Amazon Employee Woes

Doesn’t sound like Amazon are interested in any employer of the month type awards.

According to this Times Online UK article based on the experiences of a reporter who worked undercover at a UK depot for a week.

Employees not allowed unpaid time off sick even with doctors note.

Made to work compulsory night shift after 5 days effectively killing their weekends.

Given ridiculous quotas to meet.

have to walk up to 14 miles every shift.

Penalized by not getting a bonus if other members of their team don’t make quota.

Charged approx $12 dollars a day for transport to and from the workplace which is in an out of the way place.

Apparently non of this is actually illegal but amazon are obviously intent on squeezing every last drop of productivity out of it’s workers regardless of the effects it has on them or their families. I must say that I am surprised that an employer in the UK is allowed to penalize single sick days taken with a doctor’s note.

from the original article:

The undercover reporter was given a half-point penalty on her first full day for being late. She had arrived early but did not realise she was required to swipe a card to register her presence. She was told she would work as a packer, putting varying items into boxes, and was told she was expected to pack 140 “units” an hour. Senior staff confided that they felt the target was “ridiculous” and almost impossible to reach.

On her first day working in the warehouse one of the reporter’s fellow workers described how she was told off by the area manager for not hitting her target and was in “agony” after packing heavy Xbox game consoles for most of her shift.

The original Times article also has the standard boilerplate disclaimer from one of the people responsible for these work conditions. No point in reproducing it here as it is so predictable and basically content free.

The following is from a job advertisement for Amazon US so it seems as if amazon’s disregard for their worker’s wellbeing is international:

The post specifies that people involved in “Picking/Order Selection” are required to “stand on feet for 8-10 hours,” and “walk 10-15 miles a day.”

Shipping and receiving aren’t much better.

To do shipping, potential employees “must be able to stand on feet for 8-10 hours.” And workers in ‘receiving’ are required to “stand fairly stationary throughout shift for 8-10 hours,” while they also have to “lift, bend, stoop and squat repetitively.”

Huffington Post Article

A quick related note. I do have some Amazon stuff for sale on this site – that will all be removed over the next couple of days. I knew that they weren’t the best employers in the world but I cannot in all honesty do anything that supports a company with so little regard for the fellow human beings who comprise it’s work force.

Since living in the US I have discovered that if a company uses the fuzzy “associate” in place of employee they are very unlikely to be good employers – think Walmart.