https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22977660/amazon-warehouses-work-injuries-retail-labor
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Amazon has transformed our expectations for how we buy things and how we interact with technology. It’s now intuitive for many of us to buy almost anything we want with a click — whether from Amazon or some other retailer — and to count on it being delivered within days, if not the same day. As Amazon has built the sprawling logistics and delivery empire that makes this possible, it has also begun to change the working lives of many Americans — in some ways for the better, and in some ways for the worse.
That shift is most clear in its own workforce: More than 1.1 million people now work directly for Amazon in the US, with some in its offices and the majority in its ever-expanding network of more than 800 warehouse facilities in North America alone. At its current hiring rate, Amazon will overtake Walmart as the largest private-sector employer in the US in the next few years — meaning about 1 percent of US workers will be employed directly by the tech giant.
However, its influence extends far beyond its actual employees, reaching a workforce employed by companies partnering and competing with Amazon. Some, such as Amazon delivery drivers in Amazon-branded vans and trucks, work for third-party companies that sign exclusive contracts with Amazon and are managed by Amazon technology and expectations. Others work for Amazon competitors, big and small, who are striving to keep up with the tech giant by expanding their e-commerce offerings and by imitating its business and employment practices. This shift is only in the early stages, but the ripple effects of Amazon’s influence as an employer will spread over time across the retail, e-commerce, and delivery industries.
“Anyone who wants to do business with Amazon has to conform,” said Rebecca Givan, a labor professor at Rutgers University. “And anyone who wants to compete — that’s kind of everyone — [has] to keep up with what they are doing with productivity, which seems to necessitate massive surveillance.”
Amazon’s workplace culture has long centered on “customer obsession” — doing everything and anything to satisfy customers. That mission has led Amazon to become a force of convenience the world has never seen before. Over the last decade, Amazon has outfitted its warehouses with robots, performance-tracking software, and reengineered workflows, all in the name of pushing the limits on what Amazon can offer its customers, and how quickly.
These innovations have created labor issues, including comparatively high injury and worker churn rates, turning a great American innovation story into a complex evaluation of what it takes to get what we want when we want it — and whether we should expect more from a company that’s setting the bar for what many American employers expect from workers.
To understand the potential consequences of what Amazon has built since its humble beginning as an online bookseller, it’s important to first understand how extraordinary its transformation has been.
This evolution was led early on by Jeff Wilke, a former manufacturing executive who joined Amazon in 1999 and eventually rose to the No. 2 position in the company as CEO of its core e-commerce business globally. Wilke set out to overhaul the layouts of Amazon warehouses and the software powering their processes in order to speed up shipping times and make more accurate promises to customers. To do this, Wilke and his team incorporated techniques he learned studying the lean manufacturing methodology, which aimed to maximize worker productivity while minimizing unnecessary steps. The warehouse work Wilke oversaw eventually led company founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos to feel confident in launching Amazon Prime and its two-day delivery promise.
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In those early years, as Amazon began to expand beyond selling books, one of the most common criticisms of work in its facilities was how much walking workers had to do — as much as 12 to 15 miles a day for some roles. That changed when Amazon started adding warehouse robots to its facilities after acquiring a startup called Kiva Systems in 2012. In warehouses with robots, workers no longer had to traverse endless aisles of merchandise all day; instead, Kiva’s robots carried portable shelves to them at stationary stations. The robots’ arrival also boosted worker productivity, which was the main goal — essentially turning the Amazon warehouse into the 21st-century version of a manufacturing assembly line, one where the goal is assembling e-commerce customer orders.
Eventually, labor historians say, Amazon’s warehouse environment began resembling a blend of at least two different manufacturing approaches pioneered in the early 20th century. One is Taylorism, a dehumanizing system for factory work invented by the mechanical engineer Frederick Taylor. Taylorism, or “scientific management,” broke complex manufacturing down into limited, repetitive tasks; managers were the experts responsible for coming up with the best way to accomplish those tasks, and workers were treated like simpletons. “Amazon is an example of a company which is ultra-Taylorized,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at the University of California Santa Barbara.
The other approach involved the moving assembly line innovation pioneered by Henry Ford’s automobile factories. However, this innovation increased the monotony of the job and the pace in Ford’s factories. Workplace churn increased. And in 1914, Ford was compelled to nearly double a day’s wages to $5 in an attempt to stabilize the workforce. Similarly, at Amazon, company leaders increased the hourly wage minimum to $15 in 2018, amid significant external pressure led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). That move put pressure on retailers like Walmart and Target to raise their wages too.
Amazon spokesperson Richard Rocha opposed comparisons between the company’s working conditions and the harsh factory work of past centuries. He said Amazon has been investing heavily in safety initiatives, pointing to a company report published in January that said Amazon spent $300 million on safety initiatives in 2021 alone, and employs nearly 8,000 safety employees worldwide. The report also argues that robots reduce the physical demands on workers because they reduce the amount of walking previously necessary in key roles.
As e-commerce sales have risen, so too has the demand for more workers fulfilling online orders in warehouses and delivering them
But to some labor historians, Amazon’s warehouse workplace could be viewed as a further evolution — or blend — of the approaches of Taylor and Ford, and one where technology pushes “the assembly line” faster and faster by tracking workers’ every move, from how many items they pick or stow per hour, to how much time they spend on informal bathroom breaks. Because of the robots, the goals for roles like pickers and stowers have multiplied, from having to fetch or stow about 100 pieces of merchandise an hour, to closer to 300 to 400 units per hour, warehouse workers have told Recode.