We often hear about the poor conditions that Amazon workers have to face. Is this common among other online retailers, or a problem unique to Amazon?
I’ve read several of the articles about Amazon. I take these with a large grain of salt and a few eye-rolls. I would characterize this as a large freight handling business (UPS, FedEx, etc.) than something unique to e-commerce.
I compared what I read to my own experiences in the freight/trucking world.
Warehouses are poorly heated/air-conditioned. The one’s I worked in had no climate control other than just-above-freezing radiant heaters. Sounds normal to me.
Workers have to “pick” 200 items pre hour to keep their job. As a UPS unloader, I had to hit a 775 boxes/hour minimum (or get fired). As a UPS sorter, my minimum acceptable rate was 575/hour (or get fired). Amazon sounds pretty easy to me.
Few to no breaks. Again, no breaks when I worked warehouses, except for lunch. When I worked offshore oil rigs, it was 12 hours straight, no formal breaks at all. We worked a system where one ran down to the café and brought back sandwiches – which we ate while working. When I began driving a UPS truck, I had to complete over 100 stops per day. I worked through my “lunch hour” every day to meet the schedule (they had a formula for each route, we left with “X” hours of boxes to deliver, failure to meet this had consequences). Amazon doesn’t seem too bad in this regard either, unless they’re actively preventing workers from eating.
I spent some time as a “picker” for a vitamin/supplement company. Hands down, worst job I ever had.
10-hour days, concrete floors, co-workers who would take the “easier” tickets and not do their damn jobs, the OSHA posters were posted ABOVE the loading bay doors (so nobody who could read would be able to), we were told not to climb the shelves, but not given ladders, and every day, we’d have the bosses stop us from working and yell at us for 20 minutes that we needed to work more efficiently. Nothing motivates ya like being told “I can fire every last one of you, and have you replaced by convicts in an hour!”
The only reason I lasted more than a month there was because it was still better than being at home.
Doesn’t sound like the working conditions at Amazon distribution centers are violating any sort of labor laws. The jobs sound better than many alternatives and pay a decent wage without a lot of preexisting skills. Sure it’s not the same as working in an air conditioned office area, with free breakfast and consensus decision making, but they are apparently paying enough to fill their demand for workers.