On July 16 and 17, Amazon made $14.2 billion off the backs of its workers during its annual Prime Day sale. The “holiday” means extra hours, increased rates of injury, and sweltering temperatures for workers like me. But Amazon workers have been uniting this summer to fight for the wages, conditions, and autonomy that we deserve.
Pola Posen
August 29, 2024
LEFT VOICE
On July 16, fire hydrants were open on every block, and the streets were empty, cleared by the heat wave that swept over New York City that week. Inside the Amazon warehouse where I work, it was just as hot.
July 16 and 17 — some of the hottest days recorded on the planet — were also Amazon’s 2024 Prime Days. The brutality of the temperatures was matched by that of the record-breaking profits Amazon made off its workers during the sale, which for customers lasted two days, and for workers, two weeks.
Amazon created Prime Day, its own commercial holiday, in 2015. The holiday reflects Amazon’s global ascendency and the increasing centrality of the logistics industry in the United States. Other companies, like Walmart, Target, and Temu, have been forced to create their own sales in July to compete with Prime Day. In the United States, there are about 170 million Amazon Prime members, or about half of the country’s population. Amazon Prime is enormously popular, but our warehouse labor is invisibilized—the hours, stress, and life force that this mammoth industry extracts from us and relies on to feed its own rise.
The company made $14.2 billion in profits during Prime this year, an 11 percent increase from last year. That same week, I earned $900 for working a mandatory 60 hours.
Most of us work the overnight shift, from 1 a.m. to 11:50 a.m., which is Amazon’s most common shift schedule, and which makes possible its characteristic same-day and next-day shipping. During Prime and Peak season (around Christmas time), we work forced overtime hours for two weeks — this year, we were scheduled to work 60 hours, or 12 hours a night for five days straight. This forced overtime is implemented to account for the sharp increase in volume that our warehouses process during Prime and Peak — the number of packages that my warehouse processes doubled during Prime week. The daily number of packages that we unload and sort jumped from about 20,000 to 40,000 packages overnight, meaning that not only did our site force us to work longer hours and hire more workers for Prime season, but we were also pressured through a variety of tactics to work harder.
During this period, we are not allowed to take time off. The mandatory extra time (known as MET) exhausts everyone, and is especially difficult for workers who are single parents or have second jobs that they depend on. If we miss time during MET, this time is subtracted from our paid or unpaid time off — time that we rely on for emergencies, since we do not have sick days. If we run out of our allotted unpaid time off hours (UPT), we can be fired.
On Being Disposable
This dynamic underlies Amazon’s employment model. We are at constant risk and live in constant fear of being fired. This disposability is a practical mechanism for the company: it serves the double purpose of keeping production high and facilitating company control of the shop floor. Amazon employs about 1.5 million mostly young workers around the world, uses up our bodies, and drives us to exhaustion and burnout. Then they throw us out, either by firing us or pressuring us, through the intensity of the work, to quit. The high levels of turnover at Amazon are entirely by design. By guaranteeing a constant flow of new hires who have energy and are not yet injured, the company has an easier time demanding high rates and fast work — in other words, making us do more work for the same low hourly wage.
The disposability model can be seen most acutely during Prime and Peak. The highest numbers of people hired by Amazon are hired right before Prime, and the highest numbers of people fired are fired right after Prime. Amazon, like UPS, has tier systems to instill false and arbitrary divisions between workers who do the same job. Most of these new hires are “white badges,” who are technically seasonal workers, and who do not receive the same benefits (such as vacation hours) or minimal job security as the full-time “blue badge” workers. Their employment status means that they could be fired at any time. The company is supposed to convert white badges to blue badges after three months, but the policy is inconsistent and unenforced. Several of my coworkers have been waiting for nearly a year to get blue badge status. Furthermore, favoritism and, conversely, the targeting of specific people based on bias or if they are seen as a “troublemaker” means that rules are enforced discriminately — one person may be fired for a minor offense that another worker would not be. This is another of management’s attempts to divide us.
The reality and feeling of being disposable is one of powerlessness. Amazon uses disposability to keep us down: the real risk of being fired for next to nothing discourages workers from organizing and forming unions. Amazon’s tools of disposability make us, sometimes, suspicious and resentful of each other. They make workers afraid to speak up against the injustices that we witness every day. Amazon wants us to believe that they easily can, and will, replace us. We get secret write-ups and are constantly surveilled for breaking the smallest, most meaningless rules (like checking our phones). This means our livelihoods are always on the line.
In this way, management seeks to control the shop floor. They use fear and discipline to control how we work, down to the smallest details: when we talk, how many minutes we use the bathroom, how fast we move. Our risk of disposability and material precariousness also facilitate manager harassment, which intensified during Prime. Many of my friends at work have been driven to tears or overcome by blind anger by the disrespect with which we are treated by the managers. There is very little appreciation given to us for breaking our backs 10 hours a night.
Managers will purposefully harass workers on the basis of their gender, race, and language/immigration status. They will mask discipline behind a phony facade of concern, and only later will you discover that when they asked, “Are you OK?” they wrote you up afterward. They will yell our names across the warehouse to get our attention and tell us to move faster. They will use passive-aggressive comments to dismiss and invalidate the hours of hard physical work that we do daily. These types of insidious incidents complement and strengthen the more material forms of disrespect, such as low pay and few benefits, that we face.
Amazon’s tactic of disposability, however, perpetuates a fundamental lie: that we are unimportant. When we are made to feel small and precarious, it helps the company in its quest to make us think that they, the managers and omnipresent Corporate, have the power, and that our role in the company is negligible. But the true balance of power is precisely the opposite. They move nothing; we move the boxes that make Amazon all of its profits and the managers their salaries. Without us, there would be no Amazon.
Alone, we may be disposable, but together, we have the power to decide our futures. In the moment that we are organized enough to all lift one foot in sync and take a step toward freedom together, Amazon’s myth of our disposability will dissolve. As the Wailers famously sang, “You can fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”
Earth’s Safest Place to Work
In a 2020 letter from Jeff Bezos to Amazon’s shareholders, he pledged Amazon’s commitment to be “Earth’s safest place to work.” As an Amazon employee in 2024, it is clear that nothing could be further from the truth.
On Prime Day 2022, Amazon worker Rafael Reynaldo Mota Frias died in a fulfillment center warehouse in New Jersey. Under the immense pressures of working conditions during the sale, Mota Frias had a heart attack.
Coworkers attested that they believe that he was “overworked and overheated.” Mota Frias’s warehouse, like my own, did not have air-conditioning on the warehouse floor. Throughout the summer, it is as hot inside the warehouse as outside, a condition that only worsens each year with the climate crisis. While management’s offices are air-conditioned, the shop floor, where we sweat and exercise for 10 to 12 hours each night, is not. My coworkers joked throughout Prime week that management would wait for someone to pass out from heat exhaustion before they would give us AC.
Indeed, throughout the heat wave that lasted the week of Prime Day this year, management expressed consistent disregard for our heat safety. After an associate complained about the heat, a manager told us that the fans they set up were “sufficient” and that, if someone had a complaint, they should just write again on the useless “Voice of Associates” board. Many of my coworkers told me at different points that they felt overheated and lightheaded. In another instance, I paused work to drink water, and a manager approached me. “What’s going on?” they asked disapprovingly, as I was mid-sip. In coded language, they told me to get back to work.
On July 15 of this year, the U.S. Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Senate Committee released an interim report entitled “Peak Seasons, Peak Injuries: Amazon Warehouses Are Especially Dangerous during Prime Day and the Holiday Season — and the Company Knows It.” In its investigation, the committee found that far more Amazon workers are injured each year than are reported to OSHA, the federal occupational safety regulator. They also found that the company tends to overlook safety procedures during peak periods; when safety requirements inhibit productivity and profit, they are pushed aside. As in an example given in the report, the company commonly floods the conveyor belt with boxes beyond any reasonable capacity, such that they fall off the belt and often hit workers. We are discouraged from turning off the belt to ensure our safety.
According to OSHA, only injuries that are treated beyond first aid must be reported to the agency. This leads to a vast discrepancy between the total injury rate (TIR) and recorded injury rate (RIR) of Amazon warehouse workers, which the Senate committee analyzed using worker testimony and internal Amazon data. Through its RIR, the company artificially manufactures injury rates for the federal regulator that are far lower than they really are — the company often discourages workers from seeking aid beyond first aid and does not provide information about how we can seek outside medical care and workers compensation. As the report notes,
When Amazon workers are injured, they typically visit an on-site first-aid clinic called AMCARE. If their injuries are minor and require only first aid, they are usually treated and sent back to work. But if their injuries are more serious and require additional attention, they are often still only given first aid and sent back to work instead of being sent to a doctor. The result is that their injuries can be rendered not recordable, regardless of severity.
Further, the report demonstrates that injury rates spike during Prime and Peak seasons.
LEFT VOICE
On July 16, fire hydrants were open on every block, and the streets were empty, cleared by the heat wave that swept over New York City that week. Inside the Amazon warehouse where I work, it was just as hot.
July 16 and 17 — some of the hottest days recorded on the planet — were also Amazon’s 2024 Prime Days. The brutality of the temperatures was matched by that of the record-breaking profits Amazon made off its workers during the sale, which for customers lasted two days, and for workers, two weeks.
Amazon created Prime Day, its own commercial holiday, in 2015. The holiday reflects Amazon’s global ascendency and the increasing centrality of the logistics industry in the United States. Other companies, like Walmart, Target, and Temu, have been forced to create their own sales in July to compete with Prime Day. In the United States, there are about 170 million Amazon Prime members, or about half of the country’s population. Amazon Prime is enormously popular, but our warehouse labor is invisibilized—the hours, stress, and life force that this mammoth industry extracts from us and relies on to feed its own rise.
The company made $14.2 billion in profits during Prime this year, an 11 percent increase from last year. That same week, I earned $900 for working a mandatory 60 hours.
Most of us work the overnight shift, from 1 a.m. to 11:50 a.m., which is Amazon’s most common shift schedule, and which makes possible its characteristic same-day and next-day shipping. During Prime and Peak season (around Christmas time), we work forced overtime hours for two weeks — this year, we were scheduled to work 60 hours, or 12 hours a night for five days straight. This forced overtime is implemented to account for the sharp increase in volume that our warehouses process during Prime and Peak — the number of packages that my warehouse processes doubled during Prime week. The daily number of packages that we unload and sort jumped from about 20,000 to 40,000 packages overnight, meaning that not only did our site force us to work longer hours and hire more workers for Prime season, but we were also pressured through a variety of tactics to work harder.
During this period, we are not allowed to take time off. The mandatory extra time (known as MET) exhausts everyone, and is especially difficult for workers who are single parents or have second jobs that they depend on. If we miss time during MET, this time is subtracted from our paid or unpaid time off — time that we rely on for emergencies, since we do not have sick days. If we run out of our allotted unpaid time off hours (UPT), we can be fired.
On Being Disposable
This dynamic underlies Amazon’s employment model. We are at constant risk and live in constant fear of being fired. This disposability is a practical mechanism for the company: it serves the double purpose of keeping production high and facilitating company control of the shop floor. Amazon employs about 1.5 million mostly young workers around the world, uses up our bodies, and drives us to exhaustion and burnout. Then they throw us out, either by firing us or pressuring us, through the intensity of the work, to quit. The high levels of turnover at Amazon are entirely by design. By guaranteeing a constant flow of new hires who have energy and are not yet injured, the company has an easier time demanding high rates and fast work — in other words, making us do more work for the same low hourly wage.
The disposability model can be seen most acutely during Prime and Peak. The highest numbers of people hired by Amazon are hired right before Prime, and the highest numbers of people fired are fired right after Prime. Amazon, like UPS, has tier systems to instill false and arbitrary divisions between workers who do the same job. Most of these new hires are “white badges,” who are technically seasonal workers, and who do not receive the same benefits (such as vacation hours) or minimal job security as the full-time “blue badge” workers. Their employment status means that they could be fired at any time. The company is supposed to convert white badges to blue badges after three months, but the policy is inconsistent and unenforced. Several of my coworkers have been waiting for nearly a year to get blue badge status. Furthermore, favoritism and, conversely, the targeting of specific people based on bias or if they are seen as a “troublemaker” means that rules are enforced discriminately — one person may be fired for a minor offense that another worker would not be. This is another of management’s attempts to divide us.
The reality and feeling of being disposable is one of powerlessness. Amazon uses disposability to keep us down: the real risk of being fired for next to nothing discourages workers from organizing and forming unions. Amazon’s tools of disposability make us, sometimes, suspicious and resentful of each other. They make workers afraid to speak up against the injustices that we witness every day. Amazon wants us to believe that they easily can, and will, replace us. We get secret write-ups and are constantly surveilled for breaking the smallest, most meaningless rules (like checking our phones). This means our livelihoods are always on the line.
In this way, management seeks to control the shop floor. They use fear and discipline to control how we work, down to the smallest details: when we talk, how many minutes we use the bathroom, how fast we move. Our risk of disposability and material precariousness also facilitate manager harassment, which intensified during Prime. Many of my friends at work have been driven to tears or overcome by blind anger by the disrespect with which we are treated by the managers. There is very little appreciation given to us for breaking our backs 10 hours a night.
Managers will purposefully harass workers on the basis of their gender, race, and language/immigration status. They will mask discipline behind a phony facade of concern, and only later will you discover that when they asked, “Are you OK?” they wrote you up afterward. They will yell our names across the warehouse to get our attention and tell us to move faster. They will use passive-aggressive comments to dismiss and invalidate the hours of hard physical work that we do daily. These types of insidious incidents complement and strengthen the more material forms of disrespect, such as low pay and few benefits, that we face.
Amazon’s tactic of disposability, however, perpetuates a fundamental lie: that we are unimportant. When we are made to feel small and precarious, it helps the company in its quest to make us think that they, the managers and omnipresent Corporate, have the power, and that our role in the company is negligible. But the true balance of power is precisely the opposite. They move nothing; we move the boxes that make Amazon all of its profits and the managers their salaries. Without us, there would be no Amazon.
Alone, we may be disposable, but together, we have the power to decide our futures. In the moment that we are organized enough to all lift one foot in sync and take a step toward freedom together, Amazon’s myth of our disposability will dissolve. As the Wailers famously sang, “You can fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”
Earth’s Safest Place to Work
In a 2020 letter from Jeff Bezos to Amazon’s shareholders, he pledged Amazon’s commitment to be “Earth’s safest place to work.” As an Amazon employee in 2024, it is clear that nothing could be further from the truth.
On Prime Day 2022, Amazon worker Rafael Reynaldo Mota Frias died in a fulfillment center warehouse in New Jersey. Under the immense pressures of working conditions during the sale, Mota Frias had a heart attack.
Coworkers attested that they believe that he was “overworked and overheated.” Mota Frias’s warehouse, like my own, did not have air-conditioning on the warehouse floor. Throughout the summer, it is as hot inside the warehouse as outside, a condition that only worsens each year with the climate crisis. While management’s offices are air-conditioned, the shop floor, where we sweat and exercise for 10 to 12 hours each night, is not. My coworkers joked throughout Prime week that management would wait for someone to pass out from heat exhaustion before they would give us AC.
Indeed, throughout the heat wave that lasted the week of Prime Day this year, management expressed consistent disregard for our heat safety. After an associate complained about the heat, a manager told us that the fans they set up were “sufficient” and that, if someone had a complaint, they should just write again on the useless “Voice of Associates” board. Many of my coworkers told me at different points that they felt overheated and lightheaded. In another instance, I paused work to drink water, and a manager approached me. “What’s going on?” they asked disapprovingly, as I was mid-sip. In coded language, they told me to get back to work.
On July 15 of this year, the U.S. Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Senate Committee released an interim report entitled “Peak Seasons, Peak Injuries: Amazon Warehouses Are Especially Dangerous during Prime Day and the Holiday Season — and the Company Knows It.” In its investigation, the committee found that far more Amazon workers are injured each year than are reported to OSHA, the federal occupational safety regulator. They also found that the company tends to overlook safety procedures during peak periods; when safety requirements inhibit productivity and profit, they are pushed aside. As in an example given in the report, the company commonly floods the conveyor belt with boxes beyond any reasonable capacity, such that they fall off the belt and often hit workers. We are discouraged from turning off the belt to ensure our safety.
According to OSHA, only injuries that are treated beyond first aid must be reported to the agency. This leads to a vast discrepancy between the total injury rate (TIR) and recorded injury rate (RIR) of Amazon warehouse workers, which the Senate committee analyzed using worker testimony and internal Amazon data. Through its RIR, the company artificially manufactures injury rates for the federal regulator that are far lower than they really are — the company often discourages workers from seeking aid beyond first aid and does not provide information about how we can seek outside medical care and workers compensation. As the report notes,
When Amazon workers are injured, they typically visit an on-site first-aid clinic called AMCARE. If their injuries are minor and require only first aid, they are usually treated and sent back to work. But if their injuries are more serious and require additional attention, they are often still only given first aid and sent back to work instead of being sent to a doctor. The result is that their injuries can be rendered not recordable, regardless of severity.
Further, the report demonstrates that injury rates spike during Prime and Peak seasons.
Graph excerpted from the Senate report, originally sourced from a 2020 Amazon Workplace Health and Safety report.
The committee report, while progressive in its orientation and useful in exposing Amazon’s systemic maneuvering, has two important limitations.
First, most injuries at Amazon go unreported. I know this from firsthand experience; one of my coworkers gets injured nearly every day. Often, they choose not to report the injury, for an array of reasons. They fear that they could get in trouble for the injury — managers often blame injuries on the victims, or even reprimand them for getting injured because of what they identify as unsafe practices. Workers are often shamed and harassed after sustaining injuries, even when they receive medical accommodations. For many of my immigrant coworkers, there is a significant language barrier that leads them to avoid reporting injury. In other cases, workers feel that AMCARE, Amazon’s on-site resource, will not help them. Nearly all that AMCARE can prescribe is ice, a heat compress, or ibuprofen; what many workers need is rest, and in more severe cases, physical therapy or more intensive medical treatment. But the process for accessing this treatment is obscured by the company. And, regardless, many workers cannot afford to take unpaid time off.
Second, the report places its trust in OSHA and implores action from Congress as a solution to the injustices perpetrated by Amazon. But this trust is misplaced — Amazon workers have a more accurate understanding that Amazon is not bound by federal laws and regulations. It operates, in a practical sense, outside the law. Though its union busting and abusive occupational practices can be challenged in court, only the organized power of Amazon workers can confront the company.
Amazon Workers Fight Back
Across the country and around the world this summer, Amazon workers are fighting back and growing the movement to transform our working conditions.
On Juneteenth, 600 Amazon workers across five warehouses in the New York area signed petitions, demanding Amazon recognize Juneteenth as a paid holiday, as well as $25-an-hour base pay, time-and-a-half pay for Prime Day (“Prime Pay for Prime Day”), and automatic conversions of seasonal white badge workers to regular blue badge workers in 30 days. Workers marched on their bosses together to deliver the petitions. These warehouse workers are organizing in coordination with what they call the “Amazon Workers Summit, a loose network of workplace committees across New York and New Jersey.”
The Amazon Labor Union at JFK8 on Staten Island is also entering a new era of more militant and renewed struggle against Amazon. The ALU formally affiliated with the Teamsters in June, and in July, the ALU Democratic Reform Caucus slate won the first leadership elections within the union. For the new leadership board, a new chapter of democracy and rank-and-file leadership for the union will allow them to more effectively confront the company and bring them to the bargaining table.
On Sunday, July 21, several days after Prime, more than 130 workers walked out of their warehouse in San Bernardino, California.
Most recently, on August 22, the National Labor Relations Board determined that Amazon is a joint employer of the drivers who deliver its packages in Palmdale, California. Previously, the company has claimed that these workers are the sole employees of third-party delivery service partner (DSP) companies. In 2023, Palmdale drivers at one DSP voted to unionize with the Teamsters and were voluntarily recognized by the DSP management — but because they weren’t technically employees of Amazon, Amazon terminated the DSP contract and refused to bargain with the drivers. Now Amazon must negotiate with the Palmdale drivers, and Amazon drivers have a position of increased leverage against the company.
Organizing at Amazon is entering a new period. As our actions and organization grow, we inspire each other and multiply in our power and confidence. The landscape has also been influenced significantly by the Teamsters’ increased investment in organizing efforts. This influence is exciting to workers as organizing momentum grows, but also poses new problems for workers, as many organizing committees that were formerly independent choose to affiliate with the powerful business union. In this new chapter, it is essential that we recognize and uplift the need for rank-and-file leadership and worker democracy in the actions that we take.
The need for worker power is felt most acutely during peak periods like Prime, when we are most exploited and abused by the company. And the contradiction that rules our lives is felt most acutely: when we are most exploited by Amazon, the company makes the most money from us. All the billions of dollars of profit that Amazon made this year on Prime Day is wealth that we created, and that we should fight to reclaim. The more sweat that we spend on Amazon, the more injuries and sleepless hours we give, the more wealth that the bosses amass and the further we are buried in precarity. Only our united power as workers can turn this system upside down. Only together can we take back the humanity and abundance that is ours.
No comments:
Post a Comment