If you want to understand 21st century exploitation of labor by the billionaire class, you must read this horrifying story about Amazon's working conditions from the New York Times.
In short, Amazon mixes the brutality of Victorian workhouse with the constant paranoia of Stalinist Russia. Amazon's working conditions are an obscenity -- after reading this article, I have decided that Amazon is not a company of which Americans should be proud -- Barack Obama visited a warehouse in 2013 -- but one of which we should be truly ashamed. Amazon is an obscenity.
I encourage you to read this article in full, but will share a few bits that horrified me the most.
Workers are encouraged to send "feedback" to the bosses of their colleagues through an online system.
The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)Workers who need to take care of loved ones -- or fall ill themselves -- are punished with critical feedback, performance reviews, and improvement plans.
Molly Jay, an early member of the Kindle team, said she received high ratings for years. But when she began traveling to care for her father, who was suffering from cancer, and cut back working on nights and weekends, her status changed. She was blocked from transferring to a less pressure-filled job, she said, and her boss told her she was “a problem.” As her father was dying, she took unpaid leave to care for him and never returned to Amazon.People are constantly crying at their desks from the insane, inhumane pressure.“When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness,” she said.
A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”
A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan”— Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired”— because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.
Bo Olson was one of them. He lasted less than two years in a book marketing role and said that his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”Like banking interns who die from exhaustion, Amazon workers are forced to put their own health at risk, going days without sleeping and skipping vacations.
“One time I didn’t sleep for four days straight,” said Dina Vaccari, who joined in 2008 to sell Amazon gift cards to other companies and once used her own money, without asking for approval, to pay a freelancer in India to enter data so she could get more done.“These businesses were my babies, and I did whatever I could to make them successful.”Blue collar warehouse workers have also been abused. Amazon used to keep ambulances outside a non-air conditioned warehouse to remove collapsed bodies -- excuse me, labor units. It took media attention for Amazon to agree to air condition the warehouse.“That’s when the ulcer started,” she said. (Like several other former workers, the woman requested that her name not be used because her current company does business with Amazon. Some current employees were reluctant to be identified because they were barred from speaking with reporters.)
She and other workers had no shortage of career options but said they had internalized Amazon’s priorities. One ex-employee’s fiancé became so concerned about her nonstop working night after night that he would drive to the Amazon campus at 10 p.m. and dial her cellphone until she agreed to come home. When they took a vacation to Florida, she spent every day at Starbucks using the wireless connection to get work done.
In Amazon warehouses, employees are monitored by sophisticated electronic systems to ensure they are packing enough boxes every hour. (Amazon came under fire in 2011 when workers in an eastern Pennsylvania warehouse toiled in more than 100-degree heat with ambulances waiting outside, taking away laborers as they fell. After an investigation by the local newspaper, the company installed air-conditioning.)To be very frank, if this is the kind of "innovation" that America uses to grease its GDP -- and argue that "Old Europe" labor protections are hindering economic growth and unpractical for the 21st Century -- our neoliberal leaders can stuff their stomachs with drone-delivered corn-based snacks and shut the fuck up.
This is not "progress" or "innovation," my friends. It is regression. It is barbarity.
To restate, Amazon is an obscenity -- and I challenge Democratic Party leaders to disassociate themselves with this company, its leadership and, when possible, the Washington Post.