Narrative: Amazon Mistreats Employees

Written: January 24, 2017

Amazon has been accused over the years of mistreating two distinct categories of employees: the blue collar workers who man its fulfillment centers and warehouses, and the white collar workers who staff its offices. The issues affecting the two sets of workers are different, and worth looking at separately.

The allegations of mistreatment of blue collar workers have been far more prevalent and gone on for much longer, and since these workers make up the bulk of Amazon’s overall employees, it’s worth looking at those first. Allegations of mistreatment against these employees include:

I could go on, but you get the picture – some of these are about specific incidents, while others are about the everyday conditions of working in a fulfillment center. How you feel about all this probably largely depends on your existing notions of worker-employer relationships, subjects like unionization and the minimum wage, and so on. It’s absolutely clear both that there have been isolated incidents of inhumane treatment of workers, and that the everyday life of an Amazon warehouse worker is grueling.

However, Amazon points out that it employs many people who otherwise wouldn’t be employed, that each of its employees can quit if they’d prefer to work somewhere else, and so on. It pays above (sometimes barely above) minimum wage, and offers long-term job security to those who are willing to put up with the demands of the job.

It’s tough to find a completely objective view of Amazon’s blue collar workers’ jobs, but Glassdoor offers one perspective. It’s a site where employees can rate their jobs and provide information about salaries. The 338 Amazon warehouse associates who have reviewed the job give it an average of 3.1 out of 5 stars, only 56% would recommend the job to a friend, and 66% approve of CEO Jeff Bezos. This Forbes piece summarizes some of the more detailed findings. Indeed.com is a similar site and Amazon Warehouse Worker has an average of 3.7 stars out of 5 there. For context, similar Costco jobs seem to receive higher ratings, while equivalents at Walmart are broadly similar.

Stories about white collar workers at Amazon have been far rarer, in large part because the number is smaller and these people will typically have other options to go to in similar professional settings. But the New York Times did an in-depth expose a while back about working conditions in the Amazon offices, which painted a fairly unflattering picture too. It spoke of a highly competitive culture, one which was unsympathetic to personal challenges like illness, and cited a number of former employees who had had a miserable experience working there. Amazon pushed back fairly hard, both denying some of the specific claims and inviting employees who felt similarly to raise their concerns with HR.

The reality is that across both blue collar and white collar jobs, Amazon pushes its employees hard – that the stories mostly come from former employees is an indication that these conditions are absolutely not right for some people, and they shouldn’t work there. Others are apparently happy (or at least willing) to continue to work in either blue or white collar jobs at Amazon, and a little over 300,000 do so as of the end of September 2016. Conditions could definitely be better for blue collar workers and there will undoubtedly be more cases of one-off events which are far worse than everyday conditions. But comparing Amazon employment to similar jobs either at the warehouse or office level suggests that it’s probably about par for the course, or only slightly worse.