Amazon jobs: boon or
torture?
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/amazon_jobs_boon_or_torture.html
The company at the root
of the fortune of the world’s richest man is either a slave-driving torture
camp, or a generous and understanding enabler of people seeking to grow their
skills and develop satisfying careers. Both views are getting lots of air right
now, as Christmas hiring in a tight job market is sparking a recruitment drive
at the online retailing champion.
Some people who have
worked at Amazon denounce their former employer as an inhumane sweatshop.
Consider this article in the New York Post, written by Maureen
Donnelly, who worked for one month at an Amazon fulfillment center, where goods
on order are packed into boxes for shipping to customers. Ms. Donnelly found
the experience intolerable:
I soon learned that only difference between an Amazon
warehouse and a third-world sweatshop were the robots. At Amazon, you were
surrounded by bots, and they were treated better than the humans. (snip)
They assigned me as a “stower.” I stocked shelves, called
racks.
Squat, square orange robots — they looked like an ugly cousin
to the Roomba — carried 8-foot-tall yellow racks with dozens of compartments.
The bots would whiz around to the stowers and stop. Somebody called a “water
spider” would bring me boxes of items to stow. I would lift the items out of
the box, scan them and put each item into a compartment in the rack. When the
rack was full, I pressed a button, and the robot would zip away with the rack,
and another robot would arrive with an empty rack for me to fill.
When I showed up for my shift, I’d walk in the main entrance
and scan a security badge to get through a revolving door. The locker room was
to the left. You had to put any personal items in the locker. No headphones. I
think it was a safety issue. Absolutely no cellphones on the floor! They didn’t
want anybody taking pictures or giving away their secrets! No food. No drinks —
except water. (snip)
After putting away my personals, I’d go to the meeting area
for 10 minutes of group calisthenics — I felt like I was in the Army.
Then it was on to my station to start stowing. I’d stare
at what awaited me: An endless line of yellow racks. One hundred
stowers lined up 15 feet apart. It reminded me of the ending of
“Raiders of the Lost Ark.” (snip)
It was hot as hell in that building — it felt like 150
degrees.
People kept asking, “Can we get fans?” But the answer was
always no. You know why? Because, we were told, the robots don’t function well
in the cold. Finally we figured out why every manager in the place was wearing
shorts.
There were hundreds of robots zigging and zagging on each
floor. It was very creepy because no two bots ever crashed. The human stowers
and pickers were on the perimeter of the robots’ fenced-in area. If the humans
ever crossed into the robots’ domain it was a fireable offense.
The job was mind-numbing. The same thing every hour. Every
day. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I had “‘projections.” I had to stock at least 12 items a
minute. I was not even close. It’s physically impossible. You were constantly
like, “I gotta get this done.” The computer constantly showed you how far off
you from making the quota.
I wasn’t disciplined because I was a newbie, and I quit
before I could find out the punishment.
Ms. Donnelly obviously
never worked on an assembly line, or in any machine-paced factory-like
environment. I’ve worked in such situations and can tell her that it is worse
than having to meet a quota. On an assembly line, if you fall behind and don’t
perform your task on an item going by, it creates problems for the stations
after yours, and a supervisor will soon bring that failure to your attention.
The relentless pace of the line becomes your master, your disciplinarian, and
your nightmares.
One of the consequences
of the prosperity that President Trump has brought America (after 8 years of
Obama telling us that 1% growth and high unemployment is the “new normal”) is
that employers have to try harder to recruit employees. This Christmas
season, Amazon is advertising very heavily on TV touting the desirability of
working for it. Here is one commercial that appears very frequently on Fox
News, at least in the Bay Area, where the jobs market is extremely tight,
featuring the health care benefits, tuition assistance, and other perks that
Amazon uses to attract workers.
One of the pitches is
that Amazon is “trans-friendly”
And Ms. Donnelly does
admit that some of her colleagues were very enthusiastic about working for
Amazon:
A very enthusiastic woman from the South in T-shirt and jeans
— that’s the uniform — bragged that Amazon was the “best” company, “beyond
huge.” She reeled off all the perks: Stock shares. Employee discounts. Full
benefits. Four-day work weeks, with not a ton of mandatory OT. (snip)
On the first day, about 100 of us newbies gathered in a
conference room, and a bunch of managers got up to talk. They were all the
same. They all drank the Kool-Aid. They all said, “This is the best place to
work.”
Looking back, it was cult-like.
They went over the different jobs. If you got something you
didn’t like, they’d give you something else.
Like McDonalds, another major company that advertises for
employees on national TV, Amazon sees its entry-level jobs as a rung on the
employment ladder for younger workers to gain skills, build an employment track
record, get educational assistance, and move on to jobs with upward mobility
prospects. I am certain that these entry-level jobs are demanding and
unpleasant in many ways. Like many jobs. But by helping those doing these jobs
gain training for higher-level work, they offer a gateway.
I know that the very
demanding jobs I did in my college years during summers motivated me to ensure
that I didn’t have to spend the rest of my life in such circumstances, and
helped me realize that hard work is necessary to produce and distribute all the
physical goods that we consume. It engendered respect for all the people whose
labor, much of it unpleasant, was necessary for me to be able to buy and enjoy
various products.
If Amazon's bargain of
work hard for flexibility and benefits doesn't appeal to you, then don't work
there. Ms. Donnelly had the option of leaving and she exercised it. If enough
people feel that way, Amazon wlll have to change what it offers. Or buy more
robots. That's the glory of a market economy, where we get to choose.
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