By Clio Blazer
Amazon, a trillion-dollar company and one of the world’s biggest retail suppliers, has provoked a public outcry in regards to the misconduct of employees, effects of supply chain issues on consumers, and unfair competitive practices against small businesses.
For the consumer, Amazon is a familiar and convenient way to access a wide assortment of products. However, the quick distribution associated with this company is a facade of an elaborate and exhaustive process. Jeff Bezos structured Amazon to make skilled workers nearly obsolete: the human labor required is largely unskilled work and does not require extensive training. The company has been accused of an environment where work retention is unimportant, and often employee’s job expectancies are a short two years. Essentially, Amazon is built on the fundamentals of hiring and firing people constantly. Their turnover rate is an astounding 150% annually and in the past year they’ve added 427,300 people to their workforce, bringing it to 1.2 million global employees. Though in the past this has proven to bring Amazon massive success, the pandemic brought insight into some of the human resource weaknesses of its elaborate system.
Even in the face of national shipment delays, Amazon’s infrastructure, technology, and warehouse system have allowed it to deliver products in the promised time frame. To meet holiday demands this year, the company onboarded 45,000 employees in just one week. As Bezos cultivated the company around his belief that workers would grow exhausted of the repetitive work processes and become inconvenient, high employee turnover is the basis of the way Amazon operates. Though this system architected by Bezos has made him the world’s wealthiest man, with approximately $27 billion of Amazon shares, many wonder if this strategy is sustainable and ethical.
Even pre-pandemic the company was subject to substantial employee outcry. In October 2021 the New York Times published an article exposing Amazon’s consistent issues in under compensating vulnerable workers. They interviewed Tara Jones, a worker who noticed $90 missing from her expected check of $540. Jones shared that this issue became persistent despite reporting it. Tara was no exception, apparently “For at least a year and a half — including during periods of record profit — Amazon had been shortchanging new parents, patients dealing with medical crises and other vulnerable workers on leave, according to a confidential report on the findings.”
This issue stems from the beginning stages of the pandemic when Amazon instated abnormally flexible policies and boosted wages to try and keep employees from quitting out of fear of COVID-19. These policies allowed workers to take as much time off as they needed which relaxed productivity requirements. As the pandemic began to become more controlled, these policies were revoked and caused significant complications to the income of many employees.
As Amazon continuously expands to a new extreme, there is little evidence that the company has changed its labor practices, leaving employees to wonder about the future of their occupation and the income they rely on.