Critics Say Amazon Must Improve After Leaked Doc Reveals 'Looming Labor Crisis'
JESSICA CORBETT for Common Dreams
Journalist
Jason Del Rey's reporting on the "looming labor crisis" comes as the
company is under fire for battling its
workers' organizing efforts, including the historic victory of the Amazon Labor
Union at a Staten Island facility earlier this year.
"This
is crazy. Amazon burns through workers so fast there might be none left
soon," tweeted New
York City organizer and writer Joshua Potash, adding that he "can't
imagine how anyone defends a system that treats people like expendable parts
like this."
Retired journalist Laura Keeney said that "if you need to better understand how Amazon burns through workers, here you go. I guess treating people like they're expendable has consequences, who knew?"
California
Labor Federation's Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher told Amazon that "maybe it's
time to improve working conditions and allow your workers to unionize."
"It
turns out that low wages and unsafe working conditions are [Amazon's] biggest
labor problem, not unions," declared Doug
Bloch, political director for Teamsters Joint Council 7. "Gee, aren't
those the problems that workers join together in unions to fix?"
Longtime
labor reporter Steven Greenhouse similarly suggested that
"IF AMAZON LETS ITS WAREHOUSES UNIONIZE, they could become far less
grueling places to work and worker turnover could decline greatly."
Pointing
out that "workers have long warned Amazon that its 'churn and burn' would
cause the company to 'run out of workers,'" Jobs with Justice also said that
"maybe if Amazon stopped fighting workers organizing unions, they could
build a safer, healthier workplace and this would be less of a problem."
According
to Del Rey—who noted that an Amazon spokesperson didn't deny the report's
findings but declined to comment—the company "was expected to exhaust its entire
available labor pool in the Phoenix, Arizona, metro area by the end of 2021,
and in the Inland Empire region of California, roughly 60 miles east of Los
Angeles, by the end of 2022."
"The
internal research also identified the regions surrounding Memphis, Tennessee,
and Wilmington, Delaware, as areas where Amazon was on the cusp of exhausting
local warehouse labor availability," he continued, highlighting the
accuracy of the company's models for staffing shortages ahead of Amazon Prime
Day shopping event in June 2021.
Amazon's
own data shows that its attrition rate was 123% in 2019 and 159% in 2020, which
are high figures compared with the federal government's estimates for those two
years in the U.S. transportation and warehouse sectors (46% and 59%) and retail
(58% and 70%).
The
document "provides a rare glimpse into the staffing challenges" faced
by a company whose employees "have long complained of stresses unique to
Amazon's workplace, from the pace and repetition of the labor to the
unrelenting computerized surveillance of workers' every move to comparatively
high injury rates," Del Rey wrote. "The leaked internal findings also
serve as a cautionary tale for other employers who seek to emulate the Amazon
Way of management."
The
journalist asserted that the report "reads like an attempted wake-up
call" and outlined the projected impacts of some solutions it offers,
including raising wages, changing termination or retention policies, improving
the hiring process, choosing new warehouse locations in areas with significant
labor pools, and increasing automation.
Noting
that Amazon's new CEO, Andy Jassy, has claimed the company is "not close
to being done in how we improve the lives of our employees," Del Rey
concluded that "as the internal report shows, doing so should no longer be
optional for Amazon; it's an imperative."
