Warehouse Woes
Does Amazon Treat Their Employees Fairly?
Many have passed the massive Amazon Distribution Center that was built off of 144th and I-25 on October 5th, 2018. It has brought a great number of job opportunities to the area and of course a central hotspot for package delivering in Colorado. It’s a fact that more people have Amazon Prime then a landline in their homes nowadays. Just about everybody has used Amazon to deliver a package, it’s vastly convenient and simple to use. They have round the clock shipping and ordering which means that there must always be people working, but why wouldn’t there be with such an extreme demand for online purchases that customers expects to be shipped straight to the front door.
Many current and former employees of Amazon, Amazonians as some call them, are speaking out about what really goes on inside the company and what it’s really like to work for them.
A typical day in an Amazon warehouse will have you walking up to around 15 miles, various squatting and bending down to find packages, and being held to the standard of a robot. Workers use a scan gun that tracks their every move and countdown an allotted time to find and place a package where it needs to be. The device does not allow much for any inefficiency.
In the case of a fulfillment center in Indiana, it the device allotted 18 minutes in a 12-hour shift, a 6:30 am to 6:00 pm shift for things known as “time off task” such as using the bathroom, getting water, or for not delivering a package in time. If you succeed in the given minutes to be off-task it will alert a manager. With the addition of a 30-minute lunch break, you could understand how exhausting this could be.
A current technology is currently being worked on to guide workers with a bracelet that will buzz, pointing them in the direction of the package.
In addition, for those who work regular 60-hour weeks, during the holiday season asking for time off is banned. To book a vacation during peak holiday season must be done months in advance or you’ll risk most definitely losing your job.
Last November, Amazon raised its minimum wage to $15 dollars an hour which highly benefits many especially those who live in places such as New Jersey with the minimum wage is $8.85 an hour. Longtime, permanent employees are being hurt by bonuses being removed. Variable compensation pay or VCP would allow workers to make $100 for attendance and skill during peak times of the year.
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, on raising minimum wage said, “Last year, we raised our minimum wage to $15-an-hour for all full-time, part-time, temporary, and seasonal employees across the U.S. This wage hike benefitted more than 250,000 Amazon employees, as well as over 100,000 seasonal employees who worked at Amazon sites across the country last holiday. We strongly believe that this will benefit our business as we invest in our employees. But that is not what drove the decision. We had always offered competitive wages. But we decided it was time to lead – to offer wages that went beyond competitive. We did it because it seemed like the right thing to do.”
With a workforce of 300,000 people in the U.S, Amazon is on top of the economy because no one else will compete with their labor practices. They track their warehouse workers and give them standards shy of a robots doing with no empathy for human inefficiencies in a workplace.
