LESS THAN THE MINIMUM WAGE DRIVERS
Intolerable pressure means they can’t even stop for toilet breaks Ice, police, sandwich in the cab... all in a 14hr, £100 day
hit targets has prompted many to contact the DVSA, which is also investigating claims they are exhausted and have to urinate in bottles.
One worker told us: “Amazon sent an email to all managers to try to stop drivers carrying bottles filled with urine. The security guards were reporting people for it.
“But the allocation and number of stops, and the volume to be distributed for no proper reason. The drivers, who work out of Amazon’s depots, are expected to be available on demand and at Christmas time this can involve six-day or seven-day weeks.
Amazon provides the drivers with the route they must follow and there for any given day, lies entirely with Amazon.”
Solicitors from Leigh Day are representing seven former drivers who claim agencies mistreated them.
Employment law specialist Nigel Mackay has laid out a raft of employment complaints and claimed the workers are “mislabelled” as selfemployed so bosses can deny them rights. And a leading union has called
are strict conditions on how they should deliver parcels.
If the drivers return to the Amazon depot without having made enough attempts to deliver parcels, or if they can’t work for any reason, they risk having their pay cut, being fined or denied future shifts.
Because of this the drivers, who get paid a flat daily rate, can end up WEARY James puffs out his cheeks and sighs: “I think this might be the day I quit.”
It’s midday and three hours into his shift – but his van is still brimming with brown boxes.
His eyes glass over at the realisation that once again his 10-hour shift is going to stretch well past his 7pm finish time. I meet him near the online shopping giant’s Sheffield depot, from which more than 200 drivers operate.
He had arrived at the warehouse before 9am and spent his first hour loading 188 parcels.
His route of 140 addresses is laid out by an Amazon phone app.
Within minutes we’re late thanks to a police motorway blockade.
Then we encounter ice and by midday we’ve made fewer than 10 drops.
James – not his real name – says: “These routes do not take account of weather, finding addresses, loading up.
“I don’t even put my seatbelt on. There’s not enough time to keep taking it off.”
James races to more drops and each time he scans a box with his phone a green tick booms from his phone app – bringing the next address up on the screen. At 3pm, with only 40 drops done, we grab a sandwich and eat it in the cab.
At 6.15pm James pulls over, lights a cig and takes his first on Amazon’s US but it’s not optional. We founder Jeff Bezos, 53, don’t get to pick and the world’s richest man choose which laws we who last year made App drivers adhere to and which we £1.6million an hour, to download to be told routes don’t like.” do more to support agency workers. An Amazon spokesman told the
Maria Ludkin, legal director of the Sunday Mirror: “Over 100 businesses GMB union said: “Employers might across the UK are providing work not like paying the minimum wage or opportunities to thousands of people giving their workers the protections delivering parcels to customers. We they’re entitled to in the workplace, are committed to ensuring that the
working extremely long days, often without breaks. Their resulting hourly rate can be very low, once you take into account expensive van rental agreements and the cost of fuel.
How can Amazon get away with this? Because it uses sub-contractors to employ these drivers, keeping them at arm’s length.
On top of that, the companies they
use treat their drivers as self-employed independent contractors, similar to how Uber treats its drivers – which an employment tribunal has already held to be unlawful in another claim brought by the GMB.
The union is arguing that in reality the drivers delivering Amazon parcels are employees who should be given the rights they are entitled to. real break – for five minutes. Drivers have a 9pm cut-off by which they must have tried to make every delivery once. After that they are no longer allowed to knock on doors.
They cannot skip any addresses because their vans’ positions show up on GPS.
In a race to meet this deadline, James drives more erratically and he complains he is tired and his back hurts.
By 9pm he has met the attempted-delivery target but still has parcels left.
Too scared to take them back to the depot, he breaches rules by “re-attempting” those where the homeowners were not previously in and we don’t finish until 9.28pm.
By the time he gets back to the depot and is debriefed it will be 11pm. He will have been working for 14 hours and earn a little more than £100.
Drivers operate on the basis they earn a flat rate for a 10-hour route. Not all of them have contracts.
Agencies argue that if the route is completed in the allocated time, drivers earn the national living wage.
But having seen the job myself, it is physically impossible to deliver all the parcels in the allotted time.
Drivers claim, with the extra hours and deductions, they earn well below the national living wage. Many also fear they will not be re-hired if they fail to complete the route.
Employers can’t pick which laws they like or which ones they don’t MARIA LUDKIN LEGAL DIRECTOR OF GMB UNION
people contracted by our independent delivery providers are fairly compensated, treated with respect, follow all applicable laws and driving regulations and drive safely.
“Our delivery providers are expected to ensure drivers receive a minimum £12 per hour before deductions and excluding bonuses, incentives and fuel reimbursements.”
A spokesman for Prospect Commercial Ltd said: “We work hard to provide a good service and supportive work environment for our self-employed contracted drivers.
“We provide competitive compensation to contracted drivers, who receive a rate in excess of the national living wage after deductions, and this is regularly audited.”