April 10, 2021
Here are some of the ways that people who have worked inside Amazon’s warehouses describe the experience: “The job crushed my spirit and crippled my body.” “The lowest point in my life.” An “isolating colony of hell.” “They’re killing people mentally and physically.” “I began to hate my day-to-day life.” “The way Amazon pushes people is not moral.” “I had whole days where I didn’t talk to anyone.” “The systematic devaluing of human bodies.”
Few of these accounts are
new. But persistent horror stories have done nothing to diminish Amazon’s
geometric growth. In 2017, the company’s head count surpassed 500,000
employees. In 2020, Amazon added that
many new workers, very likely a record level of hiring for a company in a single year.
Today, nearly 1.3 million people work at Amazon, making it the country’s
second-largest private employer, after Walmart. The majority toil in its
sprawling fulfillment operations — they are the people who pick, pack, drive
and deliver your stuff.
Are these workers happy? Is
this good work? Should we rejoice about a company that can hire so many people
in the midst of pandemic-induced mass unemployment? And one that, in 2018,
instituted a minimum hourly wage of
$15, pushing Walmart, Target and
other competing retailers to raise their pay,
too?
Or should we recoil at the way Amazon has swept the apparent
brutality of its operations under a haze of public-relations opportunism — the
way it paints itself as a high-minded savior of
American labor while its workers are so pressed for time that
they must urinate
and defecate in bags and bottles?
More urgently: Should we
stop shopping at Amazon?
As an inveterate Amazon shopper whose spending with the company
soared to embarrassing heights during the pandemic, I have thought about the
ethics behind those smiling boxes a whole lot recently. And I regret to say
that my hottest take is irritatingly tepid: It’s complicated.
To me it is far from
obvious that boycotting Amazon is the best way to reform American retail in a
way that results in greater safety and prosperity for workers. But that doesn’t
mean that consumers have no power. To a degree greater than many of its
competitors, Amazon has thrived by accommodating its customers’ desires.
Consumers can now try to marshal that power on behalf of Amazon’s workers.
There is one thing Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, seems to
care about above all else: What his customers want.
I suspect that if he were
pushed to take employees’ safety as seriously as he does price or selection,
Bezos could do more than just about anyone else to improve the lives of
America’s workers by radically improving conditions at Amazon to set a standard
for rivals to follow.
I can sense readers ready
to mock me as Bezos’s credulous stooge. I understand that impulse; it is
becoming impossible not to feel icky about shopping at Amazon.
In the last few months, as the company faced the most serious union drive in its history at a fulfillment
center in Bessemer, Ala., its ugly labor record has become inescapable.
Amazon’s employees suffer injuries at rates far higher than the national average for the warehouse
industry, stats that it has worked hard to hide from the public.
Turnover at its facilities is so far off the charts that
you have to conclude that treating workers as disposable cogs is a core part of
its business model. The company is obsessed with crushing unions; the workers in Alabama voted down the union, but Amazon’s victory
came at the cost of laying bare its antagonism toward organized labor.
On the other hand, in
American retail, what real choice is there? In his excellent new book, “Fulfillment,” the journalist Alec MacGillis examines
American inequality and economic desperation through the lens of Amazon’s
growth and rapid domination. The company almost seems to personify economic
imbalances. Its founder is the richest man alive;
its workers are mainly refugees from an industrial economy decimated by
globalization; and while its customer base has become quite broad, it is
a favored shopping destination for the wealthy.
Yet MacGillis’s account
also makes clear that the problem of Amazon is far bigger than Amazon.
Amazon’s retail competitors
are not much better guardians of American labor; a lot of them are obviously
worse. Remember that Walmart was destroying local
economies long before Amazon came along, and according to an
analysis of data from 11 states, more of Walmart’s workers in
those states rely on public assistance to make ends meet. Dollar General, the
discount chain that is one of America’s
fastest-growing retailers, might have just as shameful a record
on worker safety and comfort.
Workers at Whole Foods, Amazon’s grocery subsidiary, seem to have fared pretty much
the same during the pandemic as those at Kroger, Walmart and
other food giants.
The larger point is that
Amazon is less the cause of American inequality than it is a consequence.
Amazon is what you get when a country has systematically devalued workers and
labor organizations to the benefit of billionaires. Amazon is what you get when
a country has decided to import so many of its physical goods from abroad. And
Amazon is what you get when states and cities compete with one another to lavish huge tax breaks
upon corporations that pledge to create local jobs, without
setting any requirements that they be good, safe, high-paying jobs.
Consider, for instance, how
America’s longtime negligence on worker safety opened the door to Amazon’s
injurious warehouses. Workers say that the most punishing thing about working
at Amazon is the repetitiveness and relentlessness of the work.
“The human body was not
designed to do the same motion over and over and over again for hours,” Tyler
Hamilton, an Amazon warehouse employee in Shakopee, Minn., told me. “That’s
what robots do.”
Yet there is little in
American law that prevents companies from treating workers like robots. Deborah Berkowitz,
a former chief of staff of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration,
the federal agency that sets standards for worker safety, told me that injuries
in Amazon’s warehouses are mostly ergonomic — the results of “forceful
exertions, repetitive motions, twisting, bending and awkward postures,” according
to a 2019 report published
by a coalition of labor advocates. But OSHA can’t do much about ergonomics. In
2001, the agency was
specifically prevented by Congress and President George W. Bush from
setting standards on ergonomics. Bush argued the rule would have been too
costly to employers.
That wasn’t the only time worker safety was brushed aside by the
federal government. David Michaels, who ran OSHA during the Obama
administration, told me that the agency’s “basic model doesn’t work.” OSHA,
Michaels said, is disastrously underfunded and understaffed, leaving it unable
to inspect and enforce standards across the economy. It is also very slow,
putting it far behind workplaces that are changing as quickly as Amazon’s. For
example, the agency began working on a rule about crystalline silica — a dust
produced in the manufacture of glass and
other materials that can cause respiratory illnesses — in 1997.
The rule was not finalized
until 2016.
Both Michaels and Berkowitz
said that unions could do a great deal to address safety. At companies that are
unionized, the union can negotiate for practices that are safer than those
required by OSHA’s moldering standards. But it would be preferable to have
stronger federal rules than counting on long-weakened labor unions to improve
standards.
I asked several Amazon
employees over the past week whether consumers should stop using the company.
Some thought so. “I wish
people can stop buying from them,” said Mohamed Mire, who also works at the
Shakopee, Minn., warehouse.
But Stuart Appelbaum,
president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which led the
union campaign in Alabama, said consumers can have a powerful voice without a
boycott.
“What people should do is
demand that Amazon change the way it operates and demand from our elected
officials that they ensure Amazon does that,” Appelbaum told me. “I think that
in America we should have higher standards for the way working people should be
treated.”
But how can we get Amazon
to fix up its workplace without withholding our dollars? One thing I have
noticed in covering Amazon is the company’s willingness to make big changes
quickly. For years, Amazon skirted collecting
sales tax from its customers, giving it an unfair price
advantage over its brick-and-mortar competitors. Then, in 2012, Amazon suddenly
stopped fighting sales tax laws
because Bezos realized that Amazon’s customers cared a lot more about speed
than price. This meant that it was wiser for Amazon to build warehouses across
the country even though it meant collecting sales tax in the
states where they were located. That was a trade-off Bezos was willing to make
to please his customers and get more business.
The best way to push changes to labor standards at Amazon is for
its most loyal customers to demand it. We should demand it from our elected
officials and our regulators, but it might be more effective to go to the
source of the problem.
It is a point of pride with
Bezos that his email address is public: jeff@amazon.com. When customers email
him complaints, Bezos has been known to forward them to his staff with a single
ominous character — a question mark,
widely understood to mean that they should drop everything and address the
problem.
Here’s what I would say:
Jeff, you will not believe how much stuff I buy from you. But I am having more
and more trouble defending that choice, and I’m starting to look at the
alternatives. Your workers are hurting, Jeff. One of your employees told me he
had trouble holding the phone because his hands had been rendered numb from the
unrelenting repetitiveness of his job. Another told me that your company treats
him as if he weren’t human.
Jeff, you are a smart, inventive man, and you have racked up a fortune larger than you know what to do with. Don’t you have enough? You have altered the retail industry more than just about anyone. You can do much better than simply meeting the lowest bar of American workplace standards. You can be transparent about injuries and what you’re doing to address them. You can remake Amazon as a better place to work — a company that empowers employees rather than chews them up in pursuit of tax-free profits.
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