Amazon’s workplace culture and job creation claims questioned
According to Amazon, the company has already created more than 7,000 full-time jobs in Canada.
Negative stories about working conditions for warehouse employees and a “churn and burn” company culture have been following Amazon like a dark cloud for years. Workers say the pressure to perform faster and better is unrelenting, and the workforce is culled constantly. Wrote one worker at the Milton warehouse on Glassdoor: “You will have to walk as much as 15 kilometres a day (in 10 hours). Your feet and various other parts of your body will hurt like nothing you have experienced before.”
Tran said workers receive comprehensive training and learn about the expectations for their roles. In any job, there are expectations, she said. “We continue to see good interest.”
As Cumberland Coun. Stephen Blais sees it, Amazon’s arrival in his ward is reason to celebrate. Amazon will be the largest employer in the east end. It will create not only manual-labour jobs, but also employment for managers and administrators. There will be economic spinoffs for the entire region, and the warehouse will kickstart growth in the industrial park.
The jobs generated by Amazon will be, statistically, middle-class jobs, he said. According to Statistics Canada, the national median household income was just over $70,000 in 2015.
“I think there’s a lack of understanding about what middle-class means. If you look at the Statistics Canada definition, that would be the case,” he said. “As I understand it, if you work at this kind of a centre, and you’re part of a couple, it would put you in the realm of the national average.”
Others are asking if the kinds of jobs Amazon will bring are worth celebrating.
“There are good jobs and there are bad jobs. Amazon is known for creating really bad jobs,” says Ricardo Tranjan, a senior researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Ottawa’s fulfilment centre will produce two kinds of jobs. During the construction process, the warehouse will create jobs that will allow apprentices to gain skills and move on to other jobs. That’s good, said Tranjan. But for the people who will work in the warehouse? He has reservations.
Amazon is aggressively antiunion and has one of the highest turnover rates of any Fortune 500 company, Tranjan said.
He points to a study published in April in The New Food Economy, a non-profit publication, that found large numbers of U.S. Amazon employees enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as “food stamps.” In Ohio, around one in 10 Amazon employees uses food stamps. In Pennsylvania, about one in nine, according to the study. In Arizona, almost one in three were enrolled in the program, which provides food-purchasing assistance to lowincome people.
“Are they bringing low-paid, back-breaking jobs that squeeze employees for as long as they can stand? Yes, we are excited to have new jobs. But not all jobs are the same,” Tranjan said.
Certainly, any time there is a construction project of this magnitude, there are jobs both on and off the site, says Sean McKenny, president of the Ottawa and Dis- trict Labour Council.
“Is it good story? Absolutely it is. But there are conflicting stories about who will be working at the fulfilment centre,” he said. “Time will tell. We have concerns. It’s great if people are paid a fair wage. We’ll be watching and paying close attention.”
In any industry, you’ll hear a lot of the negative but the positive doesn’t get repeated, Blais said. “While there are many critics, many of those are at the highest level of the ivory tower. People have to work.”
Amazon’s business culture is built on the idea that every process can be improved to keep customers happy, and every employee has a hand in this grand enterprise. But questions have been raised about the price workers pay.
“This is the irony of work in an Amazon fulfilment centre: the end result of doing your job consistently well today is that customers will expect that tomorrow Amazon will do it faster and better,” noted Wired magazine.
According to a 2011 newspaper report from Allentown, Pa., 15 out of 1,600 workers in its Lehigh Valley warehouse collapsed after the heat index reached 102 degrees (over 38 C). Workers who were sent home because of the heat received disciplinary points, some employees told The Morning Call. An email response to the newspaper attributed to Vickie Mortimer, general manager at the warehouse, said the safety and welfare of employees is the company’s top priority.
“We go to great lengths to ensure a safe work environment, with activities that include free water, snacks, extra fans and cooled air during the summer. I am grateful to work with such a fantastic group of employees from our community, and we partner with them every day to make sure our facility is a great place to work.”
Even Amazon’s white-collar culture has been in the line of fire. In a scorching 2015 investigative piece, The New York Times said Amazon was “conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable.”
Amazon top recruiter Susan Harker, said the company strives to do big, innovative, groundbreaking things, and those things aren’t easy. “When you’re shooting for the moon, the nature of the work is really challenging. For some people, it doesn’t work.”
“The article doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day,” wrote CEO Jeff Bezos in an email to workers after the article was published.
“But if you know of any stories like those reported, I want you to escalate to HR. You can also email me directly at jeff@amazon.com. Even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero.”
Still, the criticism has not let up. In Britain, investigative journalist James Bloodworth, author of Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain, reported finding a bottle of urine on a shelf while he was working undercover in an Amazon warehouse. Why would workers pee in bottles? Because the washrooms are too far away and workers don’t want to take time away from work to meet productivity targets, he explained.
“It’s the most oppressive place I had ever worked, easily,” Bloodworth said in an interview earlier this year.
There have even been questions about whether fulfilment centres actually generate jobs.
In February, the Washingtonbased Economic Policy Institute released a report based on data of 1,161 U.S. counties with warehousing facilities from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of these, 69 were Amazon fulfilment centres in 445 counties between 2001 and 2015.
The report concluded that when Amazon opens a new fulfilment centre, it gains about 30 per cent more warehousing and storage jobs, but no new net jobs. The report suggests there’s a kind of “job displacement” taking place, or that growth in warehousing jobs is not spilling into broader employment gains.
“We find that opening an Amazon fulfilment centre does lead to gains in warehouse jobs in a county, but does not lead to gains in overall county-level employment. These findings are consistent with theories arguing that luring establishments from existing national employers to a particular locale may just displace incumbent jobs.”
State and local governments give away millions in tax abatements, credits and exemptions to lure Amazon warehouses to their jurisdictions but don’t get a corresponding return on their investment, said the report.
In 2017, Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson set out to woo Amazon after it announced it was looking for a second North American headquarters. Although Ottawa never made the shortlist, news that a behemoth warehouse was coming to the city was confirmed this spring. The city agreed to let Amazon’s landlord, Broccolini, defer $8,034,164 in municipal development charge payments until the warehouse is built.
The Economic Policy Institute researchers urged local governments to invest in public services such as childhood education and infrastructure “that are proven to spur long-term economic development” instead of spending public resources on a supposedly ineffective strategy.
“Instead of committing to giving away public funds to attract existing employers from other regions in a zero-sum contest, communities should demand concrete ac- tions that ensure that an employer’s arrival will make their region a more prosperous place — or that at least offset some of the harms the arrival could create.”
The Amazon workplace ethos has fans who offset the detractors. Some workers have described working for the company as fastpaced, challenging and invigorating. Warehouse employees get medical benefits and overtime pay after 40 hours a week. (For most jobs, overtime is payable after 44 hours of work in a week, according to the Ontario Employment Standards Act.) One Glassdoor contributor reported learning many things about shipping and receiving and how huge companies get orders out on time. “Its (sic) a non stop learning environment.”
Added another worker from the Milton plant: “An ideal place to start your career life.”
In Ontario, the company ’s health and safety record with the Ministry of Labour has been fairly solid. Inspectors made 18 field visits to three Amazon fulfilment centres between July 1, 2015 and July 11, 2018 for health and safety checks, according to ministry records.
Out of these visits, 10 orders were issued, including two ordering that the company ensure items can’t tip or fall — a rather modest number of orders given the size of the facilities in Brampton, Mississauga and Milton. Most of the cases have been closed.
The Ontario Employment Standards Act governs working conditions such as hours of work, rest, meal breaks and overtime, but the act is silent on the issues of what would be a reasonable level of productivity to expect of workers, and what would exceed that limit.
What does the arrival of Amazon mean for Ottawa’s job scene? Alan Arcand, associate director of the Centre for Municipal Studies at the Conference Board of Canada, said Ottawa- Gatineau already has a low unemployment rate.
Some of the fulfilment centre workers will likely come from outside the region. These jobs will not necessarily be minimum-wage jobs, he adds.
Arcand doesn’t believe the fulfilment centre will do much to change the complexion of the workforce in Ottawa.
“There are 745,000 people working in Ottawa- Gatineau. Another 600 jobs adds up to less than .1 per cent.”
Workers, labour leaders, the city and the province will have to remain vigilant about working conditions, Tranjan says.
“Kudos for the city. But the hard part starts now. We have a lot of work ahead of us to make sure they’re good jobs,” he said.
“The city brought these jobs here. They made a big deal of it. Now they’re also on the hook to make sure employees benefit from it.”
Amazon and other businesses that provide on-demand services, such as Walmart, should be scrutinized over working conditions, wages and their surveillance of workers, said Claire Mummé, a professor of employment and labour law at the University of Windsor. Society has to think about the true cost of convenience, she said.
“I like getting same-day packages. It’s difficult to move people away from these kinds of conveniences. Everyone is working harder and more precariously. They need these kinds of conveniences. What’s the chicken and what’s the egg? How much do we love convenience over decent pay and sustainable work?”