 900 will be paid at a rate of $30,000 a year for full-time workers, according to the company. That comes to $14.40 an hour. (The remaining 100 workers will make from $33,000 to $60,000 a year.)
The current minimum wage in Upstate New York rose to $11.80 at the end of 2019 and is scheduled to go to $12.50 at the end of 2020 and eventually to $15. So, the pay at the Clay distribution center will, at least initially, exceed minimum wage.
On top of the $15 minimum wage, Lighty said Amazon offers full-time employees comprehensive benefits including full medical, vision and dental insurance, as well as a 401(k) retirement plan with a 50% company match “starting on Day One.”
In addition, she said the company offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and has pledged to invest more than $700 million to provide “upskilling training” for 100,000 U.S. employees for in-demand jobs, even outside the company.
“Programs will help Amazonians from all backgrounds access training to move into highly skilled roles across the company’s corporate offices, tech hubs, fulfillment centers, retail stores and transportation network, or pursue career paths outside of Amazon,” she said.
How about vacation time?
Employees earn paid time off and receive six company paid holidays a year.
The number of vacation days are accrued on a per pay-period basis and depend on whether a worker is part time or full time. Full-time workers, for example, accrue a week’s vacation after one year and two weeks after two years of working for Amazon. After six years, they get three weeks of vacation.
Amazon says it grants paid sick time based on local, city and state ordinances.
How do I apply?
Interested in working for Amazon? The jobs page on the company’s website is a good place to start. It lets you search for available jobs by location and then apply online.
There are no jobs listed for the Syracuse area now. If Amazon leases the Clay facility as many expect, jobs at the center will likely begin to show up on the company’s website a few months before the facility opens.
Construction of the enormous facility is expected to start this spring and be completed in the fall of 2021.
Rick Moriarty covers business news and consumer issues. Have a question or news tip? Contact him anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 315-470-3148
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https://www.greenamerica.org/hidden-workers-fighting-change/true-cost-two-day-shipping
The True Cost of Two-Day Shipping
By
Eleanor Greene
Amazon continues to grow in popularity for its low prices and fast delivery. But warehouse workers behind the scenes are paying for it all with bottom-level salaries and back-breaking work.
In cities across the country, people are waiting with bated breath to see where online retail giant Amazon will build its planned second headquarters, because they’re hungry for the 50,000 jobs the company says it will add as part of the expansion.
Amazon has already busted out of its headquarter city of Seattle. It has 75 fulfillment centers across the US employing 125,000 full-time workers, according to company reports, with hundreds of other locations and hundreds of thousands more employees around the world. But what goes on behind the closed doors of those fulfillment centers—and thousands like them owned by other companies—is a dangerous business.
Temporary Workers, Permanent Problem
After the labor movement of the 1940s and ’50s, warehouses jobs were stable, paid enough to support a family, and offered benefits. But in the following decades, costs fell as companies outsourced manufacturing, and box stores saw they could increase profit by paying US warehouse workers less, too.
Temporary workers are now standard in the industry—an organizer in Southern California says up to 40 percent of warehouse jobs in the state’s Inland Valley region are temporary, and in Chicago, organizing group Warehouse Workers for Justice estimates more than 60 percent of the city’s 80,000 warehouse jobs are temporary. Chicago and L.A. are the biggest shipping hubs in the US.
Temporary workers provide companies with a more flexible labor force requiring fewer benefits than full-time, salaried employees. They are also a more “vulnerable workforce with unclear lines of accountability for health and safety,” states a 2018 report from the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH).
The way companies like Amazon and Walmart fulfill temp positions is through staffing agencies, which find, hire, and pay workers. This system prevents unionization—because not all jobs in one warehouse are for the same staffing company—and helps corporations save on health insurance and other costs.
Sheheryar Kaoosji is executive co-director at the Warehouse Worker Resource Center in Ontario, CA, a nonprofit that aims to improve working conditions in the Inland Valley of California, home to a large warehousing industry.
“There’s 80,000 jobs available [here], but because of the temp system, there might be 200,000 people flowing in and out of those jobs—they’re not fully employed,” explains Kaoosji. “It’s a key part of the ‘working poor’ economy in our region.”
He says workers who move to the Inland Valley, because of the lower cost of living and many job opportunities, end up scrambling to make ends meet.
“The warehouse worker population is almost entirely people of color, and it’s lots of people who are new to the community,” Kaoosji says. “It’s a lot of people … who are trying to hang on and make a life for themselves. This region was promised that these jobs would be the future of the economy, and it’s not turning out to be that way.”
Humans Treated Like Machines
Ten percent of the warehouse jobs in the Inland Valley are at Amazon warehouses. Kaoosji says people must pay attention to Amazon because it draws in workers with wages a few dollars higher than minimum wage, and as one of the country’s largest retailers, it impacts how other companies treat their workers. [Editor’s note: Green America has a campaign pressuring Amazon to clean up its coal-powered cloud operations.]
Recently, workers have spoken out anonymously to various news sources about the bad conditions in Amazon’s warehouses. As orders come in via the Amazon website, workers called “pickers” retrieve items for orders from stocked warehouse shelves, putting them onto giant shopping carts and delivering to a boxing station. Amazon holds pickers to a steep piece rate, reported to be from 85-300 items per hour.
Pickers can be and have been fired for not making rate, and these workers complain of back and joint pain from bending, reaching, and being on their feet all day. Some workers report walking more than ten miles per shift through huge fulfillment centers.
Roberto Jesus Clack is an organizer with Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ) in Chicago. He says that Amazon’s goal is to provide the same instant gratification as department stores.
“Really, its goal is to be able to get people as many products as possible within the day, or even within a few hours of ordering,” Clack says. “There’s a ton of pressure on the workforce to always speed up, speed up. [WWJ is] really concerned about safety issues, and whether [workers are] being compensated appropriately for the value they add.”
Other reports make Amazon’s warehouses seem like sweatshops. Security checks to prevent worker theft are included in break times, so half-hour lunch breaks and timed bathroom breaks end up being shorter than promised. Employees have reported being written up for not showing up for overtime hours, which should be voluntary by law.
Since 2013, there have been seven fatalities among Amazon warehouse workers. In 2013, picker Jeff Lockhart Jr. died after collapsing during his overnight shift. A cardiologist who reviewed his autopsy said it was likely from overexertion. And last year, two workers were crushed by warehouse vehicles, calling into concern the safety procedures of both drivers and ground staff.
The Associated Press reported in November that Amazon could face $28,000 in fines from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for safety violations that led to last year’s deaths, including a $7,000 fine for failure to provide training.
Earlier this year, Amazon made headlines when it was approved for a patent for a wristband that tracks workers’ movements. The wristband will buzz when a worker’s hand is close to the item they’re reaching for, to help reduce the time needed to locate the correct item on a crowded shelf.
Kaoosji, says the wristband is just the latest push in the company’s efforts to improve its employees’ piece rates.
“Amazon has a specific kind of problem that stems from its obsession with metrics, and because of technological advantages, their surveillance regime is about as good as it can get,” Kaoosji says. “They’re surveilling employees to watch exactly what they’re doing and how quickly they’re moving.”
That kind of constant pressure to meet ever higher fulfillment quotas has created a culture at Amazon warehouses where stressed-out employees forgo bathroom breaks or urinate in bottles, out of fear of being disciplined or losing their jobs, according to journalist James Bloodworth, who went undercover in a UK Amazon warehouse, the subject of his new book Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low Wage Britain (Atlantic Books, 2018).
Dangers of the “Lower-archy”
Many warehouse workers are afraid of losing their jobs if they report a safety violation or complain about conditions. Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, co-executive director at National COSH, describes the people who feel least comfortable speaking out, and who are the lowest-paid workers as a “lower-archy.”
“The lower you are, the fewer job options you have, the more that you risk if you speak up about a labor violation—be it health and safety or not being paid—and the less likely you are to feel comfortable speaking up,” Goldstein-Gelb says. “There’s a few factors that make you vulnerable: if you don’t speak English, if you’re younger, if you lack a union, if you’re a temporary worker. If you’re in a day-to-day situation where you could be fired for speaking out, then your life is at risk.”
National COSH and its regional groups are trying to make workplaces safer by training employees on what to look for to assess workplace safety, how to speak up if their workplaces aren’t safe, how to work with unions, and how to talk to communities about the importance of having strong safety laws and standards.
Consumers can help by telling their Congressional representatives to press for adequate staffing at OSHA, Goldstein-Gelb says. This federal agency can make workplaces comply with regulations for worker safety by sending in investigators who cite employers for violations. However, nearly 50 investigator positions have opened up and not been rehired since the beginning of Trump’s presidency. Goldstein-Gelb notes it would take the current number of investigators 140 years to look into all complaints that are on file right now (with no new ones added).
“In the ideal world, employers would simply want to have safe workplaces and do it on their own without any need for enforcement, but too often, we find that employers are cutting corners and trying to make a quick buck at the expense of workers,” Goldstein-Gelb says.
Support Warehouse Workers
Across the country, warehouse workers are organizing for better working conditions. Here’s how you can amplify their efforts:
- Support unions. Shopping at stores where the workers are unionized supports fair wages and safer workplaces. Instead of buying groceries at Amazon or Walmart, try union stores like Kroger or Albertson’s. Find one at ufcw.org/grocery. Find union-made products at unionlabel.org.
- Shop green and local. Avoid big-box and online retail giants like Amazon when you can, and shop with local, green businesses instead. Find those near you at GreenPages.org. And read our “11 Greener Options Than Amazon.”
- Support campaigns at warehouse worker organizations. Stay informed through Warehouse Workers for Justice, the Warehouse Workers Resource Center, and the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health.
Amazon Has Turned a Middle-Class Warehouse Career Into a McJob
Despite a starting wage well above the federal minimum, the company is dragging down pay in the logistics industry and bracing for a fight with unions.
Many Amazon warehouse employees struggle to pay the bills.
Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg
Matt Day and Spencer Soper
December 17, 2020, 5:00 AM EST
Amazon.com Inc. job ads are everywhere. Plastered on city buses, displayed on career web sites, slotted between songs on classic rock stations. They promise a quick start, $15 an hour and health insurance. In recent weeks, America’s second-largest employer has rolled out videos featuring happy package handlers wearing masks, a pandemic-era twist on its annual holiday season hiring spree.
Amazon’s object is to persuade potential recruits that there’s no better place to work.
The reality is less rosy. Many Amazon warehouse employees struggle to pay the bills, and more than 4,000 employees are on food stamps in nine states studied by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Only Walmart, McDonald’s and two dollar-store chains have more workers requiring such assistance, according to the report, which said 70% of recipients work full-time. As Amazon opens U.S. warehouses at the rate of about one a day, it’s transforming the logistics industry from a career destination with the promise of middle-class wages into entry-level work that’s just a notch above being a burger flipper or convenience store cashier.
Union workers who make comfortable livelihoods driving delivery trucks and packing boxes consider Amazon an existential threat. While labor tensions have simmered for years, the stakes have risen sharply amid the pandemic, which prompted Amazon to hire more than 250,000 people to keep up with surging demand from home-bound shoppers. Risking infection while toiling in a crowded warehouse for $15 an hour has many Amazon workers asking if they’re getting shortchanged.
A Bloomberg analysis of government labor statistics reveals that in community after community where Amazon sets up shop, warehouse wages tend to fall. In 68 counties where Amazon has opened one of its largest facilities, average industry compensation slips by more than 6% during the facility’s first two years, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In many cases, Amazon quickly becomes the largest logistics player in these counties, so its size and lower pay likely pull down the average. Among economists, there’s a debate about whether the company is creating a kind of monopsony, where there’s only one buyer—or in this case one employer.
While Amazon’s arrival coincides with rising pay in some southern and low-wage precincts, the opposite is true in wealthier parts of the country, including the northeast and Midwest. Six years ago, before the company opened a giant fulfillment center in Robbinsville, New Jersey, warehouse workers made $24 an hour on average, according to BLS data. Last year the average hourly wage slipped to $17.50.
Wages often tick higher in subsequent years, but don’t reach their pre-Amazon level till five years after a new facility opens—meaning that industry workers, on average, find themselves no better off half a decade after Amazon’s arrival.
“Bloomberg’s conclusion is false—it violates over 50 years of economic thought, and suspends the law of supply and demand,” a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Hiring more, by paying less, simply does not work. Many of our employees join Amazon from other jobs in retail which tend to be predominantly part-time, reduced benefit jobs with substantially less than our $15 minimum wage. These employees see a big increase in pay per hour, total take-home pay, and overall benefits versus their previous jobs. What surprises us is that we are the focus of a story like this when some of the country’s largest employers, including the largest retailer, have yet to join us in raising the minimum wage to $15.”
Amazon Workers Need Help Buying Food
Companies with the most employees receiving government food vouchers through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Source: Government Accountability Office
Employees receiving support from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska, North Carolina, Tennessee and Washington.
Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos, whose wealth grew about 65% this year as his company posted record sales and profits, has so far managed to keep unions out of his U.S. operations. Now that’s being challenged. In November, representatives of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union quietly filed paperwork with the National Labor Relations Board, proposing to form a union on behalf of 1,500 workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, fulfillment center. On Wednesday, the NLRB gave workers the greenlight to put the proposal to a vote, which promises to be the biggest referendum to date on the retail giant’s fraught relationship with its frontline workers.
“The concern isn’t so much ‘the robots are coming, and they’re going to put everybody out of work,’” says Ben Zipperer, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “It’s more that the jobs being created by extremely profitable companies have either poor pay or poor working conditions, or are not the kind of jobs that you would expect an extremely rich country, and rich company, to be able to provide.”
Breaking down pallets or hauling cartons of lettuce is hardly the stuff of American business mythology. Warehouses, featureless rectangles located in exurbs and commercial districts, are far from the plant-filled orbs and office perks of Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. But for many Americans, the logistics industry has long provided a path into the middle class, particularly for those who didn’t attend college.
Warehouses have typically paid less than factories but more than retailers. These haven’t been highly skilled jobs, but do require a certain level of ability—whether managing inventory or driving a forklift without damaging goods and hurting anyone. As recently as the early aughts, municipal officials in southern California looking to replace vanishing aerospace manufacturing jobs settled on the logistics industry, believing it would give lower-skilled workers the opportunity to move up.
Since then, industry wages have come under pressure amid a push to carry less inventory and to subcontract work to lower-cost middlemen. But logistics really started to change with the rapid acceleration of e-commerce. And no company has done more to reshape how products are warehoused, packed and shipped than Amazon, with its strong focus on customer service.
Shipping orders directly to consumers from an inventory of millions of products required redesigning not just the physical buildings but the jobs of the people working inside. After 20 years of trial and error, Amazon has turned its fulfillment centers into finely tuned assembly lines, often grueling workplaces that have been the subject of frequent media reports over the years, including investigations probing injury rates and pay practices.
Courtenay Brown at her home in Newark, on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2020. Brown says she was homeless for a while during her time working for Amazon.
Photographer: Gabriela Bhaskar/Bloomberg
Most of the labor in Amazon’s largest fulfillment centers is divided into simple, repetitive tasks: receiving goods arriving in trucks, placing items into mesh shelving, or retrieving and speeding them along a conveyor belt in yellow plastic bins to be boxed and shipped. Most jobs are marketed to high-school graduates—no resume required, start as soon as next week—who spend 10-hour shifts standing at a single station, cogs in a giant machine built for speed and efficiency. Workers receive about one day of training and are put on the line to see if they have what it takes.
Matt Giannini, who spent five years at a warehouse in New Jersey, says Amazon’s genius lies in simplifying most tasks to the point but where anybody can do it. “They’ve gotten it to such a science,” he says. “Every single process is very simple.”
But job satisfaction can be elusive when most workers are interchangeable cogs. Quality of life in the warehouse, Giannini says, often breaks along a very simple divide: people who spend their days standing by a computer terminal that tracks their every move, and those with less scrutiny and more freedom.
Amazon’s Arrival Means More Jobs, Lower Pay
Average warehouse industry wages fall at first in counties where Amazon opens new facilities, and only reach their pre-Amazon level five years later.
Bureau of Labor Statistics QCEW (wages), MWPVL International (warehouse locations)
Bloomberg interviewed 42 employees in 20 states. Some enjoy the work and say news reports of workplace travails can be overblown. Many joined to get health insurance, a rare perk for entry-level jobs, and came to Amazon from lower-wage employment in retail or logistics.
But most say there’s little opportunity to move up in a highly automated environment where a handful of people per shift oversee an entire facility. One worker in the Midwest was hoping to rise quickly because he had previous management experience. “It’s the greatest company in the world right now,” he recalls thinking. “I’m going to be able to get in there and move up.” Three years later he’s still at the entry level, picking items.
Amazon touts a training program for promising workers and says it issued more than 35,000 promotions in its logistics operation this year. Ron Delosreyes, who joined Amazon in 2018, says the first step up added responsibility and no raise. But today he’s a salaried supervisor at a Staten Island, New York, warehouse. “I’d like to stay and keep advancing my career,” he says. “Up and up.”
“The last thing we want to do is lose our job because we’ll go back to being homeless and have nothing.”
While 35,000 promotions sounds like a lot, it represents 3.5% of the more than 1 million people who worked in Amazon’s logistics group this year. That’s well below the 9% promotion rate for the industry, as calculated by the payroll processing firm ADP.
Many Amazon workers quit or are fired for safety and productivity infractions within a year or two of starting—a high rate of turnover even in an industry where people change jobs frequently. Studies have shown worker churn rises when Amazon moves to town. And workers say the company does little to encourage long tenure.
The relative few who do last more than a year or two often struggle economically.
Courtenay Brown was hired at an Amazon grocery distribution hub in Avenel, New Jersey, three years ago. For several months after joining Amazon, she and her sister, who also works there, were homeless, bouncing from one motel to another while trying to save a deposit for an apartment. They found places they could afford, but landlords denied their applications because they didn’t make enough, she says. With motel rooms eating up about $600 a week, the sisters missed meals and slurped down free coffee and cocoa at work. Eventually, a charity paid their first month’s rent and security to get them established in their current apartment. Brown, 30, was excited to have a washing machine to rid her clothes of the cigarette smell that often permeated the motels.
About half of her take-home pay covers her share of the rent. The balance mostly covers food, utilities and the cost of commuting, which includes frequent $50 Uber rides when she has to work late and misses the final van shuttle home. Brown pays about $200 a month for the van shuttle. She usually arrives at work at 5:30 am and works until close to 6 pm. She spends her vacation time doing errands or resting at home in her pajamas because she can’t afford to go anywhere.
Brown finally got the promotion she’d been hoping for in the fall and a $2 hourly raise, but it will last only through the holiday season while she helps train new workers and open facilities. She’ll find out in January if she goes back to her old job and previous pay rate of about $17 per hour or if Amazon has a permanent promotion for her.
“Me and my sister, the last thing we want to do is lose our job because we’ll go back to being homeless and having nothing,” says Brown, who joined community groups advocating for Amazon workers despite colleagues’ warnings she could be fired for speaking out. “We’re in a tough situation, and this is all we can find that’s stable. Amazon comes to places when people are desperate.”
Similar jobs at unionized logistics companies typically pay twice as much—enough for workers to pay the bills and save.
Joey Alvarado at his home in Moreno Valley, California.
Photographer: Elisa Ferrari/Bloomberg
Joey Alvarado, 42, makes almost $30 an hour moving boxes filled with pet food, shampoo, canned goods and other items sold by Stater Bros. Markets, a southern California supermarket chain. His wife stays home with their three children, and the family eats out twice a week, has a boat called Penny Lane and a travel trailer. They vacation on Lake Havasu and the Colorado River. They’re buying a 2,000-square-foot home on half an acre about 30 minutes from the San Bernardino warehouse where he works. Down the street is an Amazon warehouse where people earn far less. “I don’t see how a big company like Amazon can be so greedy,” he says. “The CEO is already a billionaire. What does he want to be a trillionaire? It’s just greed.”
Alvarado belongs to the Teamsters Local 63, which he sees as the difference between what he is paid and what Amazon workers are paid. He has been on the job 19 years and plans to remain. He doesn’t pay any premiums for medical benefits for himself and his family members and has a pension. “This job, you bust your butt, but you get paid,” he says. “No one leaves. You’d be stupid to leave.”
Jeff Fretz, 49, was working part time for United Parcel Service Inc. and attending community college to pursue a career in law enforcement. A full-time UPS truck driving job opened up, and he picked that over becoming a cop. Now he spends his days maneuvering trailers around a UPS warehouse in Bethlehem Township, Pennsylvania, and looks forward to retiring and moving south in seven or eight years with a Teamster’s pension. The job gave him a stable income and good life. He owns a home in Easton and took vacations with his wife and son in Cape May.
Fretz gets disgusted hearing about working conditions at Amazon because UPS pays its workers so much more and is still a profitable company. “A human body is not a machine,” he says. “I can’t do now what I did when I was 25. Working in a union shop protects you for a career.”
“I thought Amazon was more like a Google. But nah, it didn’t go like that.”
Now the unions fear that Amazon will do to the delivery business what it did with warehousing. The number of Americans employed as delivery drivers and couriers, outside of U.S. Postal Service work, has surged by 22% in the last two years, driven partly by the expansion of Amazon’s nationwide network of contract delivery firms and partly by the advent of new grocery delivery services. Wages in the industry fell last year by half a percentage point, the biggest decline in more than 20 years, according to BLS data.
Amazon, which has long sought to reduce its dependence on UPS, Federal Express and the U.S. Postal Service, now ships most of its own customer orders. Many of those deliveries are handled by Amazon’s network of delivery service partners, contract firms that work exclusively for Amazon and lease the trademark blue delivery vans. Driver salaries average $16 an hour, according to recruiting sites, a couple bucks an hour less than the national average for frontline delivery service workers, and roughly half the pay package of an experienced UPS driver.
Amazon also borrowed the gig-economy tactics pioneered by Uber with Flex, a service that relies on people making deliveries in their own vehicles. The idea was to boost delivery capacity without having to buy thousands of vehicles and hire people. Drivers download the Amazon Flex app and can accept assignments that typically pay about $50 for three hours. Once they factor in the cost of a vehicle and fuel, drivers say, the pay is closer to minimum wage.
UPS started a similar service for seasonal work a year after Amazon. But the drivers are employees, get 57 cents per mile, a $5 daily smartphone stipend and belong to the Teamsters union. One driver says he can easily earn $1,800 a month working part time, about 80% more than he ever made doing Flex routes. He can also count on regular work rather than competing against other Flex drivers, who spend hours watching their phones in the hopes of getting work that sometimes never materializes. The seasonal UPS job is a step up for Amazon Flex drivers. UPS’s full-time drivers see it as a step down, depriving them of overtime and potentially undermining their wages.
They have reason to be worried. Amazon’s growth in the logistics industry is undermining union clout. Union membership in transportation and warehousing dropped to 16.1% in 2019 from 21.3% a decade earlier, by far the biggest decline of any industry, according to BLS data. The slide was driven by the rapid growth of non-union jobs at places like Amazon, not a loss of union work.
Now, the RWDSU, an activist unit of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, is campaigning to organize the Alabama facility, which opened in March. A website for the union drive says employees are seeking safer working conditions and protections from arbitrary dismissal, among other things. “I thought Amazon was more like a Google,” one employee says in a video posted to the site. “The bigger the company, the more benefits, the more loyalty to the worker. But nah, it didn’t go like that.”
Now that the federal labor regulator has approved the union’s proposal, a vote is likely some time next year.
04.10.2020 12:14 PM
9 Amazon Workers Describe the Daily Risks They Face in the Pandemic
“This job is essential because people need deliveries, but it’s also essential for me because I need the money to feed my family.”
AS THE NOVEL coronavirus pandemic sweeps the globe, an otherwise marginalized class of workers is suddenly in the spotlight. Often undervalued and poorly paid, they are grocery store clerks, sanitation workers, medical professionals, and other employees who can’t stay home—even when the nation is on lockdown. In the United States, hundreds of thousands of these so-called essential workers are employed by or contract for Amazon, whose delivery network has emerged as a vital service for millions of Americans stuck inside their homes.
WIRED spoke with nine people working for Amazon during the Covid-19 crisis over the past two weeks and is publishing their accounts of being on the job, in their own words. They work in Amazon fulfillment centers, deliver packages and groceries, and stock food in Amazon cafeterias. Some are employed by Amazon directly, while others are contractors. Each of them say they are terrified for their health and that of their families, and many believe Amazon isn’t doing enough to ensure their safety. While the company has often framed its frontline workers as heroes, the people WIRED spoke with say they didn’t sign up for this level of risk.
Covid-19 has now spread to at least 50 Amazon facilities in the US, out of a total of more than 500, according to The New York Times. Amazon says it has 110 fulfillment centers and 150 delivery stations in North America. The outbreaks have led to employee protests in Detroit, New York City, and Chicago, where workers said Amazon was slow to notify them about infections and failed to conduct adequate cleaning. At Amazon-owned Whole Foods, staff staged a nationwide demonstration citing similar safety concerns and calling for free coronavirus testing for all employees. And more than 5,000 Amazon workers have signed a petition asking for additional benefits given the health crisis, including hazard pay and for the company to shut down any facility where a worker tests positive so it can be properly cleaned.
Amazon’s practices have attracted the attention of lawmakers including senators Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Robert Menendez, and Sherrod Brown, who sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos last month demanding answers about the company’s workplace safety measures. “Any failure of Amazon to keep its workers safe does not just put their employees at risk, it puts the entire country at risk,” they wrote. On Wednesday, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced it was investigating an Amazon warehouse in Pennsylvania after workers there said their health wasn’t being protected. Workers at a warehouse in California filed similar complaints with state and county regulators the same day.
“Our employees are heroes fighting for their communities and helping people get critical items they need in this crisis. Like all businesses grappling with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, we are working hard to keep employees safe while serving communities and the most vulnerable,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “We have taken extreme measures to keep people safe, tripling down on deep cleaning, procuring safety supplies that are available, and changing processes to ensure those in our buildings are keeping safe distances.”
Do you know more about Amazon working conditions? Email Louise Matsakis at louise_matsakis@wired.com.
Amazon says it has made over 150 changes to help protect its workforce, including distributing face masks to all staff, instituting social-distancing protocols, staggering shift start times, and adding more space between workstations. The company is also checking whether employees have a fever when they show up for their shifts, though the practice won’t detect the significant number of Covid-19 cases that are asymptomatic. The Amazon spokesperson said it’s just “one of the many preventative measures Amazon is taking to support the health and safety of our customers and employees.”
In recent weeks, Amazon has raised wages for hourly workers and said it would let anyone concerned about coming into work to take unpaid time off through the end of April. After receiving criticism from lawmakers, it will also now allow anyone suspected of having Covid-19 or placed into quarantine to take two weeks of emergency paid sick leave. Prior to March 27, the company required that workers obtain a positive test result to use the benefit, but a nationwide testing shortage made that extremely difficult.
The following interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.
Warehouse worker, early forties, Texas
My partner and I have both been working at Amazon for a few years. We’re awesome at what we do. I love the job itself, but I don’t like how the company handles people—almost like they’re disposable.
Since the virus came, for the last couple of weeks, we’ve taken advantage of the unpaid—not paid—time off. This next upcoming paycheck, I think I will be paid for six hours of work. I’m staying home because my mom, she had a pacemaker put in not too long ago, and she lives with me. We don’t want to go without money. In fact, I don’t know how we’re going to pay our bills this month. I’m down to about $200, and this stimulus check is probably not going to come for another month.
Amazon releases their own little news alerts, and one of them told us that we need to make sure we’re cleaning our scanners. They told us to do it—the people who are also working on the floor, who are also responsible for getting a certain number of packages out every shift. This is what kills me: When we walk through the main front doors, we hit these turnstiles to enter. Everyone has to touch them, and I have never, not one time in my life, seen anybody clean those things. I know that in my fulfillment center, we’ve got over 900 people who work there, and we have three entrances to choose from. All it’s going to take is one infected person.
You’ve got people that are working for $15 an hour, that now have to be excited that they’re making $17 an hour, going out there and basically putting their family at risk. If you’re saying our job is so damn important, and that everybody else should stay home, yet we have to show up like soldiers, why not protect us?
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The day this interview was conducted, Amazon notified the worker about a confirmed case of Covid-19 at their workplace.
Food vendor, early thirties, Ohio
I’ve been at my job for under a year. I wasn’t aware that I would specifically be vending at Amazon, and that it would be my only location. We run open air markets within the warehouse, where employees can go and purchase things for lunch, your typical chips, soda. We have a couple of different sandwiches and stuff in coolers, that sort of thing. It’s a big job, there’s a lot to do. During peak, which is usually around Christmastime, we can be there up to 11, 12 hours a day. But it’s starting to be more like that now, as Amazon is hiring more and more people to keep up with demand for essential items. They just hired another 100 people today.
I feel like this job is essential because people need deliveries, but it’s also essential for me because I need the money to feed my family.
AMAZON WAREHOUSE WORKER
My employer never gave us any specific guidelines as far as social distancing goes. It’s kind of impossible to socially distance with our jobs, because our storage room is so small. They had us take out at least 70 percent of the microwaves, in the hopes that things would be more spaced out in the break rooms. But the problem is now we have an overwhelming amount of employees trying to use way fewer microwaves. An employee asked today if we had any milk crates, because there’s not enough chairs. So we have people sitting on the floor, in the hallways, because there just simply isn’t enough room for everyone to be spaced 6 feet apart. [In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson says the company has “recently implemented a new policy: individuals who intentionally violate our social distancing guidelines will receive two warnings—on the second documented offense, termination may occur.”]
I’m petrified. It’s just me and my 16-year-old son, and he’s a type 1 diabetic. I’m scared of bringing something home to him with his diabetes, because I know that’s a much higher risk factor. I can’t even let him have his boyfriend over right now. I tell him, “Hey man, I would, but I’m such a high-risk person to be around right now working at Amazon.” It makes it rough for everybody.
I do feel essential. While I’m not working at Amazon shipping things out to people, I’m helping feed the people that are doing that job. I had that realization even before the “essential” term became popular. Things started shutting down around here, and I was like, Why the hell can’t I stay at home? All I’m literally doing is putting sandwiches on a shelf. But the more I think about it, the more I think of it in terms of, I’m helping to sustain somebody so they can do their job. To me, that is essential. I’m definitely looking at it differently nowadays.
After this interview was conducted, multiple confirmed cases of Covid-19 were reported at their workplace. They are now taking unpaid time off.
Warehouse worker, late thirties, Illinois
I started working at Amazon in 2018. A couple of weeks ago, they started doing superficial stuff for the coronavirus. They put tape on the ground by the time clocks for social distancing, and they removed some of the time clocks. But then they hired more people, which made the crowding worse in some areas.
Now, when you walk in the door, they scan your head for your temperature. If it’s high, they send you home. But the issue is if you come in late, nobody is there to scan your head. Also, none of the managers know how to use the scanners, which I don’t get. You pull the trigger, aim at the person’s temple, and done. So they were just waiving people in anyway, it’s not really accomplishing anything. I think it’s too little, too late. [In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson said that temperature checks are mandatory and that “if we found someone attempting to bypass this safety measure we would pursue disciplinary action.”]
I feel that there’s no effort, and they’re not taking it seriously. They kept saying they were doing extensive cleaning, extensive cleaning—they weren’t. There aren’t enough wipes and spray; one wipe is used to clean four people’s stations. I said something to my manager, and he just shook his head and said, “It’s better than nothing.”
Yesterday we got emails and text messages saying that there’s now several confirmed cases at our warehouse. I think they should at least close the warehouse down for cleaning. Once somebody in the building has got it, they’ve touched so much, and everybody else has touched it, too. Nobody is going out and getting tested, so you don’t know how many cases there actually are. It wouldn’t take much—just shut it down for a day, do a deep cleaning, and then have everybody come back. If you did that once every other week, I’m sure it would help. Amazon is definitely more focused on their product moving out of the building than anything else, clearly. [In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson said that not all instances require shutting down a facility entirely: “If someone hasn’t been at the building for quite some time, they were onsite only briefly, or the area they were in was already deep cleaned several times as a regular course of business, we may not need to close.”]
Delivery driver, late forties, South Carolina
I actually love the job, I really do. I work for a delivery company that contracts with Amazon. It pays the bills with a little left over, and you’re just out there, free. When you pull up in front of a little kid’s house and give him a box and he smiles and says thank you, it makes you feel like you’re doing something.
I just found out five minutes ago that someone tested positive at our building. They have not closed the building, they have not done anything. Before this, I wasn’t getting much information about the virus at work. My boss didn’t know anything, because Amazon wasn’t communicating with him. The only way I was finding out things was going online and looking at NPR, looking at your website. Today, after someone already contracted the virus, was the first time I’ve seen wipes and gloves available.
I’m trying to do my part in staying 6 feet away from people, but you still have customers coming out to the van, expecting us to give them their packages in hand. I have four grandkids, two kids, a wife, and two dogs. It’s very scary, because I may not be in the most vulnerable age range, but it’s still possible I could get sick. I just wish Amazon would step up to the plate and protect us.
Whole Foods delivery driver, late fifties, New York City area
I’m a writer, and I started writing about the automotive industry about a decade ago. A few years back, I became fascinated with the potential for local delivery to help reduce carbon emissions. In 2018, I started doing delivery work for Roadie first, and then Whole Foods, to learn more about the industry from the inside. When one of my primary writing gigs evaporated, I was like Oh my god, I gotta pay the bills. Delivering for Whole Foods pays the bills, but only if you do it right.
When you pull up in front of a little kid’s house and give him a box and he smiles and says thank you, it makes you feel like you’re doing something.
AMAZON DELIVERY DRIVER
The appreciation I feel from customers has an effect on me. When people thank you profusely for what you’re doing, even though it’s a menial task, it makes you feel good about it. Feeding people is really important. But the gig has always had its ups and downs. When I first started doing it primarily as research, my wife said, “Look, if you do it when you’re in town, you better pull your baseball hat down over your eyes so nobody knows who you are.” It’s like dad’s delivering groceries—that’s embarrassing. That kind of sucks.
Now the coronavirus looms over me. Every time now when I wake up, I’m scared. It’s just like, Oh man, I gotta go into one of those contagion zones. I made my own mask and hand sanitizer. This first mask is duct taped together and it’s made from an old Nike golf shirt. I try to be really cautious about wiping down the steering wheel, wiping down the gearshift, any place I could touch—I wipe it down.
After this interview was conducted, the driver reported that Whole Foods has instituted more protections for workers, including social distancing measures, temperature screenings, and providing gloves.
Warehouse worker, early sixties, California
I’ve been with Amazon 11 months now. I went there with the idea that it was just going to be a temporary job until I could find something that was better suited for me. When I first started there, it was a great job, because it’s only part-time, it’s fairly flexible, and it gave me the opportunity to look for other things. I have been going to work through the pandemic, but I am starting to contemplate staying home because of some of the issues at Amazon.
Amazon, at least our facility, hasn’t enforced the policies as much as they could have. One problem we’re encountering is that once we’re on the floor and we’re doing our work, they don’t mandate social distancing. People aren’t staying 6 feet away. Instead of going around me, workers cut right in front of me, they bump into me. I’ve asked, please, 6 feet away, but they just ignore me and keep on going. Every time I’ve gone to management, their response is, “There’s nothing we can do about it, if there’s a problem you can just stay home.”
My feeling is they want to do the right thing, but they don’t know how to enforce it, so it’s not really happening. We have no hand sanitizers. We have no wipes. They’re not providing face masks.
My biggest concern is my parents, they’re 82 and 88 and they live close by. I call them every day to make sure they’re OK, but I’m very hesitant to go see them because I don’t know what I might be bringing to them. Especially my father. He’s 88, he’s blind, he’s frail. I don’t want to make him sick. So until this is all done, I can’t come up and see them, because I can’t risk making them sick.
Warehouse worker, early thirties, Florida
I previously worked in events and conferences, but when the virus hit, they started cutting my hours, so I applied to work at Amazon. I’ve been there about three weeks, or maybe a month. At my location, I was noticing that they have wipes, but they’re not actually disinfecting wipes. I picked up the can the other day to check, and they’re not. They’re for painters to use to remove paint that drips onto the floor. [An Amazon spokesperson disputes this: “Disinfectant wipes and hand sanitizer are already standard across our network, and the procurement teams have worked tirelessly to create new sources of supply to keep these critical items flowing.”]
Amazon is trying to do social distancing. They put markers on the floor, but the thing is, a lot of people are not taking this seriously. If there’s no supervisors on the floor that care, it’s not being enforced. I’ve had to tell people to back off from me a few times.
It’s very scary. I’m a single mom. My mom lives with me, and she doesn’t have any income. She has a lung condition, and she’s older, she’s 72. I try to stay away from them. I haven’t held my 6-year-old son since I started at Amazon. It’s very hard. He still doesn’t understand it. He’s always mad at me, he says that I’m mean.
I feel like this job is essential because people need deliveries, but it’s also essential for me because I need the money to feed my family. My son’s dad stopped working too, so it’s not like I’m getting child support. I have no choice. But I’m also thinking of stopping because I don’t want to put my family at risk. I’m not the only one thinking of not going to work. Amazon needs to take care of what they have, and I don’t think they’re doing that.
Warehouse worker, late twenties, Washington
The first US case of Covid-19 was in Seattle, so I was like, this is really bad news. I was thinking ahead, planning for quarantine and stuff, buying food. As the story got worse, I wondered what Amazon was going to do. I’ve worked there for two years. For me, the pay is good. I know it’s not the best pay in the world, but the benefits and pay work well for me. I’ve become friends with a lot of the people I work with. But now, with all the craziness, and with the recent Covid-19 case at my warehouse, I feel like they’re not doing enough. They’re putting profits over people right now, that’s what I want to express.
I found out there was a case of Covid-19 at my warehouse through a manager. I was just talking to him, and I told him I was stressed. He said “Yeah, especially with the announcement.” I said, “What announcement?” He told me there was a confirmed case of the coronavirus at our warehouse, but I hadn’t heard anything. They should have let everyone know. I feel like they only let people in that person’s department know. I later got a notification about daily temperature screenings, but there was no email or notification about the case. The real official confirmation was through the news, not from Amazon. [In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson said that the company communicates confirmed cases of Covid-19 to all employees who work at the affected site.]
I want to be taking time off, but Amazon has been deemed an essential business. I have to be there, and if I wasn’t, I would still be struggling with bills. I have rheumatoid arthritis, which makes me immunocompromised. It’s really stressing me out to go to work every day. I do have some paid time off saved up, but it wouldn’t sustain me for very long. I’m saving it—I feel like it isn’t even the peak of the craziness yet.
Grocery warehouse worker, late twenties, Washington
I’m what’s called a Flex employee, which basically means part-time—you set your own hours. Ninety percent of my fulfillment center, and lots of other fulfillment centers, are grocery-based. We put together grocery orders for people. Compared to what I used to do, it’s an easy job. Sometimes there’s a little bit of pressure, but most of the time, you just walk around using a portable scanner. No one is breathing down your neck.
If you’re saying our job is so damn important, and that everybody else should stay home, yet we have to show up like soldiers, why not protect us?
AMAZON WAREHOUSE WORKER
Because of the coronavirus, I haven’t been going in. For me, it’s just not worth the risk. While they are taking basic precautions, the fact of the matter is there are over 200, maybe 300 people that come in and out of this warehouse every day. They can’t possibly sanitize every single surface every two hours.
The last time I worked was a few weeks ago. We had a meeting where the managers read a statement about the pandemic. They set up hand-sanitizing stations and told us to try to keep a 6-foot distance. But the fact of the matter is, you’re in a warehouse. Most of the time you can keep that radius, but the cooler space and the freezer space are very compact. The aisles are narrower, and there’s not nearly as much square footage.
The suits were the final nail in the coffin for me. In the freezer, it’s around zero degrees Fahrenheit. Amazon has these big puffy bodysuits that you put on over your whole body, including your mouth, which you need to keep you insulated. You find one that fits you, you do your time in the freezer, then you come out and you take it off, and some other poor bastard uses it.
Updated, 4-10-20, 4:21 pm EDT: This story has been updated with additional comment from Amazon.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/26/amazon-warehouse-employees-grapple-with-coronavirus-risks.html
‘They’re putting us all at risk’: What it’s like working in Amazon’s warehouses during the coronavirus outbreak
PUBLISHED THU, MAR 26 202012:00 PM EDTUPDATED THU, MAR 26 20203:40 PM EDT
KEY POINTS
- A dozen Amazon workers told CNBC they’re terrified to go to work during the pandemic, while others have expressed frustration over how their employer has handled the situation.
- Warehouse workers and delivery drivers say they’re forced to choose between going to work and risking their health or staying home and not being able to pay their bills.
- At some facilities, essential supplies like hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes are rationed or there’s none available, leaving workers at risk of catching the coronavirus.
A worker assembles a box for delivery at the Amazon fulfillment center in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S., April 30, 2019.
Clodagh Kilcoyne | Reuters
As the coronavirus outbreak has worsened, many Americans have hunkered down in their homes and are turning to online marketplaces like Amazon to get essentials like toilet paper, food and hand sanitizer delivered to their door.
While physical stores run out of stock and cities are on lockdown, Amazon’s warehouse workers, delivery drivers and contract employees have been praised for their fearlessness in continuing to go to work during a crisis. Amazon has called its employees “heroes fighting for their communities” and CEO Jeff Bezos said workers’ efforts were “being noticed at the highest levels of government.”
Warehouse workers and other Amazon employees don’t view their jobs with the same rose-colored optimism. A dozen Amazon workers told CNBC that they’re terrified to go to work during the pandemic, while others have expressed frustration over how their employer has responded to the threat of the coronavirus at their workplaces. Many of the workers asked to remain anonymous so as not to upset their employer.
In private Facebook groups, warehouse workers from across the country debated the merits of missing shifts because they don’t feel comfortable coming to work. Others question whether Amazon is doing enough to keep workers safe, which often garners responses from workers who say they should feel lucky enough to have a job during a time of economic uncertainty. (Jobless claims hit 3.28 million on Thursday, shattering previous records.) Some employees who continue to report to their jobs have added a badge to their Facebook profile picture that reads: “I can’t stay home, I work at Amazon.”
Amazon employees who feel it’s unsafe to come into work are given a limited set of options. They can take as much unpaid time off as they want through the month of April, but it means they won’t get a paycheck while they’re at home. Amazon has also offered two weeks of paid sick leave, but only for those who test positive for the coronavirus or if they’re in quarantine. As a result, many employees continue to come in to work.
Facilities remain crowded and run at full speed. At some warehouses, sanitation supplies are scarce or nowhere to be found, while some employees come to work sick, workers told CNBC.
Above all, Amazon employees said there’s an overwhelming sense that they’re responsible for their own safety at work.
“It’s made me so furious to see all of these managers say we’re doing the best we can, but you look at anything from the outside world and so many people are working from home,” said William Stolz, a picker at a warehouse in Shakopee, Minnesota, known as MSP1, and an organizer with the Awood Center, a nonprofit that advocates for East African workers in the state and a frequent critic of Amazon.
“I have a lot of co-workers with older parents they’re taking care of or co-workers who live in multigenerational households with young children. It’s just so maddening to see that they really don’t care about us.”
Concern for Amazon workers’ safety has continued to build in recent weeks. Workers have circulated petitions calling for the company to do more. Employee group Amazonians United NYC has also launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for Amazon employees who are staying home without pay. Their calls have been taken up by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., as well as a group of senators who urged Bezos to give workers paid time off.
An Amazon spokesperson referred CNBC to a recent blog post about steps the company is taking to protect workers’ health and safety. Amazon has previously said it’s gone to “great lengths” to keep facilities clean and make sure employees are following necessary safety precautions, such as washing their hands, using hand sanitizer, practicing social distancing and other measures.
Amazon has also announced several benefits changes in recent weeks, including raising pay for warehouse workers and delivery drivers by $2 per hour through the month of April, doubling overtime pay and allowing for unlimited unpaid time off. On Monday, Amazon said it would offer paid time off for part-time warehouse workers.
Still, Amazon employees argue that these efforts aren’t enough to keep them safe. They remain anxious as more and more warehouses across the country report cases of the coronavirus. There are at least 10 facilities in the U.S. that have workers who have tested positive for the virus, and they all remain open. An Amazon warehouse in Queens, New York, temporarily closed last week after a worker tested positive. Amazon has closed a facility in Shepherdsville, Kentucky, known as SDF9, until April 1 after there was a confirmed case of the coronavirus.
Working ‘shoulder to shoulder’
Some Amazon fulfillment centers are the size of 26 football fields and employ thousands of workers. At least 300 employees might be reporting into work during each shift and facilities are usually bustling with activity, as workers pick and pack a flurry of items that are sent out to customers’ doorsteps.
Despite their sprawling size, employees say they’re often working close to their colleagues, whether that’s reaching across a conveyor belt to hand off a package or standing side by side at a workstation, packing boxes.
A worker at a facility in Michigan said that what concerns her most are the employees who have to work “shoulder to shoulder or elbow to elbow.” For these employees, it’s impossible for them to keep 6 feet apart, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends.
Amazon says it has made social distancing a priority at its facilities and that work stations are several feet apart in warehouses. The company has canceled stand-up meetings, which are held before the beginning of each shift and gather hundreds of workers in one room. To prevent crowding, shifts and breaks have have been staggered, while chairs in break rooms are no longer side by side. Amazon has also canceled security screenings, where employees gather in long lines to have their belongings inspected before leaving for the day.
Amazon has tried to limit contact in break rooms at its warehouses by spacing out chairs.
But these efforts don’t address the crowding that occurs on the warehouse floor, where employees sweat, move packages with their hands, and share work stations with touch screens and other common surfaces.
“They want to talk about social distancing as far as the break room and stand up [meetings] goes, but work conditions are still bad,” the worker in Michigan said. “Social distancing is not being practiced in the sort area and packing. People are still working very close to one another.”
Hibaq Mohamed, who also works out of MSP1 in Minnesota, said there continues to be crowding in the break room at her facility. Employees are using the same microwaves to heat up their lunch and hand sanitizer remains in short supply.
“The workplace is overcrowded,” Mohamed said. “I am afraid, but I cannot stop working without pay.”
An Amazon employee who works in a facility in Kentucky said his location has implemented some safety measures like sending out cleaning crews to wipe down the break rooms and work stations after every shift. But he’s worried that Amazon’s move to hire an additional 100,000 workers will make it even harder to police whether employees are keeping their stations clean.
″[The facilities] do feel unsafe,” the worker in Kentucky said. “Our building typically has 400 [people] or so per night shift. That’s a lot of people in a single building.”
Rationed supplies and no time to wash hands
Despite Amazon’s efforts to make cleaning supplies available at facilities, five Amazon employees told CNBC that hand sanitizer and sanitizing wipes were either in short supply or completely absent from their workplaces.
Some employees say they’ve brought in their own supplies, including face masks, to compensate for the shortage. A driver in Atlanta who works for a delivery service provider contracted by Amazon said employees were told they had to bring their own supplies, such as gloves and disinfectant spray. He said he noticed several colleagues who were delivering packages to shoppers’ homes without wearing any kind of protective gear. An Amazon spokesperson pointed CNBC to the company’s blog post that said delivery drivers have been instructed to sanitize their vehicles and avoid contact with customers.
The driver is now afraid he’ll contract the virus from a co-worker who isn’t taking proper precautions or by coming into contact with members of the public while he’s on his delivery route. This fear has only become more intense after a close friend died from the coronavirus this week, he said.
Amazon recently issued a letter for drivers to show to police officers if they get pulled over for being on the road. The letter, dated March 23 and viewed by CNBC, says that the driver is “an employee of a supplier that provides vital services for Amazon, an essential business” and is “allowing members of the community to remain at home and reduce the risk of COVID-19 exposure and transmission, including the elderly and vulnerable persons.”
While average Americans are being told to stay home, the driver said his employer has only encouraged them to work more. His employer has offered an extra $2 per hour through the end of March, and employees are eligible to receive an additional $2 per hour if they finish a certain number of deliveries per shift. The pace of work has been akin to Prime Day, the driver said, with him making 130 stops in a single day.
“I have high blood pressure and asthma issues. I have three children. I’m really not willing to risk my life for two extra dollars,” he said.
At fulfillment centers, the pressure to hit certain metrics also remains intense. Employees are also working more than usual, as a result of the surge in online shopping.
Workers said their facilities were operating at full capacity like they do during peak periods such as Prime Day. Several workers said their facilities have ordered workers to come in for mandatory extra time (MET) due to the increase in demand. In those cases, each full-time employee has one extra day where they’re required to come in and work a 10-hour to 12-hour shift.
Three warehouse workers said the pressure to make rate, or unpack and pack a required number of items per hour, means they have fewer opportunities to step away and wash their hands, which in some cases is their only choice if there’s no sanitizer available. It can take several minutes to walk across the facility to a restroom, at which point they risk logging too many “time off task” (TOT) points, which is grounds for termination.
“Amazon keeps us in the same fast pace as always,” said an employee who works out of a facility in Orlando, Florida. “There’s not enough time to go to the restrooms and wash our hands as needed to keep safe.”
The Amazon spokesperson said employees can wash their hands whenever they choose and it won’t be counted against them.
An Amazon warehouse in Michigan shows a notice informing employees of staggered shift times.
The worker added that her work station remains dirty and employees are only allowed to take two pairs of gloves per week from the facility, despite the CDC recommending that users throw away gloves after they’re worn once.
Another worker at an Amazon facility in Maryland said she decided to stay home after her location ran out of supplies. The worker said her facility restricted employees to using one sanitizing wipe to clean their station as supplies began to run low. She said social distancing has been practically impossible for her while she coaches and trains associates, and as workers continue to crowd around time clocks and during the start and end of shifts.
“I don’t want to carry COVID-19 home to my family,” the worker said. “My last straw was when my building ran out of hand sanitizer and I couldn’t find wipes to clean my shared laptop and radio.”
A pharmacist at Amazon’s online pharmacy company PillPack, who works out of an Amazon fulfillment center in Phoenix, said there are restrictions on supplies at her facility. There are no gloves or masks available at her facility and sanitizer is being rationed to “one dime-sized portion,” and they can only use it if their job requires it. Additionally, there are only two bathrooms on the floor, one for each gender, for hundreds of employees. The other bathroom is upstairs in the facility, which is too far away, she added.
“You’re not going to walk to the bathroom a mile away,” the pharmacist said. “The time that you’re upstairs and downstairs, that’s measured too.”
Tough decisions
Warehouse workers and delivery drivers have been met with a serious dilemma: Go to work and risk getting sick or stay home and find themselves unable to pay their bills.
One worker at a facility in Oregon said he’s been grappling with that decision since his wife went to the emergency room last week “gasping for air” and running a fever. His wife couldn’t get tested for the coronavirus, but the doctor told him to treat her as if she did have it. Since then, the situation has only gotten worse, as his 4-year-old son has developed a severe cough, bad enough that the worker said he was afraid his son would need to go to the hospital, too.
He’s been taking unpaid time off to care for his family, but isn’t sure how long he can survive without getting a paycheck.
“I’m put in a position where I have to pay rent and go to work at Amazon, or stay home and risk our rent payment,” the worker added.
The worker in Michigan echoed those concerns. The father of her children is showing symptoms of the coronavirus and she suspects she picked it up from the facility she works at. She decided to quarantine herself to make sure she doesn’t transmit the virus, which means she isn’t going to work and isn’t getting paid. But even if she wasn’t in quarantine, she said she wouldn’t feel safe going to work.
″[Amazon] has offered to give us double for overtime pay, but honestly, at what cost?” she said. “Especially in Michigan, nothing is dying down and the cases seem to be rising more.”
Employees may risk coming to work sick because taking unpaid time off would mean not paying their bills. In order to get paid time off, employees either have to be in quarantine after coming into contact with someone who tested positive, or to have tested positive for COVID-19 themselves. Even if workers show symptoms of the virus, it’s hard to get tested, since tests are still in limited supply.
The uneven safety precautions at facilities across the country have sown feelings of distrust between workers and their managers. Despite reassurances from Bezos that he intends to make masks available for workers on the front lines, workers say they don’t trust him either.
Workers say they’ve become paranoid that managers aren’t being honest about whether employees are sick with the virus, so that they can keep the facilities open and the goods flowing to shoppers around the country who need them.
“If they could say we’re testing everybody every two days, I’d feel a lot better, but they can’t do that,” said Stolz, the worker in Minnesota. “In the meantime, they’re just smiling and putting us all at risk.”
Amid building boom, Amazon faces complaints from warehouse workers
The company is still expanding in New York, but some employees have complained about pandemic working conditions.
FEBRUARY 16, 2021
Update: Late Tuesday, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Amazon, claiming that the company failed to protect warehouse workers at facilities in Queens and Staten Island during the COVID-19 pandemic, providing inadequate health and safety protections in those facilities. As reported below, Amazon sued James last week in an attempt to preempt charges such as these, and said in response to Tuesday’s suit that James’ claims didn’t represent an accurate picture of the company’s pandemic response.
In early March 2020, when little was still known about the new coronavirus, state and federal health authorities issued some broad guidance. Wash your hands frequently, avoid touching your face, keep a few feet of distance between yourself and others.
Ramos, Constantinides lead protest against new Amazon distribution centers
But at Amazon’s fulfillment center in Staten Island – an 855,000 square-foot warehouse site that employs more than 5,000 people – some workers allege that it was difficult or impossible to take those health precautions without fearing consequences. Derrick Palmer, a warehouse associate at the Staten Island facility – which is also known as JFK8 – told City & State this February that employees are afraid to take time away from scanning, picking and packing goods to wash their hands or clean their workstations. “I don’t want to lose my job for what they claim is ‘time off task,’” Palmer said, referring to the company’s “time off task” policy – one of the company’s productivity metrics – which tracks the time workers spend not actively scanning or packing items, for example, and can lead to discipline and even termination for workers spending too much time off task. Thirty minutes of “time off task” accrued throughout a single shift can result in a warning, and further infractions can eventually lead to termination, Palmer said.
Amazon’s health and safety protocols have come under close scrutiny during the pandemic, including from New York Attorney General Letitia James. After an employee at the Staten Island warehouse was fired at the end of March after he staged a walkout over conditions in the warehouse, James opened an investigation into Amazon’s labor practices. In a letter obtained by NPR last April, James’ office told Amazon they may have violated the state’s whistleblower law for firing the employee, and called the company’s safety protections “inadequate.” That was 10 months ago, and James’ office has declined to comment on the investigation since.
Now, Amazon is fighting back. Last Friday, the company sued James’ office, in an apparent attempt to preempt an effort by James to demand changes to the company’s warehouse practices. In the suit, Amazon says that James threatened to sue the company if it didn’t agree to implement a series of changes at its facilities, including reducing productivity requirements for workers. But Amazon argues that James’ office doesn’t have the legal authority to regulate workplace safety issues, saying that oversight for that rests under federal law.
James’ office brushed off the suit in a statement on Friday. “Let me be clear: We will not be intimidated by anyone, especially corporate bullies that put profits over the health and safety of working people,” James said.
The new lawsuit from Amazon is just the latest of the company’s efforts to defend against allegations of harsh and unsafe labor practices. Amazon has denied allegations such as the ones from Palmer that its productivity metrics make for an unsafe work environment. Amazon declined to elaborate on how its time off task policy works or how workers are disciplined under it, but said that employees at its fulfillment centers work 10-hour shifts four days per week, with two scheduled 30 minute breaks per shift, and are free to take short breaks to do things like use the bathroom or speak to their managers. In an emailed comment, spokesperson Jenna Hilzenrath said that at the onset of the pandemic, the company introduced changes to build in time for safety precautions. “As we continue to adapt to a new normal, we introduced updated associate performance expectations with support and coaching for those who need it along the way, and extra time built in so that associates can continue to practice social distancing, wash their hands and clean their work stations whenever needed,” she said.
Amazon has said in previous court filings – specifically in a lawsuit Palmer and other Staten Island workers filed in June over the issue – that it stopped imposing discipline for low productivity rates in March. But the employees suing Amazon claimed in court that this change wasn’t effectively communicated to them until months later, meaning they were still operating under the assumption that they could face discipline if they took too many breaks to wash their hands or waited a few minutes outside a break room for it to empty out so they could socially distance inside. In the sprawling warehouse, two trips to the bathroom can easily require 30 minutes, said Frank Kearl, an attorney with the progressive activism group Make the Road New York – one of the groups representing the employees in the suit.
The lawsuit argued that Amazon’s policies amounted to a “public nuisance” – essentially claiming that a lack of proper health and safety protocol put Amazon workers at risk of contracting COVID-19, and because those workers could then take the virus home or out into the community with them, those policies then put the larger public at heightened risk of contracting it. A federal judge dismissed that lawsuit in November, finding that the matter should be decided by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration – the federal workplace safety agency – and that the workers failed to demonstrate that Amazon’s policies created a “public nuisance.” But the plaintiffs have appealed to the Second Circuit.
In the meantime, Palmer said in an October court filing that the time off task policy and other performance tracking has been reinstated, and workers are again afraid to spend too much time away from their stations, despite the ongoing risk of contracting the virus. “People are scared, but at the same time, they’re like, ‘I don’t want to lose my job because Amazon is firing people for time off task,’” Palmer told City & State. “I feel like (Amazon has) pushed safety to the backburner and are focusing on productivity.”
In a court filing this week, Amazon argued that the claim that its productivity metrics make for an unsafe work environment are moot, in part because time spent on tasks including washing hands, social distancing and using the bathroom are no longer counted in the feedback employees receive on their “time off task.”
A spokesperson did not respond directly when asked whether Amazon had fired any warehouse employees during the pandemic because of violations of the time off task policy. “We would never dismiss an employee without first ensuring that they had received our fullest support, including understanding any barriers and providing dedicated coaching to help them improve and additional training,” Hilzenrath wrote over email, noting that the company has an interest in retaining employees.
Hilzenrath said that low productivity rates are met with extra training. “Associate performance expectations are measured and evaluated over a long period of time as we know that a variety of things could impact the ability to meet expectations in any given day or hour,” Hilzenrath wrote over email. “We support people who are not performing to the levels expected with dedicated coaching to help them improve.”
Since the onset of the pandemic, complaints about the treatment of warehouse workers have been raised by Amazon employees on Staten Island, and across the country. Some workers have taken to protesting over what they say are unsafe working conditions and an alleged lack of transparency about the spread of COVID-19 in warehouses. A March 30 protest in front of the Staten Island warehouse in Bloomfield on Staten Island’s West Shore organized by Palmer and Christian Smalls, a former assistant manager at the facility, led to Smalls’ firing. Amazon said that Smalls had violated quarantine instructions by showing up at the facility to stage a walkout on March 30 after he had been told to stay home from work – with pay – because he came into close contact with another employee who tested positive for COVID-19. Amazon said they had given Smalls multiple warnings for previously violating social distancing guidelines, but in his own lawsuit against the company, Smalls said they never did.
In addition to the investigation James opened last spring into Smalls’ firing, New York City’s Commission on Human Rights also opened an investigation. A spokesperson for the commission declined to comment, saying the matter was still open.
In the lawsuit Amazon filed against James on Friday, the company said that James had threatened to sue the company if it did not agree to reinstate Smalls, as well as reduce productivity metrics for its warehouse employees.
In that suit, Amazon pointed to an unannounced inspection for COVID-19 safety at the Staten Island facility by the New York City Sheriff’s Office on March 30, in which the Sheriff’s Office said the facility “appeared to go above and beyond the current compliance requirements.” “Nothing is more important than the health and safety of our employees, and we’re doing everything we can to support them through the pandemic,” Hilzenrath said in an emailed statement. “In 2020, we invested more than $11.5 billion on COVID related initiatives to keep our employees safe and deliver for customers. This includes more than $961M invested in personal protective equipment and safety measures, such as mandating masks, temperature screening, installing plexi-shields, additional cleaning teams and providing voluntary COVID-19 testing onsite.” Hilzenrath said that at the beginning of the pandemic, the company implemented changes including social distancing measures and enhanced cleaning efforts at every site.
Videos and commercials for Amazon show the company thanking its “retail heroes” and citing the millions of masks and other PPE the company has provided to workers. “I feel more protected when I’m in this building than one I’m out in the general public,” one employee says in a video.
While the pandemic has meant disaster for many small businesses, Amazon is one of the giants whose business has boomed amid stay-at-home orders, with its shares up more than 60% over the last year and its net sales increasing 38% in 2020. To serve that growing demand, Amazon has gone on a global hiring spree, adding nearly half a million employees between last January and October, The New York Times reports. In New York, the company continues to grow its physical footprint too. A spokesperson for the company said that the state is currently home to two fulfillment centers, two sortation centers and 15 delivery stations, employing more than 44,000 in New York. Those jobs pay a minimum of $15 per hour statewide, and come with health and retirement benefits. While the company wouldn’t comment on future construction plans, it seems to be expanding every day, with two new facilities planned in East New York, Brooklyn, one in Erie County and another in the Bronx. (A map created by the good government organization Good Jobs First shows how sprawling the company’s current footprint is.)
Just over two years ago, Amazon pulled out of plans to build a second headquarters in Long Island City, Queens – a project the company said would bring 25,000-plus jobs to the city, many of them high-paying. The demise of HQ2, as the project was nicknamed, was brought on by a groundswell of pushback from progressive politicians and labor leaders, although some unions welcomed the company. Amazon was offered roughly $3 billion in tax breaks to locate in Queens, which spurred the backlash, as did the harsh conditions for warehouse workers and the company’s anti-union stance.
Good Jobs First tracks the state and local subsidies that Amazon receives for building across the country, and reports that the company has received at least $3.7 billion in various public incentives over the years, with data going back to 2000. Despite the uproar over the tax breaks offered by New York City and state to lure HQ2, Amazon hasn’t stopped seeking or receiving incentives in New York. A developer of an Amazon distribution center in Suffolk County recently won $2.3 million from the county’s industrial development agency. A more than one million square foot warehouse being built in Montgomery was awarded $20.5 million in tax breaks – through a payment in lieu of taxes agreement – by the local industrial development agency. Not all Amazon facilities in New York have been accompanied by these deal sweeteners, but the company continues to seek tax breaks as it builds.
Some public officials argue that tax breaks are a small price to pay for a company such as Amazon to bring jobs and economic activity to towns and small cities across New York. Officials are considering tax breaks for an Amazon facility in Hamburg, Erie County, and some pushing for subsidies make exactly this argument. “In order to realize tax revenue and employment possibilities for our citizens, if we don’t have some type of tax incentive program here, some pilot program, there is no realistic chance that we will be able to land large industrial concerns at any time in the future,” Hamburg Town Supervisor Jim Shaw told WGRZ earlier this month.
As the company expands in New York – including not just warehouses but also some corporate offices in Manhattan – the same criticisms prompted by the debate over HQ2 persist. “The issue is that these billionaires and these corporations are buying up property and setting up shop and warehouses and sortation centers all over the country, and they’re not giving back to our communities,” said Chris Smalls, the Staten Island warehouse employee who was fired, and who now runs an advocacy group called The Congress of Essential Workers, which continues to criticize Amazon’s labor practices. “It’s one thing to have a job, but it’s another thing to have a job with protections.”
Critics argue that in order to fulfill Amazon’s promises of one and two-day delivery windows, they need to build new warehouses anyway and shouldn’t receive tax breaks to do so. Labor advocates and progressive lawmakers say that employees who support unionizing should be able to do so without aggressive anti-union pressure from the company – something currently on display as workers at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama vote on whether to unionize. “We need to do a lot of things to get this under control, and helping workers organize is one of them, (and) keeping from giving them public dollars to do what they’re going to do anyway is another,” said Queens state Sen. Michael Gianaris – one of the most outspoken opponents of HQ2.
Last year, Grand Island, a small town on the Canadian border in Western New York, grappled with these questions, serving as a kind of microcosm of the HQ2 fight. As part of a secretive project codenamed “Project Olive,” Amazon planned to build a massive distribution center on the island, creating 1,000 jobs. Those plans were scrapped this summer, as the project faced opposition from local residents, including an advocacy group called the Coalition for Responsible Economic Development for Grand Island. That coalition opposed the project for reasons including that it would create heavy traffic, polluting the air and the Niagara River. The activists argued that the warehouse jobs Amazon offered wouldn’t be worth those social costs, in part because they wouldn’t be high-paying and those jobs have been associated with high injury rates. Cathy Rayhill, a Grand Island resident and spokesperson for the coalition, said she thought the Grand Island plans were scrapped because Amazon didn’t want to deal with the backlash. “They just didn’t want negative publicity,” Rayhill said. “They didn’t want to be tied up in the courts.”
Now, Rayhill said, the developer who owns that land is proposing a new warehouse complex on that same site, and she believes Amazon will be the eventual tenant, even though the developer has not named any tenants yet. “Amazon has to be in the top 50 metropolitan areas to deliver on their quote, ‘Amazon Prime promise.’ And Buffalo is in the top 50,” Rayhill said. “So they will find a way, come hell or high water, to get these warehouses built and operational.”
A spokesperson for Amazon did not comment on the Grand Island development or whether it would occupy a future development there, saying the company doesn’t comment on its future roadmap. Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz – a Democrat who supported the original Grand Island development – said he has also heard that the idea behind the new development may be for Amazon to eventually occupy it, but he has not had discussions with Amazon.
In the meantime, Amazon may soon be settling into another, much smaller site in Erie County. Shaw and other officials in Hamburg are currently at odds over whether the behemoth company should receive roughly $6 million in proposed tax breaks from the town’s industrial development agency to build a warehouse in the town. Poloncarz is one of a few elected officials representing the area who says that while he supports Amazon coming to the area, they shouldn’t get public incentives to do so. “We know they’re going to build the facility anyway because they need to, for their rapidly expanding business model,” Poloncarz said. “I’m not adverse to Amazon’s growth, I just don’t think that this type of project is one that should be receiving tax breaks.”
Erie County already is home to two Amazon facilities, neither of which were built with tax breaks, Poloncarz said. The county executive also said that he has not heard any complaints from warehouse employees about health or safety issues during the pandemic, though he said that doesn’t mean concerns hadn’t been raised in other parts of the state.
Smalls and Palmer, who both registered complaints about the conditions in the Staten Island facility during the pandemic, say they want Amazon to do more to protect its workers. Smalls said he used to take pride in his work as a supervisor, bringing his five years of experience with the company to the floor every day. Though Smalls acknowledged the work has always been tough, even before the pandemic. “I (used to) tell every new hire, ‘If you have a gym membership, you might want to cancel it,’” Smalls recalled. “You’re going to be on your feet for 10 hour days.”
Last week, Smalls was headed down to Bessemer, Alabama, where employees at a warehouse are voting on whether to unionize. If they succeed, they’d be the first of the company’s employees to unionize in the country. (Amazon spokesperson Rachael Lighty said in an emailed statement that the company already provides what workers are asking for, including competitive pay and benefits.)
Though the effort in Alabama faces steep opposition from the company, Smalls hopes that worker organizing will spread across the country. “That’s my plan, to bring it back up here to New York, and try to organize even my former facility,” he said.
Palmer, who still works at the Staten Island facility, said that he received a “final write-up” for violating social distancing policy while participating in the March 30 protest with Smalls – a warning that Kearl, the Make the Road New York attorney, said serves as a kind of last warning before firing. Amazon said that Palmer was provided with feedback about violating social distancing on three other occasions, though Palmer said he didn’t get any other warnings, despite the final write-up typically following a first, second and third warning. He said he wasn’t told about a social distancing policy, though the company said that guidelines were implemented in early March. Amazon did not confirm whether a final write-up is associated with impending termination, but said that the process varies depending on the situation.
Like Smalls, Palmer said he feels he was disciplined for speaking out. “It just speaks a lot about this company, especially when they have commercials saying how safe they are,” Palmer said. “Their actions contradict the message that they’re trying to get out to the public.”
Despite receiving that final write-up, Palmer said he hasn’t felt under as much threat of retaliation since hooking up with Kearl and filing the lawsuit. While their appeal in that case continues – and the attorney general apparently continues to scrutinize the company – Palmer is in no rush to stop calling for change at Amazon. “Amazon needs to do better,” Palmer said. “All we wanted to do was just get the building safe and get all the associates safe.”
Fired, interrogated, disciplined: Amazon warehouse organizers allege year of retaliation
The number of charges filed with the National Labor Relations Board accusing Amazon of interfering with workers’ right to organize more than tripled during the pandemic.
Jonathan Bailey filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board accusing Amazon of retaliating against him for protected activities.Victor J. Blue / for NBC News
March 30, 2021, 4:30 AM EDT
By Olivia Solon and April Glaser
The day after Jonathan Bailey organized a walkout over Covid-19 concerns at an Amazon warehouse in Queens, New York, he was, he said, “detained” during his lunch break by a manager in a black camouflage vest who introduced himself as ex-FBI.
Bailey, who co-founded Amazonians United, a network of Amazon workers fighting for better pay and working conditions, was ushered to a side office and interrogated for 90 minutes, according to testimony filed to the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB.
The manager asked exactly what Bailey had said or done to get his fellow workers to join the walkout. When Bailey declined to explain, the manager shifted his tone. He told Bailey that some people “felt hurt” by what he did and that it “might be seen as harassment,” Bailey said.
“It was already a pretty intense conversation. But it became very clear they were trying to intimidate me,” Bailey said. “Being accused of harassment is a very dangerous thing.”
A week later, Bailey received a formal write-up for harassment, although his managers would not tell him whom he had allegedly harassed, nor what he had allegedly said or done, according to his NLRB testimony.
MARCH 30, 202104:33
Bailey, who still works for Amazon, believes that was part of a corporate strategy to silence organizers, and in May 2020 he filed a charge against Amazon to the NLRB alleging that the company had violated labor law by retaliating against him for protected, concerted activities. The board found merit to the allegations and filed a federal complaint against Amazon.
This month, a year after Bailey staged the walkout, Amazon settled. Under the terms of the settlement, Amazon was required to post a notice to employees, on physical bulletin boards and via email, reminding them of their right to organize.
A handful of workers, including Jonathan Bailey, said allegations made against them by Amazon seem to play into racist stereotypes of Black men as angry or aggressive.Victor J. Blue / for NBC News
“Amazon will work to destroy your character and try to keep you from talking about what’s actually going on,” Bailey said. “And it’s all so that Jeff Bezos can make more dollars.”
Bailey’s complaint is one of at least 37 charges filed to the NLRB against Amazon, America’s second-largest employer, across 20 cities since February 2020, when news of the pandemic began to spread, according to an analysis of NLRB filings by NBC News. These complaints accuse the company of interfering with workers’ rights to organize or form a union. That’s more than triple the number of cases of this kind filed to the agency about Amazon in 2019 and six times the number filed in 2018.
For comparison, Walmart, America’s largest employer, has had eight such charges since February 2020. The meat-processing giant JBS, whose workers have been fighting for better working conditions throughout the pandemic, including staging protests, had nine.
The number of similar charges filed against Amazon over the last year has become significant enough that the NLRB is considering whether the “meritorious allegations warrant a consolidated effort between the regions,” NLRB spokesman Nelson Carrasco said. Typically NLRB charges are investigated by one of 26 regional offices. But in rare instances the board combines cases into a consolidated complaint, as it has done with Walmart and McDonald’s, if it believes there is a pattern emerging at a company.
Amazon declined to comment on the increase in NLRB charges.
Labor experts said that the surge in such charges reflects a dramatic increase in organizing among a small but vocal portion of Amazon’s 500,000 warehouse workers across North America during a coronavirus-led boom in online retail, leading to record sales and an almost 200 percent increase in profits for Amazon.
Workers have been coming together to demand better working conditions — including through solidarity campaigns, strikes, protests and walkouts — at warehouses across the United States, including in Chicago; New York; Minneapolis; Iowa City, Iowa; Sacramento and the Inland Empire of California; Salem, Oregon; and King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.
People in New York City protest in support of Amazon workers in Alabama on March 4.Emaz / VIEW press / Corbis via Getty Images
As worker activism gains momentum, so, too, has Amazon’s effort to counter it with anti-union propaganda, firing key organizers, surveilling employees and hiring Pinkertons to gather intelligence on warehouse workers.
NBC News interviewed more than two dozen Amazon warehouse workers, nine of whom said they had been fired, disciplined or retaliated against for protected activity and three of whom filed NLRB complaints since the pandemic began. They allege that Amazon has in some cases selectively enforced its policies on issues such as social distancing, vulgar language and insubordination to target those speaking up for worker rights. A handful of workers, including Bailey, said that allegations made against them by Amazon seemingly play into racist stereotypes of Black men being angry or aggressive.
“We have zero tolerance for racism or retaliation of any kind, and in many cases these complaints come from individuals who acted inappropriately toward co-workers and were terminated as a result,” said an Amazon spokeswoman, Leah Seay. “We work hard to make sure our teams feel supported, and will always stand by our decision to take action if someone makes their colleagues feel threatened or excluded.”
But labor historians note just how significant this fight is for the future of employees at one of the world’s fastest growing companies.
“There is a David versus Goliath aspect to this. Workers getting paid $15 per hour are going up against one of the world’s most powerful corporations owned by the world’s richest man,” said John Logan, director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University. “Having a union would be a disaster for Amazon, so it’s pulling out all the stops to prevent workers from organizing.”
The highest-profile organizing campaign is in Bessemer, Alabama, where 5,800 workers are in the midst of a precedent-setting vote to form a union. There, Amazon is waging what labor experts like Logan describe as a classic and well-funded union-busting campaign. Workers described how Amazon required them to attend mandatory meetings to hear why the union was not, in Amazon’s view, beneficial for workers. The warehouse is filled with banners and signs encouraging workers to vote against the union and the company set up a website and hashtag, #DoItWithoutDues, to warn them about union fees.
“They are doing everything they can to try to convince the people to ‘Vote no,’” said Darryl Richardson, an Amazon employee in Bessemer who is organizing with the union drive. “There are signs right over the men’s stall, so when you use the bathroom it’s right there face to face.”
A demonstrator wears a mask that reads “Power To The Workers” during a Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union protest outside the Amazon BHM1 Fulfillment Center in Bessemer, Ala., on Feb. 7.Elijah Nouvelage / Bloomberg via Getty Images
Seay, the Amazon spokeswoman, said that it was important for employees to understand the facts of joining a union.
Amazon’s anti-union campaign states that union members would have to pay $500 a year in dues with no guarantee of better pay. Economic research indicates that collective bargaining unions generally raise pay for both union and nonunion members. “Amazon fears the union because of the leverage it can have to organize strikes that could cripple the business,” said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, a Los Angeles-based investment firm, noting that Amazon’s efficient customer service is critical to the company’s success.
If unions negotiate better pay and benefits, it would increase Amazon’s operating expenses and reduce profit, Pachter added.
Seay said Amazon hosts “regular information sessions for all employees, which include an opportunity for employees to ask questions.”
“If the union vote passes,” she added, “it will impact everyone at the site, and it’s important all associates understand what that means for them and their day-to-day life working at Amazon.”
The company offers a $15-an-hour starting wage, benefits and a clean working environment for its employees, a spokesperson said.
Elsewhere, the company’s crackdown on organizing has been more insidious, say workers and labor experts.
“They made up stupid reasons to get rid of each of us,” said Courtney Bowden, who was fired from her warehouse job in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, last March after advocating for sick pay for part-time workers. According to her complaint filed to the NLRB, management at her warehouse targeted her by “selectively and disparately” enforcing rules around how workers should wear their hair and later fired her for an altercation with a co-worker.
In November, the NLRB determined that, following an investigation, it found merit to the allegations that Amazon had illegally retaliated against Bowden, according to public records first obtained by BuzzFeed. Bowden withdrew her NLRB charge late March after reaching a private settlement with Amazon.
“If what they set out to do is shut down organizing, I think they are doing a good job right now,” Bowden said. “But when you take out some people there will always be someone else later down the line.”
John Hopkins, an organizer who worked at a warehouse in San Leandro, California, agreed. Amazon suspended Hopkins for three months starting in early May 2020 for violating a relatively new social-distancing rule forbidding workers to stay on site for longer than 15 minutes after their shift ended. In the months before his suspension, Hopkins had been distributing pamphlets about union organizing to co-workers after becoming concerned about the company’s handling of the pandemic. Hopkins, 34, was worried about the risk of exposure to the virus at work, particularly since he lives with his stepfather and brother and both are cancer survivors.
Amazonians United is a network of Amazon workers fighting for better pay and working conditions.Victor J. Blue / for NBC News
The pamphlets he had been leaving kept disappearing from the break room and notice boards, and nobody in human resources would explain why, Hopkins said. On May 1, he filed a complaint with the NLRB against Amazon, noting that other flyers, such as job postings for third-party delivery companies, were allowed. That night, he clocked out in solidarity with a sick-out protest held by essential workers in the United States, but stayed in the break room to talk to co-workers about organizing. Management asked him to leave, which he did after arguing that it was protected activity. He was suspended the next day.
“It seemed like a very disproportionate punishment,” Hopkins said. “I felt like they isolated me so I couldn’t get other workers rallied on my side. But they pretended they didn’t see the connection between my union organizing and my suspension.”
While the NLRB initially dismissed Hopkins’ case, it is revisiting it as part of the agency’s larger investigation into Amazon’s alleged retaliation.
Labor experts say that Amazon warehouses are also designed to detect and squash organizing through surveillance technology, including the scanners workers use to track the rate at which they sort and pack items, mandatory daily worker surveys, and AI-powered camera systems to detect social-distancing violations.
“Amazon controls workers’ bodies and movement in such minute ways, ostensibly to track productivity, that people cannot have any purpose in the workplace except for to produce,” said Veena Dubal, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings, whose research focuses on law, technology and gig work. “It’s inherently union busting.”
She noted that surveillance and intense pressure on workers to meet productivity targets make it “easy to pin a termination on one of the thousands of rules workers have to abide by.”
Amazon spokeswoman Seay said that scanners were for tracking “inventory, not people,” and that data collected from the mandatory surveys are used to make improvements to employees’ work experience.
Senior warehouse staff are also trained to inform higher-ups if they hear workers discussing organizing, said Enesha Yurchak, a former onsite medical representative at a fulfillment center in Salem, Oregon.
“I remember one of my supervisors came up to me and said if you ever hear the word ‘union’ please let us know right away,” she said. “I asked what was going to happen to them and he said, ‘Don’t quote me on this but they are going to get fired.’”
Amazon denied that senior staff were trained to keep an eye out for organizers.
“We respect our employees’ right to join, form or not to join a labor union or other lawful organization of their own selection, without fear of retaliation, intimidation or harassment,” Seay said.
Yurchak, whose job was to provide first aid to injured warehouse workers, sued Amazon last May after she was terminated for “insubordination.” In her complaint she alleged that she had repeatedly raised concerns about workplace safety violations related to the pandemic, including lack of PPE and deep-cleaning at the facility as well as feeling pressured to return to work while she was on medical leave. In court filings Amazon said Yurchak was fired after refusing to sanitize worker harnesses.
The apparent pattern of firing, suspending or disciplining organizers has played out nationwide.
Chris Smalls, who worked at a warehouse in Staten Island, New York, organized a walkout on March 30, 2020, to protest the lack of Covid-19 protections for warehouse workers. He and other workers, including Gerald Bryson and Derrick Palmer, held signs outside the building with messages such as “Treat your workers like your customers” and “Alexa, send us home.”
Gerald Bryson protests conditions at Amazon’s Staten Island distribution facility in New York City on March 30, 2020.Spencer Platt / Getty Images file
Amazon fired or disciplined all three of them in the following weeks.
Amazon said it fired Smalls on the day of the protest for violating a 14-day quarantine after coming into contact with an employee who tested positive for Covid-19. Smalls said lots of other workers were in contact with the same employee for longer time periods. But he was singled out for asking management to sanitize the warehouse and be more transparent about positive Covid cases.
A week later, on Monday, April 6, Palmer, Bryson and the recently fired Smalls attended a second protest outside the facility.
Bryson, who joined the protest on his day off, was fired two weeks later for violating Amazon’s “vulgar language” policy after a two-minute interaction with another employee who disagreed with the protest. According to a statement submitted to the NLRB, reviewed by NBC News, the woman repeatedly told him to “get the f— out of here” and told him in “racially charged language” to “go back to where you came from, go back to the Bronx.” Bryson initially responded by telling the woman he was protesting for her, too. But, according to the NLRB filing, as her insults escalated he called her a “bitch” before walking away.
“I am a renegade, a rebel. If you stomp on my foot, I will let you know and expect an apology,” Bryson said. “But I have never been aggressive to a male or female.”
Like Jonathan Bailey from the Queens warehouse, Bryson believes his race played a part in his firing. Both men are Black.
“The person they backed made racial comments towards me. But that person kept their job and I was fired — while protesting on my day off,” he said.
Seay of Amazon said the company had “zero tolerance for racism or retaliation of any kind.”
In June 2020, Bryson filed an unfair labor practice charge to the NLRB, alleging that Amazon illegally retaliated against him for organizing. The NLRB investigated and determined in December that the complaint had merit. Bryson is awaiting a hearing before an NLRB judge.
Gerald Bryson filed an unfair labor practice charge with the NLRB in June alleging that Amazon illegally retaliated against him for organizing.Victor J. Blue / for NBC News
An Amazon spokesperson said that Bryson was “witnessed by other employees bullying and intimidating a female associate” and that the company looked forward to “sharing the facts on this case.”
Palmer, who helped organize both protests, also faced disciplinary action for violating Amazon’s social-distancing rules. On April 10, 2020, the same day Bryson was suspended, he says he was given a “final write-up,” typically reserved for a third rule violation, without receiving any previous write-ups.
“They were attempting to find any little thing they could get me on to fire me,” he said. “But they found out I had an attorney and fell back from that because they got a lot of scrutiny for firing Chris.”
In February, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Amazon for failing to protect workers at warehouses in Staten Island and Queens and accused the company of illegally retaliating against workers who complained.
Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said that the AG’s filing did not present an “accurate picture of Amazon’s industry-leading response to the pandemic.”
Brett Daniels, 28, who was let go in January from his job at Amazon’s warehouse in Chandler, Arizona, said that managers would “hush” him when speaking about workplace issues and organizing. He described coming back from a November 2020 protest in Seattle, organized by the Congress of Essential Workers, a worker advocacy group created by Chris Smalls after he was fired. He said he was approached by a manager he’d never spoken to before.
“He said, ‘Brett, right?’ and told me I had been pinged on the cameras for breaking social-distancing rules because someone else had entered my bubble,” Daniels said. “I think they were letting me know they were watching me.”
The firings triggered a wave of solidarity from some of Amazon’s corporate employees, including user experience designers Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, who publicly advocated for warehouse workers via their Twitter accounts.
Cunningham and Costa were both fired last April 13 for what Amazon described to The Washington Post as “repeated violations of internal policies.”
Two weeks later, Tim Bray, a vice president at Amazon Web Services resigned, writing in a blog post that the justification Amazon gave for firing Cunningham and Costa was “laughable.”
“The Covid pandemic has cast a very harsh light on the stark inequality of power and wealth that are a feature of 21st century capitalism,” Bray said in an interview. “With Covid, the penalty for the working class might be death. You had to go to the warehouse while white collar workers stayed at home. It’s not terribly surprising that labor sentiments have been strengthened over the last year.”
This week, all eyes are on Bessemer, Alabama, where union ballots are being counted.
“It’s been a great shot in the arm for workers around the world who want to organize not only at Amazon, but other industries,” said Christy Hoffman, general secretary of UNI Global Union, which has created a worldwide alliance of unions organizing Amazon workers in 22 countries.
“If they can win in Alabama, we can do it anywhere,” she said of the workers. “If they don’t win, it doesn’t mean it’s over. It means there’s more work to do.”
CORRECTION (March 31, 2021, 3:54 p.m.) A previous version of this article misstated the status of Courtney Bowden’s NLRB claim against Amazon. She withdrew it on March 24 after reaching a private settlement with Amazon. She does not have a hearing scheduled with an NLRB judge this year.
https://time.com/5629233/amazon-warehouse-employee-treatment-robots/
I Worked at an Amazon Fulfillment Center; They Treat Workers Like Robots
Workers protest at an Amazon fulfillment center in Minnesota on March 8.
JULY 18, 2019 5:36 AM EDT
Guendelsberger is the author of On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
Agroup of workers with their fists raised in solidarity hold a scrawled sign: “We are humans not robots!” They and others at an Amazon warehouse in Minnesota protested in March and on July’s Amazon Prime Days. They were speaking against the day-to-day dehumanizing reality of their workplace.
If your only interaction with Amazon is packages arriving on your doorstep, it can be hard to understand what workers are unhappy about, or why one described his fulfillment center as an “existential sh-thole,” or why so many others shared stories about crying at work.
I’m among them. I took a job in an Amazon fulfillment center in Indiana over a few weeks–along with a call center in North Carolina and a McDonald’s in San Francisco–to investigate the experience of low-wage work.
I wasn’t prepared for how exhausting working at Amazon would be. It took my body two weeks to adjust to the agony of walking 15 miles a day and doing hundreds of squats. But as the physical stress got more manageable, the mental stress of being held to the productivity standards of a robot became an even bigger problem.
Technology has enabled employers to enforce a work pace with no room for inefficiency, squeezing every ounce of downtime out of workers’ days. The scan gun I used to do my job was also my own personal digital manager. Every single thing I did was monitored and timed. After I completed a task, the scan gun not only immediately gave me a new one but also started counting down the seconds I had left to do it.
It also alerted a manager if I had too many minutes of “Time Off Task.” At my warehouse, you were expected to be off task for only 18 minutes per shift–mine was 6:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.–which included using the bathroom, getting a drink of water or just walking slower than the algorithm dictated, though we did have a 30-minute unpaid lunch. It created a constant buzz of low-grade panic, and the isolation and monotony of the work left me feeling as if I were losing my mind. Imagine experiencing that month after month.
I felt as if the company wanted us to be robots–never stopping, never letting our minds wander off task. I felt an incredible amount of pressure to repress the human “failings” that made me less efficient than a machine. (Amazon in response said that this is not an “accurate portrayal of working in our buildings” and that it is “proud of our safe workplaces.”)
Unless you’ve worked a low-wage service job over the past decade or so, it’s hard to understand how stressful widespread monitoring technology in the workplace has made life for the bottom half of the labor market. The media have tended to focus on unsafe work conditions and low wages at fulfillment centers. Compared with companies offering other warehousing and unskilled jobs, dozens of current and former workers I spoke to agreed, Amazon was obsessed with safety and generally did have better wages and benefits, even before it raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour.
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Amazon is the apex predator of the modern economy; as with Walmart in the ’90s, anyone who wants to compete with it will have to adopt its labor practices. According to Amazon, its U.S. workforce will reach 300,000 employees this year, many of whom work in blue collar jobs. Overall, low-wage jobs have been so routinized and deskilled that “about 47% of total U.S. employment is at risk” of being lost to automation, according to a 2013 Oxford study.
Human workers are still necessary. We remain vastly superior to machines at conversation, creativity, visual recognition and fine motor control, and we’re still a little cheaper. But we’re not as good at highly inflexible, repetitive tasks as machines and algorithms.
The more human a worker is, the less productive and desirable she is in the cold eyes of the market. And today’s technology makes it possible for employers to force workers to suppress their humanity or risk losing their jobs. I’d bet that most of you, even those with white collar jobs, can already identify those same kinds of metrics and monitoring technologies creeping into your daily life.
Those Amazon workers want to be treated like human beings. Sounds reasonable to me.
This appears in the July 29, 2019 issue of TIME.
Opinion: Amazon warehouse jobs aren’t worth the salary despite the effects of COVID-19
Outside of the Amazon Tracy fulfillment center.
by Catlan Nguyen, Social Media Editor
August 3, 2020
In order to become a monopoly, a company must cut some costs to become profitable and Amazon is no stranger to this.
While Amazon offers slightly above average pay for almost every level of its company, is the pay worth it for its workers?
After working at an Amazon warehouse myself for about four weeks, I spoke to multiple current or former Amazon warehouse workers — the majority of which are college students — to answer that question. I also spoke to a former Amazon programmer for comparison.
Working at an Amazon warehouse is appealing because the company pays above minimum wage and doesn’t require more than an application, background check and an online orientation program. For an entry-level job with no interview or degree required, it seems like an easy opportunity to work if one needs money quickly.
“My parents wanted me to get a job after I graduated high school to save up some money for college,” a former Inland Empire Warehouse worker and SDSU business student said. “I heard that Amazon was paying above minimum wage, so I was excited and they hired so quickly. Looking back it probably was a trap that they hired so quickly.”
We were all required to sign confidentiality agreements so many of the people I spoke to asked to be anonymous or be referred to by an alias.
Amazon raised its warehouse workers’ salary from $15 per hour to $17 per hour from March to May this year during the statewide shelter-in-place mandate brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. After the shelter-in-place mandate was lifted in California, pay returned to $15.25/hr.
“Being a business major, by raising workers’ pay during the virus lockdown, it has economic implications,” the same former Inland Empire Warehouse worker and SDSU student said. “It might make it tougher for other warehouses and smaller companies to hire people. When Amazon raised their salaries, it made them more of a monopoly.”
An Amazon Software Development Engineer agreed with this insight and believes this could be why Amazon has become so successful.
A former Tracy warehouse worker and San Joaquin Delta College student said the pay decrease after two months of lockdown was proof of Amazon showing no regard for their workers.
“That was like the biggest ‘f–k you’ to the employees because we’re doing a job that nobody wants to do in a pandemic,” she said. “They’re supposedly taking all these precautions to prevent the spread of the virus but we’re basically putting our lives at risk and all our loved ones at risk all for $2 more an hour.”
The same former Tracy warehouse worker found the work humbling but felt like a slave for the corporation after working there for five weeks.
This location implemented virus preventative measures such as requiring every worker to wear a mask while inside, undergo fever screenings at each entrance and practice social distancing during work and breaks.
Despite these measures, this location reported at least 24 cases of COVID-19 and one COVID-19 related death among its workforce as of July 29, according to a current Tracy warehouse worker and Modesto Junior College student. Every worker at the warehouse was notified of each new case and would be individually contacted if they were ever in close proximity to the infected person.
“After they told me about the first case (at my warehouse) I took a day off,” Mount San Jacinto College student and current warehouse worker Rose said. “It’s really nerve-wracking knowing somebody got it and they were just around you. Everywhere I go, not just at my warehouse, people don’t know how to wear masks–they don’t put it over their mouths properly.”
Rose, who asked to be identified by her first name only, is a part-time student and has worked full-time at Amazon on-and-off in three different warehouse locations in Southern California to support herself financially. Her warehouse in San Bernardino had three new cases of the virus over the span of three weeks.
A current Stockton warehouse worker said their location has 10 cases of the virus as of July 14.
A former Tracy warehouse worker student described her experience with Amazon’s Human Resource department when she feared she may have been exposed to the virus.
“I was with someone who had contracted the virus, my friend, and I took it upon myself to take a temporary leave,” she said. “After I got my results back, I was negative so I was able to return to work. I emailed H.R. describing how I wasn’t at work because of the potential risk, but I still received a termination letter.”
She then went directly to Human Resources in person to show her COVID-19 test results and explain how she had a good reason to miss work. However, they asked her if she had a doctor’s note, describing her condition, and she told them she had her COVID-19 lab test results. Human Resources then said, “it wasn’t good enough.”
Even before the virus, some workers had issues receiving adequate healthcare from injuries sustained on the job.
Rose sustained an injury her first week working for Amazon a few years ago and described how the medical professionals at the locations she worked at were hired through a for-profit clinic.
“We were working 12-hour shifts that week and I had left early and when I was walking out they have these rubber guards that are supposed to be glued down so they don’t move, but at my building they didn’t take the precaution to glue it down,” Rose said. “My foot got caught in the turnstile while I was walking out and instead of that rubber guard preventing it, my foot got completely smashed. It kind of ruined my arches.”
Rose said Amazon’s response to her injury was more focused on speed rather than the quality of care.
“They offered me worker’s compensation, but it was a really difficult process,” Rose said. “With Amazon, they go through a for-profit clinic, so the doctors aren’t really focused so much on the healing and recovery of their employees. They’re more focused on just getting them in and out quickly.”
The warehouse Rose worked at didn’t allow her to do any physical therapy to help fix her muscle injury and didn’t conduct the required M.R.I. until a month after the injury.
Former Tracy warehouse worker and MJC student Elianna said on her last day, she was feeling light-headed due to her anemia and the nurse at her warehouse told her to go back to work and call her personal doctor later.
“I literally got so mad that I just left because I was so done,” Elianna said.
Rose, who has worked in other warehouses, said Amazon has some of the highest safety standards among warehouse jobs.
However, other workers said they felt the conditions weren’t as safe as they could be.
“The conditions were so different from my past jobs,” Elianna said. “I thought they were going to be so much better compared to what they were telling us in orientation in terms of conditions and breaks. In the video, it seemed like we were going to get more training, but we didn’t. It was just two days.”
Inside the warehouse, Amazon associates could voice their opinion on the “Voice of the Associate” whiteboard. Comments seen here include “Safety is not Amazon’s #1 priority or it would be fixed” and “Please be transparent about the # of Covid cases!!!” (Photo provided by Tracy Warehouse Worker.)
According to Rose, Amazon specifically overworks their employees to an extremely unhealthy point and other workers agreed with this.
“Every single one of them looked like they wanted to die,” a former Tracy warehouse worker and SJDC student said.
Both Rose and the former Tracy warehouse worker mentioned how they noticed their coworkers seemed depressed and most turned to alcohol or drugs to cope.
“Everyone I know that works there is either an alcoholic, depressed or a drug addict,” Rose said. “I don’t think this is a common thing among other warehouses. I think it’s just with Amazon because they make us work 10-hour shifts and 12-hour overtime days.”
Food in the break rooms at Amazon is not free for workers but vending machines at Amazon provide workers with free over-the-counter painkillers such as Ibuprofen and Advil.
“For how hard we work, that stuff in the breakroom should’ve been free or cost a lot less,” Eliana said. “They were overpriced. With the painkiller vending machines, I don’t know how I feel about that because Amazon doesn’t really check if they’re hiring drug addicts and that could be enabling them.”
The Amazon warehouse job application said a urine drug test would be required, but I, along with some of the other workers I spoke to, never took one.
Additionally, I was told if I wanted to be hired on as a full-time associate, I would be required to undergo a mouth-swab drug test.
Most of the workers I interviewed lasted about three to five weeks working in an Amazon warehouse and the Amazon Software Engineer Programmer said he noticed quick turnover at his level in Amazon’s organization too. He quit after only a year.
While Amazon has created jobs and stimulated the economy during their precipitous rise, its warehouse conditions still exploit many workers and haven’t significantly improved over the years.
Many of the workers agreed that the pay and consistent hours were the best part of the job but they didn’t see themselves working there forever.
Catlan Nguyen is a senior studying Journalism.
Safety in the Workplace: Amazon Under Fire for Exposing Warehouse Employees to Unnecessary Risks
Amazon has created more than 130,000 jobs in the last year and currently employs over half a million people around the world. Ensuring the safety of their employees claims to be a top priority, but the company has recently been criticized for its failure to examine safety hazards that have caused unnecessary injury-and even death-on the job.
In April 2018, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health listed Amazon as one of the most dangerous places to work in the United States, citing lack of concern for the health and safety of its employees, failure to report injuries and unsafe working conditions.
While investigating accidents in the workplace, it was uncovered that Amazon’s culture supports apathy when dealing with work-related injury complaints. Numerous employees reported suffering from work-related injuries that have left them without income, or even homeless.
Many Amazon employees reported feeling pressure from upper management to have injuries treated by an on-site medical professional or attributing the injury to a pre-existing condition, therefore, not counting the injury on OSHA reports.
Amazon warehouse employees have consistently complained that the company has failed to comply with their own workers’ compensation regulations. Amazon defends this claim by stating that employees working in fulfillment centers should expect to stand, walk, lift and bend, despite associated risks.
Complaints from Amazon Employees Have Developed into Lawsuits and Fines
An unsettling number of employees have filed personal injury lawsuits against Amazon because of injuries sustained at work. In general, the claims filed in these lawsuits have stated:
- Negligence on behalf of Amazon by not protecting employees from potentially hazardous situations.
- Wrongful termination related to disability or injury incurred while on the job.
- Failure to deliver and complete workers’ compensation paperwork.
- Exposing employees to ergonomic risk factors resulting in injury.
Employees who have suffered injuries while working at Amazon’s fulfillment centers have also experienced expensive medical bills linked to their injuries, and face many other harmful repercussions of unemployment. Despite numerous lawsuits and fines, Amazon claims their performance and employment expectations are well within
Note: is is a law firm that represents employees injuries or with other employment related issue, but is included to demonstrate the types of issues being faced by Amazon employees.