VOX:
While this may be great for Amazon’s bottom line, all this shopping has a real human cost. As plenty of Amazon employees have attested, working in the company’s warehouses is grueling. Earlier this summer, a former Amazon fulfillment center manager from California reached out to me after I wrote about Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) sparring with Amazon over worker rights and pay rates. (The battle ended in Amazon raising the hourly rate to $15 an hour but cutting company stock grants and bonuses.) The former Amazon employee, a US Air Force veteran, requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions.
This story is unlikely to change anyone’s mind about shopping on Amazon but, like all the other stories about working conditions at an Amazon warehouse we’ve seen over the years, it shows how hard the job is.
The problem is: Even if you want to divorce Amazon, the prices, selection, and service are almost impossible to beat.
Antitrust laws were never designed to deal with this.
Exactly. I’d *love* to dump Amazon but, especially because we live in a small, fairly isolated area, Amazon is the only way we can get some products. 🙁
Try doing it in your later years while struggling to survive on a fixed income, and when nobody else will hire you, even if you’re a veteran.
A few thoughts…
On the breaks etc. Those don’t seem out of line. They’re the minimum required but I’m not sure why two 15 min breaks and 30 mins for lunch is considered abusive. As for ‘bathroom breaks’ which were called out, unless you have an issue, you should be OK as that’s about 2.5 hours between break periods. Managers should, though, have discretion to allow more if an employee does need more.
On the holidays… I imagine it’s brutal. A friend is a UPS driver and he hates this time of year. ANYONE involved in getting packages out or even retail probably does. But is Amazon worse than any other large retailer who does a lot of their own fulfillment? I mean, folks, how do you THINK stuff gets to you?
On unionizing… workers should absolutely unionize the fulfillment centers. Right now, a worker has no power to bargain. That’s the point of unions, to counterbalance the weight of corporations.
On management having no leeway in discipline… that’s Amazon. It’s one reason they’re so efficient but it has a real human cost and is silly. Ideally, they’d simply hold managers to a target – “pick and pack X boxes/hour (or per shift). How you and your team does that is up to you… here’s the minimum things you need to allow employees, though (breaks, etc)”
Frankly, if Amazon could do all the fulfillment with robots, they would, I’m sure. The upside of that will be that no one will have to deal with work like this. The downside is that there wont be work like this for people, who will have to do other things to make money.
Look, I hate to be “that guy”, but reading this article, it doesn’t sound like a hard job at all. I worked in food distribution warehouses in my late teens where you’re inside a 40 foot trailer and it’s so hot you have to work shirtless, and there’s a conveyer sending you boxes as fast as the other guys can fill it up and it’s your job to stack it all so none of it gets crushed while out on the road. Weight of those boxes could be up to 50lbs (cheese is heavy man). I’d have to stack dozens of those and if you didn’t have space, you might have to move a whole stack that you just built so the heavy boxes could be on the bottom. And you absolutely could not stop the belt to pee or for any other reason until that break bell rang.
So was that a great job? Hell no man, it was probably the worst job I ever had, and it was so physically demanding there was nobody over 30 doing it. But as manual labor goes, there were a lot of worse jobs we could have been doing. My buddy used to work on a dairy farm. The stories he has…..
So all I’m saying is, being an Amazon picker doesn’t sound like a great career to me, but for a manual laborer, it doesn’t sound like a bad job at all.
I’m going to add to this though that our rate of pay was probably quite a bit more than $15/hour considering it was 1986. I don’t recall the pay exactly but working backwards using a calculator on the net, $15 today was about $6.50 and I know I was making more than that.