Amazon’s obsession high efficiency and productivity have made it one of the world’s most successful companies. That drive, however, also has a dark side. The Ecommerce giant has repeatedly come under fire for driving employees as if they were robots, resulting in poor working conditions and high turnover rates at its warehouses. Worse yet, the drive toward maximum productivity has largely been automated, allowing the company to dole out correctives and even terminations with no direct human input.
Inside Amazon’s fulfillment centers, employees are monitored carefully by algorithmic systems meant to measure their individual productivity. Tasks such as scanning labels and packing boxes are tracked, allowing Amazon to generate what it has called a proprietary productivity metric for each employee. Through this system, the company can track every employee through virtually every minute of the day.
While the system’s ostensible purpose is to ensure that employees meet Amazon’s high efficiency standards, things take an Orwellian turn when those standards aren’t met. Internal documents and employee testimonies have revealed that time spent off-task can result in automatically generated write-ups and, in some extreme cases, terminations. Several facilities have detailed turnover rates in the hundreds per year, much of which is driven by this highly automated tracking system.
The core problem at the heart of the tracking system is that it appears to be able to operate completely without human supervisors. While a supervisor can override a corrective or termination, no input from a supervisor is required for a corrective or termination to be initiated. As a result, Amazon’s employees frequently feel as if they’re at the mercy of an impersonal computer system meant to track and quantify their every movement.
Although the tracking system has come up in numerous labor lawsuits over the years, Amazon continues to use it. This fact may put the company at odds with the newly elected Biden administration and its publicly stated focus on labor relations. Amid prominent disputes over unionization drives and worker rights, Amazon has come under significant fire for its approach to managing its employees. As pro-labor efforts continue under the Biden administration, it’s very likely that new lawsuits will be initiated against Amazon for its labor practices.
The post How Amazon Tracks, Disciplines and Fires Employees With No Human Input appeared first on FinanceWeb.
