Amazon’s sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers
You might find your Prime membership morally indefensible after
reading these stories about worker mistreatment
From Salon.com, February 23, 2014
Written by Simon Head
Excerpted from the book "Mindless: How Smarter Machines are making Dumber Humans"
When I first did research on Walmart’s workplace practices in
the early 2000s, I came away convinced that Walmart was the
most egregiously ruthless corporation in America. However, ten
years later, there is a strong challenger for this dubious
distinction—Amazon Corporation. Within the corporate world, Amazon
now ranks with Apple as among the United States’ most esteemed
businesses. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, came in second in the
Harvard Business Review’s 2012 world rankings of admired CEOs, and
Amazon was third in CNN’s 2012 list of the world’s most admired
companies. Amazon is now a leading global seller not only of books but
also of music and movie DVDs, video games, gift cards, cell phones, and
magazine subscriptions. Like Walmart itself, Amazon combines
state-of-the-art CBSs with human resource practices reminiscent of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Amazon equals Walmart in
the use of monitoring technologies to track the minute-by-minute
movements and performance of employees and in settings that go beyond
the assembly line to include their movement between loading and
unloading docks, between packing and unpacking stations, and to and from
the miles of shelving at what Amazon calls its “fulfillment
centers”—gigantic warehouses where goods ordered by Amazon’s online
customers are sent by manufacturers and wholesalers, there to be
shelved, packaged, and sent out again to the Amazon customer.
Amazon’s
shop-floor processes are an extreme variant of Taylorism that Frederick
Winslow Taylor himself, a near century after his death, would have no
trouble recognizing. With this twenty-first-century Taylorism,
management experts,
scientific managers, take the basic
workplace tasks at Amazon, such as the movement, shelving, and packaging
of goods, and break down these tasks into their subtasks, usually
measured in seconds; then rely on time and motion studies to find the
fastest way to perform each subtask; and then reassemble the subtasks
and make this “one best way” the process that employees must follow.
...
In December 2009 Mark Onetto, chief of operations and customer
relations at Amazon and a close collaborator of Bezos, gave an hourlong
lecture on the Amazon Way to master’s of business administration
students at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.
Onetto is a disconcerting figure, because once he starts talking, style
and substance are in sharp contrast. He is French born, and he still
speaks with the rather faded insouciance of Maurice Chevalier and
“Gay Paree,” and he makes much of this in his lecture. But there was
nothing gay (in the traditional sense) or insouciant about the
Amazon workplace that Onetto described for UVA’s MBA candidates.
Like
most such corporate mission statements, Onetto’s uses a coded language
that hides the harshness of his underlying message, which needs
translation along with a hefty reality check. As with Walmart so at
Amazon, there is a quasi-religious cult of the customer as an object of
“trust” and “care”; Amazon “cares about the customer,” and “everything
is driven” for him or her. Early in the lecture, Onetto quotes Bezos
himself as saying, “I am not selling stuff. I am facilitating for my
customers to buy what they need.”
...
Whereas some Amazon employees are in constant motion across the
floors of its enormous centers—the biggest, in Arizona, is the size of
twenty-eight football fields—others work on assembly lines packing goods
for shipping. An anonymous German student who worked as a temporary
packer at Amazon’s depot in Augsburg, southern Germany, has given a
revealing account of work on the line at Amazon. Her account appeared in
the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the stern upholder of German
financial orthodoxy and not a publication usually given to accounts of
workplace abuse by large and powerful corporations. There were six
packing lines at Amazon’s Augsburg center, each with two conveyor belts
feeding tables where the packers stood and did the packing. The first
conveyor belt fed the table with goods stored in boxes, and the
second carried the goods away in sealed packages ready for distribution
by UPS, FedEx, and their German counterparts.
 |
| Image Source: Sarah Lee, The Guardian |
Machines measured
whether the packers were meeting their targets for output per hour and
whether the finished packages met their targets for weight and so had
been packed “the one best way
.” But alongside these digital
controls there was a team of Taylor’s “functional foremen,” overseers in
the full nineteenth-century sense of the term, watching the employees
every second to ensure that there was no “time theft,” in the language
of Walmart. On the packing lines there were six such foremen, one known
in Amazonspeak as a “coworker” and above him five “leads,” whose
collective task was to make sure that the line kept moving. Workers
would be reprimanded for speaking to one another or for pausing to catch
their breath (
Verschnaufpause) after an especially tough packing job.
...
A significant portion of the article has been reposted here. There's more. You can read the entire article by clicking here.
Note: It is not hard to find other articles critical of worker conditions at Amazon.com. The book, Mindless, written by Simon Head and from which this is excerpted, focuses at least in part on abuses such as these. You can read a short but excellent review of that book, by clicking here. A quote from the review: [Head] argues that ... computerized management programs
that Amazon and other large organizations use to measure everything that
happens in factories, warehouses and depots—are turning workers into
“digital chain gang” members who work harder and earn less. Once limited
to tracking blue-collar productivity, CBSs now engulf much of the
white-collar world, where they control the complex work of physicians,
teachers and others in the professional and administrative middle class.
-Submitted by Gareth
