Amazon’s Clashes With Labor: Days of Conflict and Control
Amazon was built on an underdog philosophy, but its workers are finding
a voice. That presents a problem for the company that goes far beyond
the union vote in Alabama.
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Union organizers distributed literature as employees left the Amazon
warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., in December. A growing number of workers
feel the company is pushing them past their limits.
Union organizers distributed literature as employees left the Amazon
warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., in December. A growing number of workers
feel the company is pushing them past their limits.Credit...Bob Miller
for The New York Times
David Streitfeld <https://www.nytimes.com/by/david-streitfeld>
ByDavid Streitfeld <https://www.nytimes.com/by/david-streitfeld>
NYT, April 5, 2021
It has been Day 1 atAmazon
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/technology/amazon-nlrb-activist-workers.html>ever
since the company began more than a quarter-century ago. Day 1 is Amazon
shorthand for staying hungry, making bold decisions and never forgetting
about the customer. This start-up mentality — underdogs against the
world — has been extremely good for Amazon’s shoppers and shareholders.
Day 1 holds less appeal for some of Amazon’s employees, especially those
doing the physical work in the warehouses. A growing number feel the
company is pushing them past their limits and risking their health. They
would like Amazon to usher in a more benign Day 2.
The clash between the desire for Day 1 and Day 2 has beenunfolding in
Alabama
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/technology/amazon-union-vote.html>,
where Amazon warehouse workers in the community of Bessemer havevoted on
whether to form a union
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/technology/amazon-union-vote.html>.
Government labor regulators are getting ready to sort through the votes
in the closely watched election. A result may come as soon as this week.
If the union gains a foothold, it will be the first in the company’s
history.
Attention has been focused on Bessemer, but the struggle between Day 1
and Day 2 is increasingly playing out everywhere in Amazon’s world. At
its heart, the conflict is about control. To maintain Day 1, the company
needs to lower labor costs and increase productivity, which requires
measuring and tweaking every moment of a worker’s existence.
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That kind of control is at the heart of the Amazon enterprise. The idea
of surrendering it is the company’s greatest horror. Jeff Bezos,
Amazon’s founder,wrote in his 2016 shareholder letter:
<https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312517120198/d373368dex991.htm>“Day
2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful
decline. Followed by death. And/that/is why it is/always/Day 1.”
For many years, Amazon has managed to maintain control and keep Day 1
going by dazzling withdelivery
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/us/amazon-delivery-drivers-accidents.html>and
counted on the media, regulators and politicians to ignore everything
unpleasant. The few stories about workers rarely got traction.
But it is now thesecond-largest private employer in the country
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/technology/pushed-by-pandemic-amazon-goes-on-a-hiring-spree-without-equal.html>.
There is widespread pro-worker sentiment in the United States and
apro-union president
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/business/economy/joe-biden-unions.html>.
In Bessemer, many of the pro-union workers are Black, which makes this a
civil rights story as well.
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ImageAmazon needs to measure and tweak every moment of a worker’s
existence to maintain its edge, but it is facing more pushback against
its control.
Amazon needs to measure and tweak every moment of a worker’s existence
to maintain its edge, but it is facing more pushback against its
control.Credit...Bob Miller for The New York Times
So the costs associated with Day 1 are finally coming into view. And it
is showing up not only in Alabama, but in the form of lawsuits, restive
workers at other warehouses, Congressional oversight, scrutiny from
labor regulators and, most noisily, on Twitter.
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In recent weeks, a heated discussion about whether Amazon’s workers must
urinate in bottles because they have no time to go to the bathroom — a
level of control that few modern corporations would dare exercise — has
raged on Twitter.
“Amazon is reorganizing the very nature of retail work — something that
traditionally is physically undemanding and has a large amount of
downtime — into something more akin to a factory, which never lets up,”
said Spencer Cox, a former Amazon worker who is writing his Ph.D. thesis
at the University of Minnesota about how the company is transforming
labor. “For Amazon, this isn’t about money. This is about control of
workers’ bodies and every possible moment of their time.”
Amazon did not have a comment for this article.
Signs that Amazon is facing more pushback against its control have
started to pile up. In February, Lovenia Scott, a former warehouse
worker for the company in Vacaville, Calif., accused Amazon in a lawsuit
of having such an “immense volume of work to be completed” that she and
her colleagues did not get any breaks. Ms. Scott is seeking class-action
status.
Last month, the California Labor Commissioner said 718 delivery drivers
who worked for Green Messengers, a Southern California contractor for
Amazon, were owed $5 million in wages that never made it to their
wallets. The drivers were paid for 10-hour days, thelabor commissioner
said
<https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/03/09/amazon-santa-ana-delivery-contractor-fined-6-4-million-for-wage-theft/>,
but the volume of packages was so great that they often had to work 11
or more hours and through breaks.
Amazon said it no longer worked with Green Messengers and would appeal
the decision. Green Messengers could not be reached for comment.
An Amazon warehouse in the Canadian province of Ontario showed rapid
spread of Covid-19 in March. “Our investigation determined a closure was
required to break the chain of transmission,” said Dr. Lawrence Loh, the
regional medical officer. “We provided our recommendation to Amazon.”
The company, he said, “did not answer.” The health officials ordered the
workers to self-isolate, effectively shutting the facility for two weeks.
And five U.S. senators wrote a letter to the company last month
demanding more information about why it was equipping its delivery vans
with surveillance cameras that constantly monitor the driver. The
technology, the senators wrote, “raises important privacy and worker
oversight questions Amazon must answer.”
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Amazon has presented a different opinion of what Day 1 means for
workers. The first thing it mentions in its official statement on
Bessemer is the starting pay of $15.30 per hour, double the federal
minimum wage.
Mr. Cox, who worked in an Amazon warehouse in Washington State, said the
higher pay had paradoxically fueled the discontent. The pay “is better
than working at a gas station, so people naturally want to keep these
jobs,” he said. “That’s why they want them to be fair. I saw a lot of
depression and anxiety when I worked for Amazon.”
(Mr. Cox said he was fired by Amazon in 2018 for organizing. Amazon told
him that he had violated safety protocol.)
The confrontation between Day 1 and Day 2 has been sharpest over bladders.
The topic erupted last month when Representative Mark Pocan, Democrat of
Wisconsin, tweeted at the company, “Paying workers $15/hr doesn’t make
you a ‘progressive workplace’ when you union-bust & make workers urinate
in water bottles.”
Amazon’s social media account fired back: “You don’t really believe the
peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work
for us.”
This isn’t the way corporations usually talk to members of Congress,
even on Twitter. On Friday, after days of being pummeled on the
issue,Amazon apologized
<https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/our-recent-response-to-representative-pocan>to
Representative Pocan, saying: “The tweet was incorrect. It did not
contemplate our large driver population and instead wrongly focused only
on our fulfillment centers.” Amazon blamed Covid and “traffic,” not its
punishing schedules.
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Representative Pocanresponded on Saturday
<https://twitter.com/repmarkpocan/status/1378322845659447297>with a
sigh. “This is not about me, this is about your workers — who you don’t
treat with enough respect or dignity,” he wrote.
The bathroom question is one on which the company has long been
vulnerable. Enforcement files from regulators in Amazon’s home state of
Washington indicate that questions about whether the company had an
appropriate number of bathrooms in its Seattle headquarters have arisen
over the past dozen years.
The company has “insufficient lavatory facilities for male employees,”
according to a 2012 complaint received by the state’s Department of
Labor and Industries. “Employees routinely traverse multiple buildings
in search of available facilities.”
A 2014 complaint filed by an Amazon employee to the same department said
employees got 12 minutes a day for “bathroom, getting water, personal
calls, etc.” outside of normally scheduled breaks. Those who needed
further toilet time had to provide a doctor’s note “explaining why the
need to void more than usual.”
The complaints went beyond Amazon’s white-collar offices. A warehouse
worker told Labor and Industries in 2009 that a manager and a human
resources representative had told her that “there would be disciplinary
action against me if I continue to use the bathroom on company time” —
she meant unscheduled breaks. The employee added that the H.R.
representative told her that “it was not fair to the company that I was
getting paid when I’m not working because I’m in the bathroom.”
Image
Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle. Some employees have filed
bathroom-related complaints, including saying some of the offices have
too few restrooms.
Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle. Some employees have filed
bathroom-related complaints, including saying some of the offices have
too few restrooms.Credit...Miles Fortune for The New York Times
Amazon did not respond to questions about the enforcement reports. A
spokesman for the Department of Labor and Industries declined to
comment, except to note that outside of Amazon, “we really don’t get a
lot of bathroom-related complaints.”
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Other technology companies have prided themselves on overriding mere
bodily needs. Marissa Mayer, an early Google employee, attributed the
search company’s success to working 130 hours a week — entirely
possible, she said ina 2016 interview with Bloomberg Businessweek
<https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-marissa-mayer-interview-issue/>,
“if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower and how often
you go to the bathroom.”
When Google was a start-up, the notion was that you gave up everything —
family, sleep, diversion — so you might become successful and rich. But
former workers at Amazon warehouses said that under the Day 1
philosophy, they suffered merely to stay employed.
“I believe many employees have indirectly lost their job for going to
the bathroom. You’re like, can I hold it to break time?” said John
Burgett, who blogged for several years about working in an Amazon
warehouse in Indiana.
His conclusionon his last entry, in 2016
<https://amazonemancipatory.com/wrap-it-up>: Amazon was “testing the
limits of human beings as a technical tool.”
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