Amazon - Worse than WalMart?

Consider the job of "picker." In each warehouse, hundreds of them are simultaneously scrambling throughout a maze of shelves, grabbing products. This is hard, physically painful labor, for two reasons. First, pickers must speed-walk on concrete an average of a dozen miles a day, for an Amazon warehouse is shockingly big-- more than 16 football fields big, or eight city blocks--and pickers must constantly crisscross the expanse. Then, there are miles of seven-foot-high shelves running along the narrow aisles on each floor of the three-story buildings, requiring the swarm of pickers to stoop continuously. They are directed by handheld computers to each target. For example, "Electric Flour Sifters: Dallas sector, section yellow, row H34, bin 22, level D." Then they scan the pick and must put it on the right track of the seven miles of conveyor belts running through the facility, immediately after which they're dispatched by the computer to find the next product.

Secondly, the pace is hellish. The pickers' computers don't just dictate where they're to go next, but how many seconds Amazon's time-motion experts have calculated it should take them to get there. The scanners also record the time each worker actually takes--information that is fed directly into a central, all-knowing computer. The times of every picker are reviewed and scored by managers.

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Score a few demerits and you get "counseled." Score a few more, and you're out the door. And everything workers do is monitored, timed, and scored, beginning the moment they punch-in for their shift. Be one minute late, you'll be assessed half a penalty point; an hour late gets you a whole point; missing a shift is 1.5 points--and six points gets you fired.

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[Lunch] break is not 30 minutes and one second, but 29 minutes and 59 seconds, literally turning "eat and run" into a command. If you're not back at your next picking spot on the dot, you earn penalty points. Never mind that the half-hour lunch period, as she pointed out, "includes the time to get through the metal detector and use the disgustingly overcrowded bathroom... and stand in line to clock out and back in." Should you desire the luxury of a warm meal, there's another line to use the microwave. Likewise, the two 15-minute breaks awarded by the Amazonians include the mass of co-workers scampering a half mile or more to the break room, waiting in line to pass through the despised metal detector and another line if you need to pee. The fifteen-minute "break" is usually reduced to a harried hiatus of under seven minutes.

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All this for $10-$12 an hour, which is under $25,000 a year, gross. But few make even that much, for they don't get year-round work.

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[W]hen sales slack off, you're let go; on the other hand, when sales perk up and managers demand you do a 12-hour shift with no notice (which might let you find a babysitter), you must do it or be fired.

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Also, technically, you don't actually work for [Amazon]. You're hired by temp agencies with Orwellian names like "Integrity Staffing Solutions," or by such warehouse operators as Amalgamated Giant Shipping that do the dirty work for the retailer. This gives Amazon plausible deniability about your treatment--and it means you have no labor rights, for you are an "independent contractor." No health care, no vacation time, no scheduled raises, no promotion track, no route to a full-time or permanent job, no regular schedule, no job protection, and--of course--no union.

  Jim Hightower

Hey. Do you want a job or not?

In fact, when you toil for the man, don't even expect air conditioning. Three summers ago, a series of heat waves hit Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, and Amazon's cement warehouse there became literally a sweatshop. Yet, workers not only were expected to endure the heat that reportedly rose as high as 114 degrees, but also were prodded to maintain the usual relentless pace dictated by the corporate timers. Many couldn't make it... so Amazon had to adapt.

Slow the pace? Don't be ridiculous! Instead, the bosses hired paramedics to tend to workers who, in effect, melted down.

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After a wave of customer outrage rolled into headquarters, and after federal workplace safety inspectors arrived at the warehouse, Bezos had some temporary AC units installed, but the upper levels of the building were still unbearably hot. Amazon's initial fix for this was to hand out popsicles on hot days! And on extremely hot afternoons, workers could choose to leave early, but that meant their pay would be docked. Finally, nine months later, permanent air conditioning was installed.

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The temp agencies that are, in essence, the hiring offshoots of Amazon, have long lines of hard-up applicants waiting for every job in its warehouses, so oppressive conditions and ruthless work requirements that constantly cause workers to quit, be fired, or pass out are no problem for [Amazon owner] Bezos. By paying just one notch above McDonald's, he draws tens of thousands of people willing to get in line for exploitation.

And now Amazon is installing robots to take the place of its exploited pickers.

There’s no job crisis in this country.

I’m kind of sorry I found this article.