Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse
mirror.co.uk
mirror.co.uk
I worked as a sparkwatch at a plywood plant in high school. Basically, a welder’s assistant. This is what regular blue collar jobs look like. You work 12 hour shifts. The machinery is hot. There is constant dust in the air. You are on your feet the entire time. It’s 30ºC in the summer. It’s -20ºC in the winter.
People in Sillicon Valley and especially the press are just completely out of touch with how the rest of the world works and live.
Which is to say: brutality is regular.
While of course the current move towards exposing harassment in the office is important, I don't hear much recognition that the people getting the most benefit are those whose prospects are already cushy to begin with... how much of this is actually "tricking down" to people working in often dehumanizing conditions?
I worked minimum wage until my mid-20's, and most of my high school friends didn't do college (or even graduate high school, in some cases); my parents (who both hold degrees) also worked in warehouses and stuff like that for a while when we first immigrated. In many jobs, being treated like trash, bullied, etc. is the norm. Being constantly talked down to and treated like a child is certainly the norm. And the sexual harassment stories are also much more frequent, and much worse. But people at the lower rungs don't have the social capital to take to Twitter safely, jump ship to a different company, etc. Doing so risks losing next month's bills, losing a good reference, etc. So it's just the way it is.
And I'm talking here in Canada where we have much better worker protection laws, so I can only assume it's even worse in the US.
Same with workplace safety. Sure, on paper you have the right to refuse unsafe work. But don't be surprised if all of a sudden you start getting less hours or get reprimanded for "not being a team player" or some crap.
That's what exploitive labor jobs look like. Not all labor jobs exploit their labor. People literally died fighting for 40 hour weeks. The idea that laborers should be happy to work 60 hour weeks, that they're being thrown a bone is insane and cruel.
It's absurd that in 2017 one would have to argue in defense of a 40 hour week for the labor class. This argument has been going on for literally hundreds of years.
And yes, I too worked a string of labor jobs before getting into software. Landscaping, packing boxes, stocking shelves, cleaning streets, pumping cesspools, etc. The entire tenor of this thread reads "let them eat cake".
Keep in mind that I’m at a delivery station, this is a huge warehouse where we receive packages and sort them for delivery, and not one of the warehouses were products are packaged for shipment. Also, I just ended my night shift so I might fall asleep but I’ll be happy to return later to answer any questions.
Edit: I should add that I really enjoy working here but when I was first hired I was unemployed and homeless, and I’m currently semi-homeless, so I probably have an overly positive outlook on working here. I’ll try and not paint too rosy a picture though.
1. Based on the stories I had heard I was expecting a much more aggressively micromanaged workplace and much stricter metrics on performance. Overall the warehouse managers have been pretty accommodating about allowing us a grace period to get up to speed on what’s expected of us and really aren’t hovering over our shoulders all the time. So long as you get your work done we are mostly left to our own devices. I was expecting a much more “authoritarian” culture.
2. Many things are run surprisingly inefficiently. To be frank, whatever opinion I previously held about Bezos has certainly gone down, and it isn’t because of the way employees are treated. There are a host of things that seem really poorly optimized here and that were apparent to me within a few weeks of starting, and I have zero previous warehouse or logistics experience, and I'm not a smart person. I’ve heard stories that Bezos is extremely hands on but I can’t imagine he would like some of the problems going on.
A few examples for you: the devices we use for stowing packages(this is the process of taking them off of a conveyor belt and placing them inside large bags or shelves for the drivers to pick up) are constantly suffering from hardware and software errors. In fact at the moment, due to the number of people we having working the night sort, I think it’s around 180-200 right now, we often don’t have enough scanners to go around. The conveyor belts are also constantly jamming resulting in work having to stop. We are starting to do so much volume, last night we did around 82k packages from 10pm to 5:45am, that we literally are running out of space to put things in our aisles, and running out of bags to stow into.
There are also some issues regarding the payroll and HR systems. Our shifts are frequently changing due to the warehouse needing more man hours and this isn’t always reflected accurately in pay or time off accrued. When this happens you need to pay a visit to HR, which btw has always handled things quickly and professionally, but we are told to stay clocked in during this time, as we should be. Sometimes I’ll end my shift and see 20-30 people queued in line for HR. Amazon is paying for this time and it seems to be the result of really poorly implemented back end systems.
3. It’s the freaking night shift at Amazon and like I stated earlier, I myself was unemployed and homeless when I first started, and I was definitely surprised by the quality of my coworkers. Most of us are coming from areas of south LA like Inglewood, Compton, Hawthorne, it doesn’t seem like many of us have any education beyond high school, everyone seems to be living paycheck to paycheck, I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one living out of their car, and many people are working multiple jobs. One of my close coworkers usually arrives after his shift at Walmart ends. Yes, there are slackers and down right mean people, but most people just show up and do a competent job. There is however a rather large group of people who really work their asses off. I suppose it might be down to human nature but when you see your coworkers working hard it makes you want to work hard as well, if for no other reason than so they don’t have to pick up your slack. Really many of us could be taking things a bit easier, management wouldn’t be the wiser imo, but we work so that the guy next to you that has to take his kid to school in the morning gets done on time. I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that things like that surprised me.
4. The free coffee and hot chocolate that comes out of a vending machine is much better than I had anticipated.
Every single person who has a job with Amazon is there because they choose to be.
That's not necessarily the case in the UK where people claiming unemployment benefits are compelled to spend 35 hours a week searching and applying for jobs.
Someone in that regime may well have applied to work at Amazon because they would have had a benefit sanction otherwise.
If you're against regulation yet expect companies to work towards the higher social good regardless of profit motive, prepare to be disappointed on both counts.
I work at an Amazon fulfillment center near Austin and I wouldn't say that the people working there seem poorly educated or skilled, at least not less so than average. They're mostly working at Amazon for the benefits and possibility of extra cash during peak. Also bear in mind that, because of what Amazon pays at the bottom tiers, many of these people also have a second job as well, so it's not necessarily the case that this is the only job they could have. There are just too many people working in these jobs for that to be the case.
How are working conditions: organized, chaotic or brutal?
Are there reasonable accommodations for the reality of life's un/certainties like doctors appointments, family/dependent emergencies and similar?
Are workers paid a living wage for the area?
And what's the prevalence or seasonality of CamperForce workers?
Chaotic, and something less than brutal. The first two months I worked there were the most painful of my life, but now I find it more tedious than physically strenuous. Dehydration and repetitive stress injuries are a problem, as is environmental noise, at least where I am.
I wouldn't discount anyone's horror stories about working at Amazon, though. It's a big network, and I'm in a large, modern facility with partial automation so I'm probably in a better position than a lot of people.
>Are there reasonable accommodations for the reality of life's un/certainties like doctors appointments, family/dependent emergencies and similar?
Not always. They allow for emergency time off, sick days, etc like any other company, but they will also sometimes not give much forewarning about mandatory extra time, since that's determined by "business need," and can last indefinitely if Amazon decides. I've seen many complaints from employees with children/other jobs/obligations about it.
>Are workers paid a living wage for the area?
Amazon pays below the cost of living here, but higher than some other entry level jobs, and justifies that by claiming the other benefits they offer make them competitive. As a result (and very likely by design), many employees are forced to work voluntary overtime to make ends meet, or find a second job.
>And what's the prevalence or seasonality of CamperForce workers?
I've never seen them, but I've only ever worked in one location.
It's just cuz they're an "innovative" tech company, that we let them get away with it?
And we are enablers of this BS (I sure am.)
About the only bright part of Amazon at this point is that they clearly hope to eliminate these jobs entirely through automation - of course then we have the social issue to deal with of how we make sure the benefits of automation transfer to society as a whole and not just the shareholders of Amazon.
As the article demonstrates, this luxury comes with a high social cost.
I wouldn't call them rock solid. Even if they were, it's not something that has to, or justifies, mistreating employees.
{1] https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC...
https://cpa.ds.npr.org/kuow/audio/2017/11/PRIMED_Episode4_0.... (Is Amazon your guilty pleasure?)
In one, a subcontractor doing installations for DTV, the warehouse staff workload was pretty light. Sure, they’d hump a bit in the morning and evening to the installers checked out and back in, but the rest of the day was light.
Certainly no overtime. And CALOSHA is quite strict in their rules. I don’t recall a single injury in the warehouse.
Now the installers generally worked quite hard - the good ones completing installations 3-4 per day.
I think the closest I have seen is the office supply chain. When you buy a notebook in a shop like office depot, there is a warehouse upstream that can the same order, it will package the notebook and deliver it the next day to the shop to refill. It's similar to Amazon in that they deliver small items of minimal value, one by one.
Bulk warehouses and specialized products should have better conditions because they can have higher margin and/or less units of volume to manage.
Amazon gets called out because they are the biggest not because they are the worst. Same reason large fast good gets called out but local diners get a pass. the drudgery and low pay may be the same but the name recognition is not.
On a side note, As for Wal Mart, they were called out for similar reasons but also both are called out because setting wage floors especially through the of min wage laws in the US affect government payouts for unionized contracts.
I knew two people who worked at an Amazon warehouse. They both said it was pretty chill and easy. It's a matter of perspective and contrast.
Amazon's really working hard on automating them away as well - the specific picking job described in the article is part of their well know Amazon Robotics Challenge:
Businesses based on grunt work, like Amazon, can't do that. Their existence is based on infinite cheap labor, to execute as much grunt work as cheap as possible.
I have an online store and we always ship within a few hours of receiving the order. It's not hard at all. After it's shipped, it's up to the carrier anyway.
It requires employees on shift every night to handle any package immediately. It requires employees to work on Saturday and Sunday to cover week end orders. It requires employees to do longer hours to complete any burst of orders at any time.
What do you think happen to items that are not in the vicinity? They have to be transported overnight across hundreds of miles to a closer distribution center. Again, night and high pressure work.
Except for the part where you pay for it.
Amazon: 591k employees[1]
I think you can also argue that a happy Costco worker = more sales, as they help customers better. May be harder to make the case that if a guy putting stuff in a box is happier, the end customer is any happier.
0 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/284430/costco-number-of-...
1 - https://www.inc.com/business-insider/jeff-bezos-amazon-emplo...
They are basically a luxury goods store and can afford to pay employees more.
It's hard to get out of Costco without spending $100. They must have a large revenue/employee. They probably have $1k/min flowing out of the store; much more than Walmart.
Sams Club is dingy and poorly lit. It's a reflection of Walmart.
For instance, Wal Mart makes more money if you shop their frequently. They have a vested interest in selling you products.
Costco makes their profits off the membership. So whether you shop there once a year or once a week, they continue to get that membership revenue.
On a side note, I wonder if that's the reason that lines at Costco are so miserable and their hours are so short? Perhaps Costco would prefer that you just stay home? Conversely, my Wal Mart is open 24hrs a day and the checkout process takes a couple minutes.
So does Costco; they are profitable even before membership fees, and that's including fixed costs; so more unit sales means more profits. But the membership fees are pure profit on top of all that (and actually encourage people to shop more.)
> On a side note, I wonder if that's the reason that lines at Costco are so miserable and their hours are so short?
IME, the lines are long because of the quantity of items people tend to purchase (but they also move quickly for their length.) The hours are short because hours with low sales volume accumulate costs quickly.
> Conversely, my Wal Mart is open 24hrs a day and the checkout process takes a couple minutes.
IME, checkout at Walmart is much more variable than Costco; the average may be less time, but the range seems to go much higher. The longer hours, including hours with very low staffing, contribute to that, because there's more opportunity for staffing to not be aligned to a cluster of customers.
Not sure Microsoft is the best example: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/13/business/technology-temp-w...
Tech makes it easy for people to share snappy political prose on Facebook, but what about the non-tech skill of human conversation? Are people any good at talking to each other on political matters?
Also I'm going to remember the fuss about Amazon when their warehouses are 100% robotic, and everyone is mad that it's not creating enough jobs.
Unfortunately many attempts to regulate the workplace result in fewer jobs and thus more people who need 100% support. One example of this is the effort to raise the minimum wage which, not surprising at all, has resulted in more incentive to eliminate or automate low-end jobs. Advocates for a $15 minimum in the fast food industry, for example, should be prepared for a net reduction in jobs in that industry as automation is rolled out or business models are modified to adjust to the higher labor costs.
I'm not saying that all labor regulations are bad but I am saying that the second-order effects of many regulations can make the overall labor situation worse.
Amazon needs to be careful, because the combination of this and tax avoidance could cause them trouble.
> As long as people are willing to do this job for this amount of money, it will probably not get better unfortunately.
child labor didn't stop because parents stopped being willing to sentence their kids to labor, it stopped because of laws. The free market does nothing to guarantee that working conditions are livable or humane. Any suggestion to the contrary is at best naive, at worst malicious.
> I think empowering people to learn employable skills is a better investment.
That's nice, but where does a single parent working wage labor have the time to learn new skills? Who is paying a livable wage for people to learn new skills?
Gee life is hard...really?
You talk about "taking risk" is if it would be solution to social problems. It is not.
no, almost nobody does that. People who work in an Amazon warehouse have no option to take a risk to make something, they are selling their labor because it is the only way to feed themselves. Almost nobody has the ability to "take a risk and make something". Your comment shows a complete ignorance of how the vast majority of people experience the world. The vast, vast majority of people in the world do not control the means of production or have the ability to do so, they sell their labor because they have no other choice.
This attitude, that everyone being exploited is doing so because they made a choice is endemic to our industry and it is the literally reason that our industry is increasingly seen negatively by those outside of our industry. People who work in Amazon warehouses did not one day decide or not decide to take a risk: the vast majority of them are working any job they can get to avoid going hungry.
If you make something and sell it, you are in control of the means of production; you are not selling your labor, you are selling a product. People who work in an Amazon warehouse are not selling a product, they are selling their labor. The vast, vast majority of people on Earth sell their labor.
you are defending inhumane working conditions. You are defending subjugation in the name of business interest.
This attitude and people like you make me sick of the software industry. I am disgusted by how common the attitude of utter indifference is in our industry.
No it did not, it just moved overseas. It is hard to beat the free market -- it just finds the most economical way to get things done, it does not care about human plight.
Oh please. We don't live in the forest, we don't scrape the dirt for nuts and berries, we live in modern industrialized societies with extreme concentrations of wealth. Life is not innately harsh due to uncontrollable circumstance; modern life is harsh because of the greed of corporations like Amazon and the indifference of comments like yours. In a modern industrialized society, there is no legitimate reason for laborers to work torturous 60 hour weeks. Scores of countries have banned these sorts of working conditions but we turn a blind eye to it because at the end of the day the software industry is utterly indifferent to the harm that it is doing to the rest of the population. We've seen labor riots and civil unrest going back hundreds of years to protest these sorts of labor conditions. These aren't random, unavoidable forces of nature: these are the cruel practices of an industry that treats humans like nothing more than numbers to be optimized.
Really, I cannot convince you of this point based on evidence alone. I can only tell you this: I am literally disgusted by your stance and I would never want to work with you or for you, and I think that society as a whole will start to see the software industry as a force of evil, moreso and moreso with each passing day, so long as your stance is the norm.
You're trying to give free agency to people who are very likely choosing between the only job they can find and starvation. That's not a free market, it's wage slavery. Low end employers can do anything they want as long as the alternative for enough of their candidates is starvation.
Or would such a system be 1. too invasive and 2. abused, either by companies or the employees.
Instead there should be programs to pay people minimum wage + tuition to attend community college for in-demand-career related degrees.
Just when you thought tuition costs couldn't go any higher...
Sounds like a great way to increase offer acceptance rates too.
Amazon has a program like that. Unfortunately, it's only for AAS, and they only pay partial tuition.
What Amazon doesn't seem to have is a program to help people grow within Amazon, beyond FC work. There are tons of in-house resources, video tutorials, etc for training that employees simply can never access because they don't have the time.
At some point we have to accept that people should be able to make free choices, and will typically make sub-optimal choices. We can increase the burden on employers but then that means less overall jobs - which then leads to that starvation outcome you mention.
And maybe think a little about the people involved in the products you consume.
Or we should force Amazon to raise their prices which affects low income consumers the most?
Obviously we don't want the societal cost of unhealthy labor exploitation, but it is an incredibly difficult minefield to create mandates which imbalance individual value exchanges. One long tail of this is the loss of labor markets (physical labor as well as mental labor) in favor of automation even at the limited levels of AI we're currently at. Offshoring is another.
It is also, apparently, not difficult to devalue people in a lesser position by reasoning that market forces have moral authority.
A society based on individuals devaluing everyone below them in the hierarchy has consequences.
I think that's being naively idealistic, looking at everything both currently and throughout history. The Stanford Prison Experiment has a lot to say about this, too.
> nor is it difficult to set fair wages and labor practices.
Theoretically, yes. But one issue with the USA in particular is its sheer size and variety. A fair wage in New York City and a fair wage in Podunk are not the same thing. Nor are manual labor practices equivalent across varying climates and population densities. The federal level of governance is wildly disconnected from the populace in both distance and levels of hierarchy. They deal with passing laws most of which arise from local issues that 99% of people (and even lawmakers) don't have a connection to, yet end up affecting everybody. Even at the state level, Californians and New Yorkers are still burdened by laws that tend to originate from the high density centers that might not make any sense outside there.
It's relatively easy to look at a single instance of a job and consider what's fair practice and fair pay in that specific environment, but to do so as a legally enforceable blanket policy is not.
> moral authority ... individuals devaluing everyone ...
There isn't a "devaluation" happening; there's little real value exchanged in the actual work to begin with. This has nothing to do with any notion of "moral authority", which themselves manifest in externalities added to work environments for societal benefit. But the ratio of expense between those externalities and the work itself can get overwhelming for low-end labor, hence automation and offshoring.
> Top comment, find a better job
> Every time
There is an inherent falsehood to this statement: it reads as if there is no alternative to a laissez faire market. Regulation serves to prevent exactly these situations. Universal limits to how many hours you can force someone to work; regulated standards to how much rest you need to give your workers; rules for how much you must pay them.
Unfortunately regulation has failed to do these things. Pieces like this are helpful to remind us of this and to push our governments to do better.
I don't think if you ask anyone that they like that their products are all made, packed, and shipped using wage slavery. Don't you want a world where we all have a little less thanks to efficiency losses but know that everyone is being treated with a minimum level of decency?
As I see it, this is the LAST thing you should do in a situation like that. Though it's counterintuitive, service jobs can be very difficult to attain, because almost anyone is qualified to do it. IE, she thought that working at Starbucks would be easy. I'd argue the opposite: it's hard, because so many people are competing for low-end jobs.
My recommendation to her was to figure out how to do something where the demand is high and the supply is low.
My first job paid $3.35/hr, and some of the hardest jobs I've ever had paid minimum wage.
That’s because Amazon would much rather have robots instead of human beings. In the meantime, it is falling back on humans, but still expecting them to behave as robots.
But... don't look too closely at the internal tools like the stow app or bintools. You'll weep.
What's brutal is their salary, £8.2 an hour, but 55 hours in the busiest season is called brutal? Please.
European working times directive limits the maximum hours to 48 hours a week, although people can opt out of that.
Oh, heavens. That almost sounds like a high school teacher's schedule.
"Two half-hour breaks were the only time off my feet"
Kind of like working in a supermarket?
"toiling for up to 55 hours a week"
The horror??
"[the warehouse] is so vast that just walking to the toilet could take more than five minutes"
Ok, this is actually absurd, and I would expect against some kind of regulation. If they don't have adequate facilities how can they expect efficient work, anyway?
Now the difference was I didn't get fired because my productivity went down .1%, which is the problem with the hyper data Amazon warehouse worker...
Fix this, Jeff.
They wouldn't know why I stopped being a customer, unless I tell them.
Perhaps a better course of action would be to write a letter directly to Jeff.
I also like going to restaurants where there's a required 20% gratuity that gets distributed to all staff and helps pay for employee benefits. I think the overall service, interactions, and experience are far better at those restaurants and I'm happy to pay for it.
I feel the same way about Uber. My family was out of town on vacation and we could have gotten the bus for $10 between the four of us but we paid over twice as much for an Uber.
I wouldn't notice if Amazon charged a few percentage more. I use it for convenience and selection.