Jon Ungoed-Thomas and Nonyelum Anigbo
Sun, 22 October 2023
Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images
It was about 3am on a night shift in May last year when Amazon worker Christine Manno tried to retrieve a box stacked high in the warehouse in St Peters, Missouri. She was 30ft in the air, strapped to a harness and standing on the edge of the raised platform of a truck.
She was recovering from operations on her injured hands for carpal tunnel syndrome, a neurological disorder, and the weight of the box shot pains through her neck and back. “It was like an electric shock,” she said.
Manno was initially on restricted duties but has been stuck at home from her injury since last July on sick pay. A few years ago, a worker like Manno would have had scant chance of redress, but she is now part of an organising committee at the St Peters warehouse demanding action over Amazon’s working conditions.
“People are getting their parcels in one or two days, but behind the scenes it’s exhausting,” said Manno last week. “The [targets] are unsustainable. I am leaning off a truck attached by a harness lifting cases weighing 40 to 50lb. And this is over a 12-hour shift. Amazon is breaking down our bodies, young or old.”
It is not just Manno and her fellow workers calling Amazon to account. From her Missouri workplace to fulfilment centres in the UK and Europe and warehouses in India, workers are demanding union rights and an overhaul of the digital giant’s working practices. They also want a greater slice of Amazon’s global revenue, which was $514bn (£423bn) in 2022.
This week, campaigners, politicians and unions will gather at a summit in Manchester called Make Amazon Pay to call for international action over workers’ rights, market abuse and tax. It will convene at a conference centre at the Mechanics’ Institute, where the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was founded in 1868.
Protests are planned around the world on 24 November, Black Friday. The GMB union has announced four days of strikes in November, including Black Friday, of more than 1,000 workers at Amazon’s Coventry warehouse.
Amazon is also under pressure from regulators. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced last month it was suing Amazon for anti-competitive strategies, including overcharging sellers, stifling innovation and suppressing competition.
“We haven’t tried to rein in a monopoly this large for decades,” said Emily Peterson-Cassin, digital rights advocate at Public Citizen, a US advocacy organisation supporting the Make Amazon Pay summit. “This could and should be a tipping point.”
It is a potential crisis for Amazon, with growing calls for it to be broken up. Some believe it has got too big and should no longer be the “referee” and a retailer on a marketplace it controls.
The FTC, headed by Lina Khan, a prominent expert in the anti-monopoly movement, seeks a permanent injunction to “pry loose” Amazon’s monopolistic control.
In Jeff Bezos’ first letter to shareholders after Amazon went public in 1997, he said the company was vigilant and maintained a sense of urgency in its long-term pursuit of market dominance, with a relentless focus on customers. More than two decades later, Amazon has more than 200 million Prime members and dominates online retail. The customers it zealously pursued, with a typically seamless service, are now a captive market.
Critics say that service quality has slumped and its sellers are being squeezed for fees. A recent Washington Post article said the proliferation of ads on product searches meant that as a place to find items it was becoming “a tacky strip mall filled with neon signs pointing you in all the wrong directions”.
Cory Doctorow, the commentator and author of The Internet Con, describes how Amazon has gone through a digital lifecycle he calls “enshittification”. Financial surpluses, he says, are first directed to users; then, once the users are locked in, to suppliers; and finally to shareholders, at which point the platform becomes degraded, or in Doctorow’s words “a useless pile of shit”.
These digital monopolists are not geniuses. They just operate with less constraint and more powerful tools
Cory Doctorow, commentator
“Amazon boasts about its $31bn advertising business, but it’s not really advertising,” said Doctorow. “It’s ‘pay for play’ where merchants buy the right to be shown on the search result page ahead of the best match. These are often deceptive offers, similar to what you may have wanted, but lower quality or higher price.”
He added: “These digital monopolists are not smarter than people who cornered markets before. They’re not wizards or geniuses. They’re the same sharp operators we’ve always had, operating with less constraint and more powerful tools.”
Richard Allen, a campaigner for retailers against online market abuse, said he refused to sell his products on Amazon when he operated a record business. “I said: ‘You’ll get to see my sales. You’ll get to know my customers. Why would I do that?’ But people fell for this idea that Amazon was a better platform to have their goods on because it was more visible.”
As a retailer, Amazon had the upper hand over every seller on its platform, he said, because it operated the marketplace: “I don’t think you should be allowed to operate a platform and also be a retailer on it. The conflict is too great.”
A report in June by the Amsterdam-based Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations found that, between 2017 and 2022, Amazon tripled earnings from fees for independent sellers in Europe.
It’s not just small retailers who are counting the cost of doing business with Amazon. Its employees around the world complain they are suffering from inadequate pay and burnout.
Rachel Fagan, GMB organiser, said there were now about 1,000 union members at the Coventry warehouse, where the workforce last year was the first to take legally mandated strike action against Amazon in the UK. Fagan said workers were demanding better pay but also considered performance targets were unfair.
She said: “In the middle of winter, people are dressed like they are going to the gym, with T-shirts, shorts and trainers, because of the physical work. It’s really hard work and it has a toll.
“If you work in any other warehouse, you get a target on how many boxes you pack a day. But at Amazon the algorithm bases [the target] on the average picking that day. People don’t know the target, so everyone is working at full capacity, and this is the reason people get worn out.”
Workers in Amazon centres across the world are calling for a change in workplace practices. One worker in India who spoke to the Observer said she would take part in action on Black Friday to press for work targets to be achievable, for working hours to be no longer than eight hours a day and for better pay rates. She works 10-hour days, five days a week, earning about £100 a month.
Amazon said in a media briefing last week it planned to automate many repetitive tasks at warehouses with robots. It is testing Digit, a two-legged robot that can grasp and lift items. Union officials say whatever innovations are in the pipeline, the workforce needs better representation.
Christy Hoffman, general secretary of UNI Global Union, an international union for service industries, said: “Amazon’s unchecked power needs to be curbed. One step governments should take is stronger labour laws and stronger enforcement that would help stop Amazon’s union-busting.”
Related: Amazon unveils plan to deliver packages by drone in UK and Italy
Between January and August, the US Department of Labor has cited Amazon for workplace violations on six occasions, including violations at warehouses in Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, New Jersey and New York. Bernie Sanders, chair of the senate committee on health, education, labour and pensions, which is investigating Amazon’s workplace practices, says conditions in US warehouses are dangerous and illegal. Amazon has said it strongly disagrees with Sanders’s assertions.
Amazon says it is a trusted partner for millions of sellers worldwide and the FTC action was misguided. It said its platform was good for competition, consumers and sellers.
The company said working in a warehouse was a rewarding job at Amazon, with excellent pay, workforce support and comfortably paced work with breaks. A spokesperson said: “We invest, invent and innovate in safety, going above and beyond the basics right across our business. Performance metrics are regularly evaluated and built on benchmarks based on real-life and attainable performance history.”
In response to reports of the proliferation of ads on product searches, the company said: “We offer hundreds of millions of items to millions of customers, and it’s our job to bring together each individual customer with the best single product for them – all in a matter of seconds. This is no easy feat, and we work hard every day to strike the right balance between organic search results, merchandising and advertising.”
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