Does Amazon force people to work for them?

quote:

---

“Amazon brags it pays workers above the minimum wage,” Bates said. “What they don’t tell you is what those jobs are really like. And they certainly don’t tell you they can afford to do much better for the workers.”

Working at Amazon, she said, entails long shifts of grueling work at a “superfast” pace with constant monitoring. Limping employees deal with pain from perpetual motion between the building’s four floors. Two 30-minute breaks during a 10-hour shift are strictly timed, and elevators are marked for materials rather than employees. Workers are sometimes subjected to random security checks that eat up break times. Bates said after a few days, her sister, who later quit, told her, “It only gets worse.”

“They seem to think you are another machine,” she said. “If your computer isn’t scanning, you get charged with being time off task. From the onset, I learned if I worked too slow, or had too much time off task, I could be disciplined or even fired.”

Bates said Amazon should pay its workers a “living wage” with benefits that match living costs. Amazon touts that its workers start out earning more than $15 an hour. She also decried what she called the impersonal nature of management at the center, where employees are notified by text of work developments. She said this makes workers nervous about their job security.

“Why can’t a large and wealthy company do better for their workers?” she asked. “Amazon has made tons of money during the pandemic. Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world, and now he’s even richer... Yet they expect us not to expect anything we didn’t already have before we started to work there.”

---