USA: Amazon founder and Richest Man in the World Jeff Bezos got shot into space on his very own rocket on July 20, two weeks after retiring and handing off the company to a successor, Andy Jassy, who previously ran Amazon web services.
The spectacle received breathless media coverage. “I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, ’cause you guys paid for all this. Thank you from the bottom of my heart very much,” an ebullient Bezos told the cameras upon his return.
He was right to thank the employees — because here on planet Earth, Amazon workers are paying for it bigtime, performing the invisible heroics of moving the goods that land upon doorsteps around the world.
The workers do so at their own peril: The Washington Post analyzed OSHA data and reported in June that the injury rate in Amazon warehouses is nearly twice that of warehouses run by other companies.
Warehouse conditions don’t make as splashy an Amazon story as a space flight, but the reports are out there about the relentless work that lead to injuries and an employee turnover rate of 100% within a year, according to the National Employment Law Project 2020 data brief “Amazon’s Disposable Workers.” A New York Times investigation published in June put the turnover at 150% a year.
Yesenia Barrera saw both injuries and turnover when she worked from August 2018 to January 2019 at a 50,000 square foot building employing some 5,000 workers in Rialto, in Southern California’s Inland Empire.
She describes a system in which productivity numbers are constantly monitored but workers aren’t informed of the very exacting quotas that they must meet to avoid a write-up or termination. The badge that employees wear to enter the building clocks them in and tracks the number of tasks completed in a given amount of time throughout the workday.
“With the monitoring systems that Amazon uses, people are going to be terminated left and right — it could be your attendance, it could be that the algorithm says you’re not productive enough for the day, or fast enough for the day,” she says. The algorithms decide how many items workers must pick or pack into a box on a conveyor belt in a given amount of time, setting the metrics for each task, performed by different departments. Tasks are assigned specific durations, many in the span of 11 or 15 seconds, according to Barrera.
Not keeping up can result in a writeup or termination for too much “time off task.”
“Say you have to use the restroom,” Barrera says. “The walk to the nearest restroom is going to be five to seven minutes away because the restrooms are not close.” A seven-minute walk plus a 10-minute visit to the restroom put a worker 17 minutes behind. A five-minute walk back — clocked by the monitoring system — puts a worker “off-task” for 22 minutes. All additional trips are noted during the 10-hour shifts.
“All that gets accumulated, and the manager in your department determines whether you get a write-up or terminated — because the algorithm keeps track of that,” Barrera says.
Barrera herself was injured when scanning boxes to assure they were headed to the right destination. The scanner got stuck on the conveyor belt, and when she wrenched it out, it struck her eye. The manager came by and called for a replacement on her walkie-talkie. Barrera says she went to the warehouse clinic and was advised to put a wet paper towel on her eye. She was back at work in minutes.
