Amazon Warehouses: Perfecting The American Plantation
By: Alex Mell-Taylor
Tags: Work, Amazon, Wealth Inequality, Slavery, Politics

The Exploitative Rise Of Amazon

Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos on July 5, 1994, as an online marketplace for books. It was originally filed under the name Cadabra, Inc. (as in, the magician’s phrase “abracadabra”). This name was allegedly tossed because it sounded too close to the word cadaver.

Jeff Bezos settled on the name Amazon both because websites at the time were listed alphabetically (see Apple vs. Altari), but also because he liked the metaphorical image of naming his company after the largest river in the world. As Jeff Bezos allegedly remarked to author Brad Stone in his book The Everything Store:

“This is not only the largest river in the world, it’s many times larger than the next biggest river. It blows all other rivers away.”

Jeff Besos was obsessed with growth from the very beginning. Infamously, one of the first names he considered before settling on Amazon was relentless.com (and as of writing this, the URL still redirects to Amazon’s homepage). His slogan in the early days of the company was “Get Big Fast,” which he was rumored to have printed on t-shirts that he then handed out for his employees to wear.

While the company did not make a profit until the final quarter of 2001, it was successful in achieving an explosive amount of growth. The company sold books to customers in over 45 different countries within the first month of the website's launch. Amazon rapidly expanded to sell countless other items, and by 1999 Bezos was so successful he made Time’s Person Of The Year.

This “Get Big Fast” mentality was unsurprisingly brutal to Amazon employees. In another anecdote from The Everything Store, one employee described how their work-life balance was so nonexistent that they were unaware that their car had been repossessed and sold at auction until months after the fact.

Sometimes this rapid expansion was downright dangerous. When the kitchen category was first introduced, it was done so haphazardly that employees noted knives hurtling down conveyor shoots without protective packaging.

This dangerous environment prompted the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health to place Amazon on its Dirty List of most dangerous employers in the United States. The advocacy group stated in its report that thirteen employees have died working for Amazon since 2013 — six of those deaths took place since November of 2018. One death just last September took over 20 minutes for anyone to notice.

The incentive for employees is to keep moving no matter what.

Amazon keeps workers moving for brutal durations: employee shifts consist of 10 hours or more of constant movement. In some instances, they suffer consequences if they go to the bathroom for longer than 6 minutes, since the company’s tracking and termination processes are automatic. If workers slip up too much, they can receive a computer-generated termination notice. As one former Baltimore fulfillment center worker told me:

“They work the sweat out of you.”

The pressure to keep up a constant pace for hours on end results in the development of chronic pain in the back, neck, and wrists. When, for example, the New York Committee for Occupational Safety & Health (NYCOSH) surveyed 145 workers from a Staten Island warehouse, over 60% reported experiencing pain while at work.

Amazon has been notoriously slow to respond to worker injuries. They have a history of dragging their feet on workers' compensation. Some employees have had to take the company to court to get their medical expenses covered. One employee, Ashley Judd, died from a heart attack due to the stress of dealing with Amazon’s appeal process. Homelessness among injured employees has been known to happen, and mental health issues are frequent.

The company has advertised “reforms” to address these systemic shortcomings. There are now people who monitor the floors more rigorously, and during the tour I took, they advertised the fact that all employees were permitted to take bathroom breaks (how revolutionary). They have also instituted audits to assess their own employee’s perception of safety.

The chief approach Amazon uses to handle these problems, however, is gaslighting. Whenever a potential violation breaks out in the news, they deny it outright. When the news site Vox asked about Amazon’s response to the NYCOSH’s aforementioned report, the company spokesperson Rachael Lighty claimed the organization was effectively lying:

“It is an example of selective data skewed to support false statements by an organization that’s sole business objective is to misinform the public on Amazon’s safety record.”

Lighty has made many similar statements for incidents running the gamut from pretending union-organizers don’t exist to pretending like workers weren’t fired for union-organizing. Amazon generally does not take responsibility for its long history of labor abuses.

Instead, they hire people to deny that things ever happened, to spread propaganda on Twitter, and to open up their facilities for highly curated tours.

It’s the reason I was there.

None of this should be surprising. Amazon is a company that works its employees for hours on end. Workers are used, often at the expense of their own health, until they can no longer pick, wrap, or lift. When this happens, they are given the bare minimum compensation required by law, with no consideration of what happens if their conditions worsen and/or are unable to come back to work.

If this type of work ethic sounds familiar, then it’s because it has deep, painful roots in the United States’ history of slavery.