Amazon Employee Explains the Poor Working Conditions of An Amazon Warehouse

Earlier this week, James Bloodworth, a former UK Amazon employee that worked undercover in the "fulfillment center" for six-months, released a book detailing the mistreatment of warehouse employees at the commerce company. He described the work culture as a prison after discovering that Amazon warehouse staff were peeing in bottles to avoid taking too many breaks. Since the report first broke, many Amazon employees have come out to share their thoughts on the working conditions, including one Reddit user who claims that "the post is pretty spot on": They don't monitor bathroom breaks, but [your] individual rate (or production goal) [doesn't] account for bathroom breaks, or... let's say there is a problem like you need [two] of something and there's only one left, well you have to put on your "andon"... wait for someone to come "fix" for you, all the while your rate is dropping. The [two] most common reasons [people] get fired are not hitting rate, and attendance. They don't really try to help you hit rate, they just fire and replace.

My first week there [two] [people] collapsed from dehydration. It's so [commonplace] to see someone collapse that nobody is even shocked anymore. You'll just hear a manager complain that he has to do some report now, while a couple of new [people] try to help the guy (veterans won't risk helping [because] it drips rate). No sitting allowed, and there's nowhere to sit anywhere except the break rooms. Before the robots (they call them kivas) pickers would regularly walk 10-15 miles a day, now it's just stand for 10-12 hours a day. [People] complain about the heat all the time but we just get told 80 degrees (Fahrenheit obviously) is a safe working temp. [Sometimes] they will pull out a thermometer, but even when it hits 85 they just say it's fine. There's been deaths, at least one in my building... Amazon likes to keep it all hush hush. Heard about others, you can find the stories if you search for it, but Amazon does a good job burying it... Amazon has denied the allegations, saying: "Amazon ensures all of its associates have easy access to toilet facilities which are just a short walk from where they are working. Amazon provides a safe and positive workplace for thousands of people across the UK with competitive pay and benefits from day one. We have not been provided with confirmation that the people who completed the survey worked at Amazon and we don't recognize these allegations as an accurate portrayal of activities in our buildings."

Comments

8 Years of experience

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked at Amazon for eight years, starting as a temp warehouse worker doing cycle counts in the Inventory department going through the entire IT department then ending my career there back in the Inventory department doing development for data dashboards and various ETL work.

I have no formal education other than high school, everything else has just been through hobbies and self learning. I managed about one "promotion" every 18 months or so, traveling the country, to other countries, moving to new states. I say "promotion" because you get the fancy new job, etc but the pay is worthless. Depending on where you join Amazon that is the benchmark of where you will go due to policies on pay raises etc, and yes those apply to promotions too, not just yearly reviews.

Since I started as a temp that basically sealed my fate, after 8 years and 6 or so promotions I was making 23 dollars an hour, with about 20 shares of stock included (which vest after 2 years with a 40% tax) - building custom apps for one of the largest companies in the world. When I was an IT Engineer I was given $20.50 an hour and 3 shares, to launch new buildings, train new IT teams, manage servers, manage site wide DNS, phone systems, the expansive network. Yet a new peer hired from outside the company would come in and make 27-28 an hour plus stock.

I think the problem with Amazon isn't the grueling work conditions, etc. As I've had far worse jobs (that were union even), and it's fairly easy to transfer or promote into an "easy" position but that they are constantly dangling the carrot, you always feel like one day you'll make it, and even if you do you'll have nothing to show for it.

SK

I'm not saying he's lying, but...

[wonkey_monkey]

Earlier this week, James Bloodworth, a former UK Amazon employee that worked undercover in the "fulfillment center" for six-months, released a book

Not that I'm saying he's lying, or even exaggerating, but you've got to at least acknowledge the fact that he went in with an agenda, and is coming out with a book to sell.

Though he obviously didn't think it through. If he'd gone undercover somewhere else, he could've sold the book on Amazon. D'oh!

The same happens at Tesco. (read on)

[Anonymous Coward]

When I jumped countries and came to live in the UK I was forced to take the first available job just to get going. I ended up in a large Tesco distribution centre which supplies the whole North West from Manchester to Liverpool and Wales.

Here's what I witnessed:
- 80% of the staff consisted of agency workers, most of them foreign.
- Rota was a myth; you were informed about the hours you were expected to work 2 to 4 hours before the beginning of your shift by a text or a call if you failed to respond within an hour.
- No guaranteed hours. The weakest workers could be told to go home after as little as 2 hours of work...
- ...but most days the strong ones were expected to work at least 10 hour shifts and it was a common practice for supervisors to ask for 12.
- Everyone had to wear a wrist-mounted scanner (AMT - arm-mounted terminal) which also tracked your performance. You were not given any extra time for toilet breaks.
- Agency workers (who, again, were the majority) were paid wages based on their performance. 80% - minimum wage (£7.50 p/h at that time), 100% - £8.10p/h and 110% (upper threshold) - £8.60 p/h.
- Your performance was often affected by random events. Sometimes one issue was enough to wreck your performance for the entire day. Crowded lanes, missing products, missing pallets, spillages, oversized products, jammed or damaged printers, random restarts of your AMT.
- If the above wasn't enough, supervisors were allowed to "steal" your performance by reassigning your already completed tasks to extremely low performers to bump their stats so that the agency as a whole looked better before the client (Tesco). Sadly, this is a fact and not a personal speculation (and common knowledge/practice).
- Agency workers who worked with frozen food in -21C were not given any additional protection equipment. They were expected to work in very thin gloves and suffered from frost burns daily. They usually happened to be the same people over and over again until they quit are replaced with other lucky ones.

Re:veterans?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon's vacation offerings are garbage until you've been there at least a year, then they merely suck. If someone is working in a physically demanding environment for long hours with lost sleep (and meals - I used to work at Amazon and was constantly pressured to work through my lunch) isn't the healthiest lifestyle. Sometimes the body just breaks the fuck down. I don't know if it's consistent everywhere, but the facility that I worked at offered vending machines and as long as you worked the day shift you could maybe find one of three area restaurants to get food from. Otherwise it's gas station food - and that's IF you're not working alone (you can't leave the facility unmanned, so if you work alone it doesn't matter what's open, you're not going anywhere). Employee considerations are garbage. Turnover is high, and amazingly enough most people get fired/let go/asked to leave about three months before they become vested in their stocks. During my year and half at Amazon I went from "98% of Amazon Employees have been here longer than you" to "62% of the employees have been here longer than you" (there's an internal tool that calculates that for you, which should also tell you something). 18 months and 30% of Amazon staff had been replaced - that's a pretty fucking big number.

Having worked there (although not at an FC), I can say that the allegations really don't surprise me despite them being a departure from what I experienced. I was 'lucky' enough to have a desk job there, so the physical demands were not particularly bad. The problem is that "shit rolls downhill" and the managers there would prefer to manipulate their staff and be lazy than do their own job - every aspect of the managers' position is handled by the employees themselves. Self-reviews, self-promotions, self-pay-resolution, and figure-it-out-yourself training. You "manage" your own vacation time through a tool; managers are essentially there for two reasons: 1) Protection for the managers above them (giving them someone to fire when *they* can't keep up) and 2) to hire/fire through a revolving door. They don't get paid well enough to do the job to begin with and with many people it teaches them to be lying douchbags because they need to keep their job and feed their family as well. The only real function that I ever saw them provide to anyone during my time there (and this was fairly consistent, although there were a couple of managers that tried to do the job properly) was "finding the person to engage when the employee had a problem that they couldn't fix by themselves". Absofuckinglutely useless.

I would like to say that there's no "easy" solution, but honestly if they stripped out about 6 layers of management they could "afford" (lol) to hire enough people to do the real work that the people currently there struggling could have enough time to do the job properly instead of rushing through quite literally everything. During the last year and a half there I helped to train no fewer than a dozen different TPMs, and knew of only two that had been there longer than me.

You can call me a bleeding heart liberal all you want, but I do not "live to work", I "work to live". I worked way too hard for the last 20 years to be treated like a fucking volunteer, especially by a company that somehow can't offer competitive rates or enough staff to perform the work yet rakes in quite literally billions in revenue.

Re:veterans?

[mjwx]

so how exactly are there "veterans" of the workplace there?

are people that lazy to find another job?

If you haven't been given an education or your IQ prevents you from getting an adequate education then these people are usually stuck with this sort of work.

This

Those who believe this "oh, just go find another job" malarky have never worked a real job in their lives. They were probably given a cushy job in a large firm straight out of university (which they barely studied at) by one of daddy's contacts.

As someone who didn't have a rich daddy and worked shit jobs when they were young, there are no better jobs if you don't have a good education. You can quit your warehouse job for another job in another warehouse that is just as shit as the one you came from.