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As Britain suffers its worst cost-of-living crisis in decades, hundreds of workers at Amazon AMZN have been laid off due to high inflation and rising energy costs.
A warehouse in Coventry, England, has asked for a pay rise this month. If the demand is not met, he said, we will strike from Black Friday and during the holiday shopping season in November.
Like other recent labor actions by US rail workers and British Royal Mail workers, the Amazon workers’ action has sparked a debate over who is to blame for the outages.
The true genius of Amazon
Amazon owes its success to several factors, including a sophisticated data-driven approach. But the real genius lies in its logistics innovations – including route optimization, fleet planning and metadata management – that reduce “click-to-ship” times and provide customers with unprecedentedly fast and reliable on-time deliveries. Amazon Prime-branded planes and trucks transport packages around the world, working like clockwork, even during a pandemic that has halted the rest of the economy.
The head of the operation was Jeff Wilke, a man who combined Taylorism (breaking down production into narrow, closely monitored and measurable repetitive tasks) and Fordism (assembly line techniques) to create a warehouse model capable of processing over a million units. day. With the help of robots and close supervision, human “pickers” and “storers” now process many times that amount of goods per hour.
But the system has become famous for testing the limits of human workers. Recent studies show that the majority of Amazon customers enjoy convenience at the expense of Amazon’s low-paid employees.
Absolutely Dickensian
For example, last year The New York Times found working conditions at Amazon’s New York “fulfillment center” to be downright Dickensian. Workers say they face heavy physical labor, long shifts (10.5-12 hours) and high rates of injuries and accidents (double the rate of non-Amazon warehouses) after going through airport-style security gates.
Exacerbating infidelity, everyone is tightly controlled by a dystopian monitoring system that punishes violations of talking to co-workers or missing productivity targets (which often amounts to processing 30 packages per minute, or a total of one minute needed to lift a shelf, box, and shelf. Deliver goods).
The threat of layoffs—or what the company calls “getting fired”—is huge, and workers seeking HR help, especially when it comes to asking for disability leave or pay, run into a Kafkaesque system of stonewalling.
Horror stories have Amazon drivers having to urinate in plastic bottles or defecate in plastic bags to stay on schedule. Workers are reported to be selling their wedding rings or relying on food stamps to make ends meet. In response to these bills, the company has offered ham-handed corporate responses, such as “meditation rooms” that look like large coffins.
It’s no surprise that union efforts are growing at Amazon facilities.
Union breakdown
Despite the company’s systematic efforts to stifle organizing, a union succeeded at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island following a narrow loss earlier this year in a similar effort in Alabama. In the year In 2018, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the Stop Bad Employers (“Stop BEZOS”) Act, eliminating subsidies that taxed companies for 100% of public government benefits they receive. And now, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has opened investigations into Amazon’s working conditions.
These conflicts severely undermined Big Tech’s narrative about itself. Amazon may be a logistics pioneer, but it doesn’t rely on labor exploitation like the “Devil’s Mills” of the first industrial revolution.
According to Amazon’s origin story, it all started with Jeff Bezos selling books out of his garage and ringing a bell every time an order came in. Yet even in the early days there was a culture of overwork (employees were required to log at least 60 hours a week), rule-bending, dangerous workplace conditions (unsealed knives falling off conveyor belts) and Orwellian performance monitoring.
Amazon is now one of the world’s largest companies. But, as I’ve argued elsewhere, bigger isn’t always better. While some of its practices may have been framed as innovative and adaptive when it was younger, today it systematically reduces employees to data points.
Disposable manpower
Before Bezos stepped down as CEO last year, he viewed employee outcry as a feature rather than a flaw in Amazon’s model. To have an entrenched workforce, it is reported to be a “step toward mediocrity.” So the company experiences roughly 150% employee turnover per year—twice the industry average—which means its entire workforce is replaced every eight months.
This model is not only inhuman and inhumane; It can also be unsustainable. Research shows that happy employees are more productive. And, as an internal company memo warned earlier this year, “If we continue business as usual, Amazon will eliminate the workforce in its U.S. network by 2024.”
Bezos was the world’s richest man from 2017 to 2021, with an estimated net worth of nearly $140 billion. The amount of wealth he estimates is out of touch with the average Amazon employee. As one employee put it in 2020, I’m sure Mr. Bezos will [the New York City warehouse] as an undercover boss.”
Coventry workers who have asked for a cost-of-living adjustment would no doubt agree. Amazon executives need to think carefully about the human costs of their business model. If you need a quiet place to contemplate, you can always try one of the meditation coffins.
Antara Haldar is Associate Professor of Empirical Legal Studies at the University of Cambridge.
This commentary was published by Project Syndicate – with permission from Amazon’s Satanic Mills.
Recommended reading
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Jeff Bezos Built Amazon into a Monolith – But Did It Hurt American Workers?
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