One person we spoke to told us they had formally complained about racist behavior by a number of area managers and the next week was written up by one of those they had complained about. Write-ups, or the threats of a write-up, is used to intimidate and retaliate, often to keep a lid on complaints and work problems that the same managers are responsible for. There are typically two AMs per department and six departments in a warehouse, with two work shifts, so there are anywhere between 20 and 30 AMs in each warehouse. With area managers (AMs) given write-up authority, often with little or no accountability, the system is frequently abused, say workers. Despite the worker's protestations, the management team that assigned them the task then fired the worker for going over their TOT limit. In one case we were told about, one worker was re-assigned to another task, and the hours they spent doing that job was wrongly registered as TOT in the system. If someone accumulates too much TOT, they are written up if they go above a certain threshold, they are automatically fired. Amazon obsessively follows what it calls “time off task” or TOT – which is the time workers spend not working. Meanwhile, in the same time frame, numerous people had simply been fired for failing to hit their work rate. The claim of coaching is one made persistently by Amazon, yet one worker we spoke to said they are one of those able to provide such coaching at Amazon facilities, and had only been asked to provide coaching once in three years. We support people who are not performing to the levels expected with dedicated coaching to help them improve." Associate performance is measured and evaluated over a long period of time as we know that a variety of things could impact the ability to meet expectations in any given day or hour. Spokespeople for Amazon told us in response to these reports of constantly changing work rates, and an imposed five per cent failure rate, "Like most companies, we have performance expectations for every Amazonian – be it corporate employee or fulfillment center associate and we measure actual performance against those expectations. This is similar to the stack ranking used at large companies: the lowest ranked staffers in a team by performance are warned or terminated even if their work is satisfactory or better.Īmazon spies on staff, fires them by text for not hitting secretive targets, workers 'feel forced to work through pain, injuries' – report READ MORE Even if everyone in the building – headcount numbers vary from 300 to 600 in warehouses – works equally hard, there will always be a bottom five per cent who are written up, according to those we spoke to. Amazon has apparently hard-coded a five per cent failure rate into its system as a way to constantly drive performance improvements. While expecting everyone to work as hard as the hardest working at all times, those who don’t are written up and are fired if they don’t improve. It variesĪmazon implies it has a single work rate across all its operations, though long-term workers who have spoken to colleagues across America say it varies all the time, and appears to be developed by averaging out the work rate of the top 10 per cent of workers on any given week, which would explain the sometimes daily variances. Then it was increased again.” With people’s jobs – and so their rent and food – literally on the line, the constant changes add a level of pressure and anxiety that many cannot handle. Then it was decreased without them telling us. “We had a single-pack rate of 55 an hour,” explained one worker. Not only are warehouse workers frequently not told what the required work rate is, the rate changes constantly – sometimes hour by hour depending on the whims of the local operational manager. Away from the number-crunching at corporate headquarters, the work rate has become a weapon that stressed-out managers use to bully and intimidate those on the shop floor, it's claimed.
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