The New York Times did an exposé
into the business practices over at
Amazon, the treatment of workers
especially in warehouses.
And they specifically zeroed in on
the one and only massive warehouse
in New York, where the working
conditions honestly make you think
of what workers are treated
in an underdeveloped country,
undeveloped country,
whichever phrase you'd like to use,
it's just absolutely deplorable.
Disgusting behavior of course meant
to maximize profits while cutting
losses and costs.
Now, what they specifically talked
about is how Amazon relies on
computerized human resources and
they encourage,
encourage high turnover.
And there's a terrible reason for
why Jeff Bezos thinks high turnover
is a good thing.
That success, speed and agility
were possible because Amazon and
its founder Jeff Bezos had
pioneered new ways of mass managing
people through technology,
relying on a maze of systems that
minimized human contact to grow
unconstrained.
Now, I could read graphics to you,
but I think it's actually better to
hear from one of the New York Times
reporters who worked on this story.
So without further ado, let's go
to Jodi Kantor who explains
the findings in this report.
>> It all goes back to the original
vision that Jeff Bezos had for
this company.
And we quoted actually some brave
former executives who went on
the record with us to describe his
philosophy and
express their concerns
about how it's playing out.
He wanted quick turnover because he
wanted people when they
were fresh and new.
To paraphrase him, he almost felt
that human beings were inherently
lazy.
And so he wanted to keep people
moving through his system and
also intentionally limited upward
mobility in the warehouses.
It's very hard to start at
the first level at Amazon and
then progress up very high.
Some of those executives are
actually worried that Amazon could
run out of workers because they are
burning through workers so quickly.
>> So on one hand,
this man thinks that workers
are just inherently lazy.
But he has literally intentionally
created a work environment where
it's impossible to strive for
a better position, right?
Because he has decided to stunt any
upward mobility.
That's what the business model is.
He wants high turnover.
He wants people to be fresh.
I mean, I've been at TYT for
over 14 years.
And I would argue that I haven't
showed any,
any- >> Lack of freshness?
>> I mean, I would
like to think that.
>> [LAUGH] That's how I put it.
>> I do my job every
day with curiosity, excitement and
like that.
Just think about how he thinks
about ordinary people,
about workers.
He just thinks that they're beneath
him, that they're lazy, >> How bad
does this guy want to replace every
person in there with a robot?
And I already feel terrible for
how he's going to treat those
robots someday.
Because he's going to work them
into the ground.
Yeah, no, he doesn't care.
They are at best cogs in
the machine.
Temporary, wants to get
rid of them.
They can phrase it as the wanting
to keep them fresh.
What that means is,
we're going to grind them down and
we could not do that.
We could try to care a little bit
more about their quality of life,
reduce the rate that they're
expected to perform.
Give them a bit more break time.
Perhaps a little bit more money,
a little bit time off work.
We can do that stuff so
they can maintain their freshness.
We're not interested in that.
We want to grind them to the ground
because we know there's going to
be more people.
And we can sustain that for
a couple of decades before we worry
that we've literally worked through
all of the American workforce.
And there's nobody desperate enough
for this position that doesn't
already have PTSD over
the experience of having previously
worked in one of our warehouses,
that's what it sounds like to me.
>> Well the story gets worse John
as you can imagine and keep in mind
that Amazon is aggressively
anti-union for a reason.
Because all these business
practices would be to change
if there was actually labor power
amongst its workers.
And so I want you to keep that all
in mind as we give you more and
more details about what this exposé
covered.
Now even before the pandemic
previously unreported data shows
Amazon lost about 3% of its hourly
associates each week,
meaning the turnover among its
workforce was roughly 150% a year.
That rate, almost double that of
retail and logistics industries.
Now John seemed a little
skeptical of that figure.
>> Well, I just want to make sure
that people don't think that that
means they go through more than
their whole workforce every year.
That's not what it means, they're
going through the same portion
roughly multiple times per year.
>> Exactly, yes.
Now, I also want to give
you a statement from a former vice
president of Amazon who spoke to
the New York Times for the story.
And by the way, they spoke to 200
people who had worked at Amazon,
who are currently working at Amazon
in order to do the story,
including some former executives
like David Niekerk, who says.
Well, David Niekerk,
a former Amazon vice president who
built the warehouse human resources
operations, said that some problems
stemmed from ideas the company had
developed when it was much smaller.
Bezos did not want an entrenched
workforce, calling it, quote,
a march to mediocrity, Niekerk
recalled and sought low skilled
jobs as relatively short term.
So again, speaking to the issues
with high turnover over at Amazon
and here's a direct quote from him.
He says, it is just a numbers game
in many ways.
The culture gets lost.
So whenever you hear about company
culture, they don't care about
company culture, they don't,
like when you hear about remote
workers being forced to go back to
the office like, we
want to maintain company culture.
No, they want to keep
an eye on you.
>> I want people to come back here
because I actually am lonely here.
>> You are.
>> I'd like the culture to return,
I want people to go to a food
truck with me.
I also want the food trucks
to come back.
But in big companies, I get what
you're saying and I agree.
Also, I'm not in charge, but
I want to make that very clear.
It's not up to me. I'm just lonely,
it's a big building
when I'm here alone.
John.
>> Yeah thanks.
>> He's a good guy,
all right, well,
then there's the topic of tracking,
something that has been covered
before, but we have a little more
insight into that by Kantor.
Let's watch.
>> Part of what the article
lays bare and
makes very clear is how well
Amazon tracks its own employees.
Not only the packages, but it
tracks things like time off task.
What does that kind of tracking do
to the culture at Amazon?
So it is true that in most of these
jobs in the warehouse you
are tracked every single second.
When you pause,
a computer is noting that.
It's almost like an attendance
system within an attendance system.
Now, you may have an excused reason
for pausing.
But you have to go to your manager
and ask them to code that in.
We write about a woman named
Diana Santos,
who was an excellent performer.
She had lots of praise.
She had one really bad day in which
a series of things some of which
were beyond her control went wrong.
She was fired for one bad day.
>> So if you need to take a break,
I mean you're being monitored every
second that you're in
that warehouse.
If you need to step away for
a second, you need to contact
a manager.
But here's the problem.
It's really hard to get in touch
with the manager because they've
computerized and automated a lot of
that, including their human
resources department, which I'll
give you some details about in just
a second but- >> Yeah, and
all of the human managers are so
mediocre and unfresh.
They've been marched into
this position with it,
no it's ridiculous.
The fact that it's assumed that
it's not an acceptable pause and
that you have to fix it,
it's just insane.
I know that a lot of people last
year were really disappointed by
the Cyberpunk game that came out
but like dude, we- >> Definitely.
>> Video game.
It's here,
it's in these warehouses.
It's huge.
It's politically influential.
The richest supervillain in world
history is in charge
of it right now.
And it is amazing that, well it's
not amazing, campaign finance and
all that, that our government
doesn't care to actually get
involved, that you have a couple of
politicians who will speak out in
favor of those trying to unionize.
You have Amazon begrudgingly
seeding to things like
the conversation around $15
an hour, minimum wage.
So that's like the one good thing
that's come to Amazon in
literally years,
thanks to groups like 515 and
politicians like Bernie Sanders,
but the issue is that I guess,
okay, it's good.
You're going to make $15 an hour,
but how long could you
possibly last?
When we were watching that video we
said we wouldn't
last five minutes there.
You are treated as if it is
unfortunate that you are a flesh
and blood thing that has a brain
that sometimes get tired,
that sometimes needs to urinate.
Like these are inconveniences that
eventually Amazon will work around.
But for now,
I guess we'll deal with it.
But if you pause for a second,
you might potentially lose your job
as a result of that.
Under those conditions,
does it matter that you're making
$15 an hour?
Kind of but it's not the biggest
thing in the world not like for
other sorts of jobs.
>> They treat people like robots
because they want them to
work like robots.
And since humans aren't robots,
they're being replaced by robots.
But I mean that there's a very
clear reason why there's so
much investment into automating
these jobs.
So let's go to the final video
because this one helps to
really humanize what's going on.
We talk about the numbers,
the statistics, the business model,
but I think it's important to talk
about specific people and
what they've gone through.
>> One of the most poignant
stories in the article is
about a woman named Ann Castillo.
Her husband was a very long time
very loyal,
well liked Amazon employee.
He got very sick with Coronavirus.
He suffered brain damage.
His condition is very serious.
And yet she had these questions
about why is the company,
do they even know what is happening
to my husband and
it led her to ask, are their
workers truly replaceable to them?
>> And the answer is yes.
In fact, just to give you some more
details about Castillo and
what her husband has gone through.
Workers like Mr. Castillo at JFK8,
that's the warehouse in New York,
were told to take as much unpaid
time as they needed and this is
after they test positive for COVID.
Then hit with mandatory overtime
when Amazon offered employee
flexible, personal leave.
The system handling them jammed
issuing a blizzard of job
abandonment notices to workers and
sending staff scrambling to save
them, according to human
resources and warehouse employees.
And one of the issues that
Castillo's wife had was just
getting in touch with someone over
at HR to ask questions about
the benefits that
are supposed to be provided.
At one point,
the workers comp benefits just stop
being mailed to her house and
she was like, what's going on?
She needed to get in touch with
someone and
it was impossible to do it.
So not only are warehouse workers
slowly but surely getting replaced
by these robots.
And I know that if there isn't
something done, if there isn't
an increase in labor power,
if there isn't organizing, if there
isn't a union drive specifically in
these big companies, then this
situation will continue devolving.
There's no question about it.
I want to just go to this
one headline.
And it was published by GeekWire in
February but
it's relevant to the argument that
I'm trying to make right now.
So Amazon now employs 1.3 million
people worldwide after adding half
a million workers in 2020.
So during the pandemic,
they really expanded.
Obviously, that's worldwide.
But we have
about a million of those employees
here in the United States.
It's the second largest
private employer.
So when we- >> Next to Walmart?
>> Walmart is still number one,
believe it or not.
So I bring that up because it's
great when small companies unionize
like there's obviously I want
everyone to have power in their
workplace.
But in terms of changing
the country, having the biggest
impact on working conditions,
we gotta focus on organizing and
getting Amazon workers to push
harder to form a union.
>> Once they get the support that
they need because obviously they
have in some places but they'll
fire you if you get distracted for
a minute.
If they have a sniff that you're
going to be unionizing, yeah,
they'll fire you immediately.
When they said,
take all the time you want off but
then there's issues and
what do you know,
we can't fix it or whatever,
there's a technical thing or
whatever.
It reminds me of last week.
There was a story about Movie Pass.
Do you remember Movie Pass?
>> I do, yeah.
>> Movie Pass was great,
I was in it when it was good.
The issue was they figured out,
wait, this isn't sustainable.
We need to figure
out a way to undercut the core
thing of Movie Pass is you can
see as many movies as you want,
that was inconvenient for them.
So eventually they added a thing
where sometimes when you go to get
your ticket, it would say
you need to take a picture of your
ticket and send it in and
people would find out, wait,
sometimes it doesn't work.
As if it's buggy, it wasn't buggy.
It was revealed eventually,
an email chain.
They had a percentage set for
it to break, and they could change
that percentage as they needed to.
So might be 2% and then there would
be an email from a CEO saying,
no, no, no, 3%, we need to make 3%
of them fail when they try to take
the picture of the thing.
I have no idea whether anything
like that could be happening at any
other company, let alone Amazon.
But we should not assume that
there's these coincidences,
that it's just inefficiency, that
it's, you got lost in the system.
Massive companies
are in it for money.
They know how to, you can see
the fact that they're checking
every second of what you're doing.
They know how to really hone in
there.
And so there should definitely be
investigations into these sorts of
abuses, especially when,
in the case of Amazon,
there were so many COVID cases,
people's lives are on the line too.
>> Yeah, you're absolutely
right about that.
By the way, that same story,
which I don't remember if we did it
on the main show, but I gotta see
because there were other details in
that that should make you aware of
certain business models that are
propped up by venture capitalists.
And so what happened with Uber for
instance, which has never turned
a profit is they had this business
model where venture capitalists
were losing money because they were
literally subsidizing the company
to offer incredibly cheap rides.
And so it made them a huge
competitor to traditional taxis and
all of that, and so
they cornered that market,
offered the cheap rides.
And then now that they've put
a bunch of taxi companies out of
business and all of that,
that subsidy from the investors is
being pulled away.
So if you've found yourself paying
like $50 for an Uber ride,
you're wondering what's going on,
I used to pay $12 for this.
Understand that they're ending what
was propping up that business in
the first place.
So what they try to do is put other
people out of business,
monopolize the market,
and then they jack up their prices.
And we're certainly seeing that
with Amazon as well.
>> That's the Walmart market way of
doing business as well.
>> Exactly, now with the Internet,
it's just like
another flavor of that.