Staff as an asset or cost?

UNDERCOVER REPORT

The real cost of your gifts from Amazon this year

The retail giant recruits an army of temporary staff in the run-up to Christmas at its biggest UK distribution centre. One undercover reporter joined them to see how the slick operation works; what she found was a soulless world of back-breaking toil, petty rules, low pay and Orwellian surveillance

Mary O’Connor

December 11 2016, 12:01am, The Sunday Times

Amazon sold 7.4m items on Black Friday last yearGERENME/GETTY

My journey to the heart of Britain’s booming online economy began with a wake-up alarm at 4am and a nervous 20-minute trek along empty streets to a Glasgow bus stop. There I stood in the biting cold with a half-awake group of ashen-faced workers awaiting the 75-minute transfer to a 21st-century El Dorado — the vast warehouse in Dunfermline, Fife, that serves as Amazon UK’s biggest distribution centre.

We boarded the bus at 5.15am and settled into our seats, desperate to snatch a little more sleep before the morning shifts began. I could manage no more than intermittent dozing.

Well wrapped up for the early start, I was now too hot in the sweltering vehicle. Around me restless workers idly gazed at their mobile phones as we headed east towards a murky Dunfermline dawn.
Christmas was coming and before it the most frantic weekend of the shopping season — from Black Friday to Cyber Monday. On Black Friday last year Amazon had sold 7.4m items at a rate of 86 a second. To prepare for the maddest of consumer rushes from late November onwards, the company was boosting its 1,500 Dunfermline workforce with 4,000 temporary employees. The western world’s virtual Santa needed warehouse elves by the busload. I was one of them.

It didn’t take me long to realise that my job as a “picker” — a retriever of items from warehouse shelves — came with a number of snags. The first was the bus — provided by the recruitment agency that got me the job — which workers were charged £10 a day to travel on. Unless you lived in Dunfermline or owned a car, there was really no alternative to the 5.15am flyer. The only other way of reaching the warehouse from Glasgow involved a three-hour journey on four different buses.

Yet when you are being paid £7.35 an hour by the recruitment agency — only 40p above the national minimum wage for a 24-year-old such as myself — immediately having to pay out £10 a day is more than a pain in the wallet.b

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Undercover footage: the pressures of working at Amazon

I calculated that by the time I had stumped up the bus fare four or five times each week and had taken an unpaid 30-minute lunch break, as stipulated by the agency in my terms of employment, I was effectively earning £6.35 an hour for my 10-hour shift — 60p below the relevant minimum wage.
I had opted to work day shifts that ran from 7am to 5.30pm. During mandatory overtime periods of peak online shopping we had to work an extra hour on each shift, plus an additional day on certain weeks.

The benefits included free coffee and tea and “hot canteen food”. What the job adverts had failed to mention was that the handheld scanners that workers are given to locate and retrieve packages also serve to monitor their whereabouts in the warehouse and their level of activity.

Amazon’s Dunfermline warehouse is the size of 14 football fieldsHEMEDIA

Those famous Amazon databases not only sort and sell products; they also analyse the performance, errors and “idle time” of “pickers” and “stowers” — those who keep the warehouse shelves stocked — and penalise them if they slip below the company’s performance targets.

By the end of the first week I was already under pressure. I was told that I had made four errors in 40 hours of hunting and fetching and had become subject to a disciplinary process.

The mistakes in question had involved marking items that I couldn’t find in the haystack-like warehouse as “missing”.

When it received a “missing” report, Amazon would send a team to check. A worker who turned out to have made a mistake was obviously incompetent or lazy. I certainly wasn’t lazy but it was often frustrating trying to pick out, say, a small packet of seeds from the bottom of an overflowing storage bin.

My excuses were to no avail: I was told that because the number of errors I had made were so high, I would automatically be on my final warning the following week — one step away from being sacked.

During busy times, workers must fetch at least 75 items an hourMichael Schofield

I also learnt that Amazon operated a stringent attendance policy with a penalty points system punishing lateness, overlong breaks and absence for sickness. One supervisor warned us that if we received six penalty points in six weeks we would be “released”.

One day I offered to present a doctor’s note to explain my absence with a migraine, but was told that I would receive a penalty point anyway. A co-worker spent three days in hospital with a severe kidney infection and was given two penalty points, reduced to one on appeal.

I would later fall foul of the scrutiny of idle time when a recruitment agency supervisor monitoring the performance of temporary staff tracked down my whereabouts via my scanner.

The supervisor was now accusing me of spending half an hour of the company’s time talking to two young men. Well, it’s true that I’m a 24-year-old woman who sometimes talks to men. My stationary 10-minute chat with two co-workers had been detected by our scanners and merited a warning. Guilty as charged.

The glossy promise of a shiny hi-tech working environment didn’t match up to the numbing reality of my job on the warehouse floor. Every day I would trundle down the aisles with my trolley and yellow plastic bins known as “totes”.

The place had the charm of a cemetery, with birdsong replaced by the jarring beeps of the perpetually busy scanner. I still hear them in my sleep.

At first, when it wasn’t quite so chaotic, I could walk for miles without seeing another human being, plucking items from shelves ranging from diamanté thongs to a chopping board engraved with Lionel Richie’s face. Some lucky soul is in for a real treat this Christmas.

The constant race to meet targets produced many collisions between workers and trolleys

As the days slid on indistinguishably I began to hear other workers complaining about increasingly “impossible” performance targets. By the third week we were expected to retrieve a minimum of 75 items an hour.

We were permitted only one error a week — wrongly marking an item as missing when it was not — and running in the aisles was forbidden. I covered up to 14 miles a day — more than half the distance of a marathon — mostly by speed-walking.

I learnt of one employee who suffered a panic attack after being persistently told by managers that she was not meeting her targets and might be sacked. Days later I found that she had been given her final formal warning and was off to be “retrained”. I never saw her again.

I had been raised on a diet of science fiction staples such as The Matrix and Westworld and I couldn’t help wondering if she had ended her days plugged into a mainframe for a software reboot.
As Black Friday approached, the warehouse descended into maniacal chaos. Workers ignored the no-running rule, racing up and down the aisles with their trolleys, some even improvising them into skateboards as they rushed to pick items from overcrowded floor-level bins or high-up shelves.
Our goal was to beat the company clock that timed the movement of items through the system. The constant race to meet targets and avoid personal penalties produced so many collisions between workers and trolleys that people gave up apologising for bruising your shins or crashing into your bins.

A manager insisted unswervingly that health and safety was “Amazon’s No 1 priority” but admitted to us that injuries were happening. His assurance that there was nothing unreasonable about the demands of our job needs to be compared with the experience of the first aider who told me the “targets were terrible” and were responsible for workers “rushing” and ultimately getting hurt.

Apart from busy periods such as Black Friday, seeing a fellow worker can be a rare eventMICHAEL SCHOFIELD

I was injured three times in my three weeks at Amazon. In my first week I suffered a cut to my eyebrow caused by a book that flew off a top shelf when I took out another item.

A manager later suggested it was because it had been wrongly wedged by a stower, who may well have been under pressure to meet his own shelf-stocking targets.

Later I injured my back after prolonged hunching over the trolley. Finally a partially unsheathed knife that had been put into an already overcrowded bin cut my hand as I searched for another item.
In this case a stower again was blamed. I would rather think of the stower as another harried soul trying desperately to meet performance targets.

Who in Glasgow could possibly be desperate enough — apart from a curious reporter — to opt for such a low-paid job with such a torrid commute? Plenty of them, it soon turned out, lured by promises of “fantastic incentives” and “good career prospects”.

Days after I applied for the job, I had found myself sitting in the dingy side room of the recruitment agency’s Glasgow office with about 15 mostly male applicants of varying ages and ethnicities, including Asian and African.

They didn’t seem to have much in common, apart from their barely concealed expressions of resignation at their not especially promising choice of employment.

I spoke to one Scottish applicant who appeared to be woefully oblivious to what the job actually entailed. He explained he was giving it a go “for a bit of extra cash” to boost his meagre student income.

A female applicant, who was Asian and appeared to be in her late twenties, announced that she was able to work only two or three shifts a week because she was doing two other jobs, one of them at her husband’s business. Unable to commit to the mandatory overtime, she was shown the door. I then became one of only two women in the room.

Three young men, who appeared to be under the age of 30, told me they were receiving out-of-work benefits and two of them had criminal convictions. Yet both sailed through the application process, despite warnings that we would undergo criminal background checks.

A week later I befriended one of the men, who said he had served time for permanently disfiguring someone.

I was conscious that I didn’t exactly blend in with my home counties accent. At one point another worker said to me: “You’re a bit posh . . . you’re not from around here, are you?”

I assured him I desperately needed the money as I had spent all my money at university on booze and had left with a third-class degree and zero career prospects. All lies of course.

Next came induction day when we were faced with a slew of Amazon promotional videos inviting us to “Work hard, have fun, make history”.

The inflatable Christmas reindeers welcoming us to the warehouse were a fun touch, but the airport-style scanners in the entrance hall and the security guards who manned them were less amusing. I later learnt they were there for a reason.

In recent months, I was told, the company had detected several thefts of new iPhones. A group of Romanian women had been removing them from the packaging, concealing them in their vaginas and walking through security undetected.

The women had worn heavy metal belts that were blamed if the alarms sounded. It was only when one member of the gang slipped up and forgot to wear her belt that all the women were then subjected to body searches. It is not clear what action was taken against them.

As for making history, I suppose it’s true that for three brief weeks I played a part in the construction of a formidable empire. Just as the splendour of ancient Egypt was built on the backs of slaves, my back has done its bit for Amazon.

Amazon delivers a speedy reply

Amazon said: “Amazon provides a safe and positive workplace with competitive pay and benefits. We are proud to have been able to create several thousand new permanent roles in our UK fulfilment centres over the last five years.

“The safety and wellbeing of our permanent and temporary associates is our No 1 priority. All associates receive health and safety information as well as dedicated safety training on their first day and must pass a safety test before beginning their first shift. Amazon has 62% fewer injuries than other companies conducting warehousing activities in the UK.

“All permanent and temporary associates start on £7.35 an hour or above, regardless of age and £11 an hour and above for overtime.

“Productivity targets are set objectively, based on previous performance levels achieved by our workforce. We support people who are not performing to the levels expected with dedicated coaching to help them improve.

“Amazon has found no evidence, record or suggestion of Romanian women smuggling phones out of the centre in their vaginas.”