I could be wrong . .but if my memory serves me right ... on THIS board there are some posts about labor disputes and Amazon... their policies once again , If I remember right .. we not so hot ... I think there was a big big stink about it ... .and I don't remember the outcome . .but It on this Board .. the whole thing story after story ... ;) I mean at least three or four of something ... ;) and I don't know the years ..
The thinking outside the box: The Amazing world of online retail giant Amazon
"Amazon Warehouse Workers Sue Over Security Checkpoint Waits"
Fifteen years after its UK launch, the shopping site employs tens of thousands of people in areas where traditional industries have gone under. Simon Usborne takes a browse behind the scenes
It is only when browsing the actual – not virtual – shelves of the world’s biggest retailer that the surreal multiplicity of its wares becomes clear. Hello Kitty scooters share space with frying pans, padded guitar bags and tins of Baxter’s luxury lobster bisque. Peppa Pig train sets rest above pepper grinders and jars of gourmet jelly beans. Had you wanted a Puzzle Plush hide-a-squirrel toy for your dog last Thursday morning, I could have told you definitively that there were only three left in stock.
Viewed from a distance, this jumble of goods creates a crazed collage of consumerist Britain. Amazon.co.uk took its first orders 15 years ago this week, three years after a guy called Jeff sold his first book from Amazon.com – then a single computer in his Seattle garage. That the site has turned Jeff (Mr Bezos to you and me) into a billionaire and transformed the way we shop is well known. But how has it changed the lives of its burgeoning workforce – and the former industrial towns in which it prefers to operate?
Amazon, perhaps tentatively, agreed to give me a tour of CWL1 (it has had bad press lately, more of which later), its code for a cavernous warehouse off the M4 between Port Talbot and Swansea in South Wales. It is the second largest of the company’s eight UK “fulfilment centres”, which together employ more than 20,000 “associates” during the Christmas rush.
On 3 December last year – Amazon’s busiest 24 hours – laden lorries left its UK centres at a rate of one every two minutes. The website received 3.5 million orders that day, or 41 every second. Meeting that kind of demand requires sophisticated technology, sweat, and high security. Arriving at the Swansea centre, which is the size of a dozen football pitches, is like visiting a supermax prison. Between the thick steel gates and the entrance to the warehouse floor, a receptionist taps a code into my mobile phone to reveal its serial number. He logs it to ensure it’s the only handset I go home with.
As I head further in, hundreds of staff in hi-viz vests and steel toe-capped shoes are leaving the floor for their 30-minute lunch break. Before they reach the canteen, where a cheese and ham slice looks like the pick of the day, they walk through airport-style scanners and are then given a once-over by a team of guards armed with security wands. Nothing apart from the clothes they wear may pass in or out to ensure nothing is stolen.
The workforce here will peak at 2,500, more than doubling in the next few weeks. Matthew Healy started five weeks ago after a period on job seeker’s allowance. He was given the job of “picker” - the people who grab the stuff you order - and now walks about 10 miles a day. “I pick the larger items,” the 20-year-old says on the floor. “Anything from ironing boards to bags of dog food. It’s good exercise – I’ve already lost more than a stone.”
Amazon’s Swansea fulfillment centre is the second-largest in the UK (Tim Mossford)
Matthew was inducted by his older sister, Sarah, who joined three years ago. They commute every day from Aberdare, 25 miles north-east of Swansea Bay, where Amazon arrived five years ago. The village, near Merthyr Tydfil, used to lie at the heart of the region’s coal mining industry. Since its collapse, a growing number of residents have started fuelling a different sort of economy. “There’s not a lot of work there,” Sarah, 25, says. “That’s why I came here but back then there weren’t many people from Aberdare at Amazon. Now we’ve got whole minibuses coming in and car-shares. It’s really helped our community.”
But while Amazon wins with customers – the company topped a poll of Britain’s favourite retailers this week – not everyone is positive about the impact of its mines of the 21st century. As well as facing criticism for its tax arrangements this year, Amazon has been hit by reports of its employment practices and conditions. As Bezos himself told Forbes magazine last year: “Our culture is friendly and intense, but if push comes to shove, we’ll settle for intense.”
Like all temporary staff, Matthew is employed via an agency, without the benefits of permanent staff, and may be released at any stage on a so-called “zero-hour” contract. Ex-employees at the Amazon centre in Rugeley, east Midlands – another former mining town – told Channel 4 News in August that lunch breaks could be as short as 10 minutes because they included the often long walk to and through security. They also claimed holiday pay was not always forthcoming.
In its response, Amazon said all its agencies were contractually obliged to give holiday pay, and drew attention to the large number of its permanent staff who, like Sarah, start in temporary roles before being promoted. At Swansea, Nicola Sweeney, the general manager, says that by the end of the year 1,600 seasonal staff will have taken full jobs. She also insists management responds to staff concerns. The canteen menu has just been smartened up, and work shoes improved.
Amazon has 6,000 permanent employees in the UK (Tim Mossford)
Before products reach Matthew and his fellow pickers, crates are unloaded from lorries arriving constantly from all over Britain and beyond. Workers scan every item into a giant database and pass them on for stowing. That’s where things get random. To maximise space, any product may be stowed on any shelf. As long as each item is scanned together with the barcode stuck to the shelf, it doesn’t matter that no human could remember where it is – because the central computer will.
As orders come in, the system generates lists of dozens of products according to their locations. Lists are assigned to pickers equipped with trolleys and scanners. Machine then directs man along the most efficient possible route, telling the picker the precise aisle and shelf number for each product. Later, at ranks of packing stations, workers are told which box to reach for according to the stored dimensions of each product. Rolls of brown paper provide cushioning before, finally, robots poised above conveyor belts slap on the address labels. No employee knows which order is destined for which customer.
I bump into a Polish picker in the books department and take a look at his scanner. It says he still has 87 items to pick in the next 44 minutes. Former employees have reported that Amazon penalises those who can’t crack the pace. But my guide insists that nothing bad will happen to the man if he takes, say, 45 minutes to finish his round. “He’ll make it in 44,” she says.
Outside in Port Talbot, the steelworks still dominate the skyline. It used to be the largest employer in Wales, but no more. Now owned by the Indian conglomerate, Tata Group, it cut 600 jobs as recently as last November - by coincidence at the height of Amazon’s recruitment drive. A sculpture called “man of steel” stands on a town square in front of Pizza Hut. He clutches six giant bars of steel. It would not take much to recast them as Amazon deliveries.
Amazon employee Sarah Healey says the company's warehouse has really helped the local community (Tim Mossford)
The son of a former steelworker who works in a community role but did not want to be named, says Amazon has a mixed reputation in Port Talbot. “My son was taken on there with a view to working ’til after Christmas but they finished him a week before with no notice,” he tells me. “But they’re in a position to do that because of the economic climate. So many other employers have gone from here over the years. This is a poor end of the world and people want to work.”
Employment in and around Port Talbot has remained steady over the past decade or so at 65 per cent, below the Welsh average of 68 per cent and national average of 71 per cent. Swansea has the same level but employment there has declined from 71 per cent in 2004, a pattern familiar in former industrial areas across the country. Increasingly, the only employment available is temporary agency work, often with limited prospects or benefits. This type of work has increased by 20 per cent since the recession started in 2008.
“Clearly those former steel and mining areas have had extensive social and economic challenges for a generation or more,” Steven Phillips, chief executive of Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council, says. But, he adds: “Any employment or strategy by a significant employer that brings jobs to those areas is to be welcomed.”
Back in the warehouse, I meet Fred Dickinson, who at 64 is one of Amazon’s oldest employees. He used to work at a glass factory in Port Talbot until he was made redundant, and for many years in the army before that. He retires next year and won’t hear a bad word about Amazon. It gave his son work before he got a Masters degree and became a software developer, he says. It also gave him an unlikely new taste for a Norwegian delicacy.
“You do see all sorts of products working here,” he tells me. “I was picking some cheese up once, some brown cheese. Caramel it was. So I did try it and it was lovely. It was a bit expensive but I thought, ‘I’ll have a go at this’.”
Where did he buy it? “Where do you think!?”
Amazon.co.uk took its first orders 15 years ago (Tim Mossford)
Amazon stats
The UK site now offers more than 100m products in more than 30 categories.
The company has 6,000 permanent employees in the UK, and is now recruiting more than 15,000 agency workers for the Christmas rush.
Amazon UK’s delivery bill has exceeded £1bn in the past five years.
On 3 December 2012, Amazon.co.uk’s busiest day, a lorry left one of its warehouses on average once every two minutes and 10 seconds. The site received 3.5m orders in those 24 hours, or 41 every second. Two million products were delivered.
Workers, or “associates” can be required to walk up to 15 miles per day while picking products. They are entitled to a 30-minute lunch break during an eight-hour shift. Agency workers may be let go at any time.
£4.2bn Total UK sales last year
Turnover topped £320m
£2.4m Amount Amazon paid in corporation tax last year, out of a total tax bill of £3.2m
£2.5m Amount Amazon received in Government loans last year.
Amazon avoids paying tax on UK sales because it routes them through its European headquarters in Luxembourg, which has low taxes.
Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain – review
Book of the day
"Amazon Warehouse Workers Sue Over Security Checkpoint Waits"
‘Jeff Bezos is an associate, and so are you’: Amazon’s logistics centre in Pforzheim, Germany. Photograph: Christoph Schmidt/EPA
Journalist James Bloodworth’s story of being ‘embedded’ for six months as a zero-hours worker is vital reading for all
Nick Cohen
Sun 11 Mar 2018 03.00 EDT Last modified on Wed 21 Mar 2018 19.48 EDT
We perpetrate a swindle every time we use that hip phrase “the gig economy” to describe the modern labour market. If we wanted to be accurate, we could call it the “piece-rate” or the “precarious” economy. If we wanted to be polemical, we would call it the “rapacious” or the “boss-takes-all” economy. Silicon Valley’s success in prompting us to talk of “the gig economy” instead suggests that exploited men and women are the equivalent of rock stars, nipping into a club for a surprise session one night and heading off to Glastonbury the next. Far from being beaten down by lives of grinding insecurity, workers are freewheeling bohemians liberated from the routines that tied down their boring parents.
By allowing the myth that drudgery is freedom to pass unchallenged, we have sold out our fellow citizens so thoroughly they no longer even have the language to describe their predicament.
In this exceptional book, James Bloodworth sets out to work among “that now permanent class of people who live a fearful and tumultuous existence characterised by an almost total subservience to the whims of their employers”. While he was walking the miles of corridors in Amazon’s Rugeley warehouse, a comparison between today’s gig economy and yesterday’s Soviet Union hit him. All around were admonishments “to workers to feel joyful at the prospect of struggle”. Socialist realism had mutated into corporate uplift. In a Staffordshire warehouse the size of 10 football pitches, feelgood slogans were plastered next to pictures of beaming workers. “We love coming to work and miss it when we are not here!” they announced.
Language was policed as thoroughly as every other aspect of the working day. Bloodworth’s supervisors told him he should not call the warehouse “a warehouse”. It was a “fulfilment centre”. No one Bloodworth met lasted the nine months required for Amazon to give them a full-time job. Like worn- out machines, they were scrapped after six. But their bosses did not “sack” them, they “released” them. Not that the bosses were “bosses”. Everyone was an “associate”.
“Jeff Bezos is an associate and so are you,” a cheery supervisor said. The only difference being Bezos was worth $60.7bn, while Bloodworth and his fellow “associates” walked back at midnight to fetid digs “with heavy legs supporting suppurating feet which over the course of the day had puffed up half a size bigger”. All the contracts he worked on, first for Amazon and then at Carewatch UK in Blackpool, the car insurers Admiral in Wales, and Uber in London, were zero-hours or nonexistent. Everywhere, “any vitality new employees might possess falls away from them like an old coat”.
We know this, don’t we? All who order from Amazon or hail Uber on our phones have had the opportunity to read many exposés. Why then is Bloodworth’s book being praised across the political spectrum when the work of so many other writers has been forgotten?The answer, I believe, lies in his physical and intellectual integrity. Bloodworth does not just take jobs. He moves into the slums his fellow workers live in. He gives you the smell of the cheap paint, the sight of the cockroaches scurrying across the floor, and the craving for junk food and cheap booze when an exhausting shift is over.
Equally important, Bloodworth avoids the narcissistic style that blights so much leftwing journalism. He has no time for the identity politics of those who imply that because they are speaking as a woman/queer/person of colour/transgender person they can be excused the need to think clearly and write well. “If it matters,” he says, he is the son of a single mother from Somerset. He might have been one of the labourers or care workers he now reports on, if he had not escaped to university. Prohibitions on cultural appropriation, in any case, fall particularly harshly on the working class because it, like all groups facing discrimination, needs support from every available quarter. As Bloodworth says, a working-class job is almost incompatible with becoming an author, when the “prerequisite to sitting down to turn out 80,000 words is not having to worry about the electric being turned off or the discomfort of an empty stomach”.
Immigration and class are now inseparable subjects. By Bloodworth’s account, the native working class has respectable reasons to worry about mass migration. The recruitment agencies that supplied eastern Europeans to Amazon warned their workers that, if they made a fuss about their conditions, there was a reserve army of their fellow countrymen ready to take their place. Bloodworth and his colleagues made about £250 a week. The average weekly wage in Romania was a little over £100. One migrant told Bloodworth he worked like an animal and was a nobody in the UK. But in Romania he would be a nobody without enough to eat.
Bloodworth argues it is progress that most British workers will not take jobs from employers who treat them like animals. He does not want to lionise migrants for putting up with intolerable conditions. Instead, he takes a nice swipe at stereotypical reactions to migration. The average eastern European meets two types of people in England: “those who wanted you to go home and those who wrote letters to liberal newspapers waxing colourfully about how wonderful and hardworking you were”.
The point is that no one should have to work in the conditions Bloodworth experienced. This is an easy sentence to write. But if we were to build a society where its sentiments were made a reality, every reader would have to accept paying more for the goods and services they now receive at bargain rates. Even from a selfish point of view, I think it a price worth paying. Jason Moyer-Lee of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain warns at the end of this book that, if we do not stop the mistreatment of Uber drivers and Deliveroo riders, one day everyone could wake up to find their employment rights gone.
It feels wrong to say that it is a pleasure to read Bloodworth when he is describing the true location of poverty in Britain, which is not among the allegedly workshy, but in the lives of the women at checkouts and the men packing boxes for 30 hours one week and two the next. That said, the element of pleasure or at least satisfaction cannot be denied. For Bloodworth is the best young leftwing writer Britain has produced in years. And it is not only the exploited who are lucky to have him.
• Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain by James Bloodworth is published by Atlantic Books (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
AI
