Amazon is again at the heart of a controversy related to working conditions in its warehouses. The company constantly scrutinizes the smallest actions of its employees. That, we already knew it. To achieve this, she uses specific software that is able to decide on its own the dismissal of an employee.
The verge has gotten hold of documents that show how Amazon monitors its employees with systems specifically designed to not only spy on them, but also assess their productivity. Employees are constantly under the control of automatic devices that "generate warning messages in the event of a work stoppage or a drop in productivity without the intervention of a human supervisor".
How Amazon fires low-performing employees
The software is even able to decide on the dismissal of a worker automatically. In a letter signed last year by an Amazon lawyer, the company willingly admitted to laying off "hundreds" of employees in a single warehouse between August 2017 and September 2018. They were criticized for not being productive enough.
According to The Verge, production quotas or the number of packets scanned can reach 100 units per hour. This information is consistent with the report of a British journalist who investigated last year the conditions of work in the warehouses of Amazon.
He describes an infernal setting, going so far as to say that many employees urinate in bottles rather than take breaks to go to the bathroom, for fear of not meeting their goals.
A few days ago, Jeff Bezos invited his competitors to increase the salaries of their employees as Amazon had done a few months ago by raising the minimum wage to 15 dollars. But it is clear that in the warehouses of the company, the working conditions are still so execrable.
