James Bloodworth talking:
I’ve been tweeting about it and doing things like this in the media, because it’s really important, I think, to recognize what that huge wealth, that Jeff Bezos and Amazon have accumulated, what that’s built on.
So, before, I went—in 2016, I went into an Amazon warehouse here in Britain. And before that, I mean, I used Amazon myself. It was kind of a first place I’d go to buy books or DVDs, say. I didn’t really know much about what goes on in the warehouses. I kind of, like other people—I mean, I kind of—I wouldn’t say I idolized Jeff Bezos, but he was someone in the culture who was—you know, you had some respect for, because he had set up this organization that so many of us used.
And when I went into the warehouse in 2016, it was—I mean, I was really, really shocked by some of the things I saw there. I have worked in warehouses before this. It’s not as if I was afraid of hard work or as if this was I had never been in a kind of warehouse environment. But the atmosphere of the Amazon warehouse I worked in was what I imagine the atmosphere of a low-security prison would feel like. So, and again, this isn’t an exaggeration. So, for example, we had to be drug- and alcohol-tested before we started work, which I’d never had to have that done before. We had to pass in and out of giant airport-style security gates every time we even went to the toilet during the day.
If you took a day off sick, you were given a disciplinary for that. And if you received six of these disciplinaries, you would effectively lose your job. And this was taking a day off sick even if you had a letter from the doctor, even if you phoned in beforehand to say that you were going to be sick. So, if you took six days off sick, you would effectively lose your job. And this was the biggest employer in this town.
Other things, I mean, the people were afraid—people were receiving disciplinaries for taking toilet breaks. The productivity targets were so high that workers were afraid to go to the bathroom. I mean, a survey came out at the Amazon warehouse I worked in, recently, which found that 74 percent of workers there, order pickers, were afraid to use the bathrooms because of the productivity targets. this culminated in, one day, I found a bottle of urine on the shelf.
– pickers were required to pick 300 items per hour from the various shelves in these huge warehouses. That comes to about one item every 12 seconds?
it was astonishing. So, I mean, the first week I was working there, I was—an Amazon supervisor came around to find me, and told me that I was in the bottom 10 percent of productivity. And I’m someone who’s relatively healthy. You know, I run. I go to the gym. I am still reasonably young. And someone like me was, you know, at the bottom of the productivity pecking order. So, imagine what it’s like if you’re older, if you’re overweight at all, if you have a disability. It was just impossible to keep up with the targets.
And so, what happened was, people were running around this huge warehouse, which is dangerous, for a start. And then, you can also—you also received a disciplinary for running. So, to hit your target—if you didn’t hit your target, you’d receive a disciplinary. But to hit your target, you had to break the rules, by running around, for which you’d receive another disciplinary.
So what happened was, you have this huge turnover of staff. No one’s hanging on to their jobs, because people are just being fired for anything. And people are also leaving then, before their full kind of employment rights kick in. So, this is agency staff. We’re all agency staff. And this turnover of staff, it’s almost as if—you know, you can’t prove it, but it’s almost as if it’s intentional. They try to get rid of you quite quickly, because then they can bring more people in who don’t have the same employment rights as a full-time employee.
when I was working in the Amazon warehouse. So, one day, or one afternoon, walking around the top floor of this huge warehouse, and, yeah, I found an empty Coca-Cola bottle with urine in it on the shelf. You know, yellow liquid. Smelled it. It’s very clear straightaway what it is. And you put two and two together, and this has happened because there’s a climate of fear, and you’re afraid if you go to the toilet, which can take five, 10 minutes—you know, huge warehouse, through security—and people are being told—being accused of taking so-called idle time, by Amazon, for doing this. Everything which takes away from productivity at Amazon is seen as you’re doing something wrong.
one warehouse in the U.K., Amazon workers called ambulances more than 115 times in three years.
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James Bloodworth
U.K.-based journalist and author of Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain.
— source democracynow.org