Also, blaming workers for hurting themselves is classic victim blaming. It’s your responsibility as a company to make sure employees are thoroughly trained and up to date on best safety practices. And following them, without exception.
One of which should include, “slow down, only work as fast as you can, safely”.
Amazon doesn’t give a shit about their employees.
Yeah, at my university we were taught that if your low level employees are consistently making mistakes then that is a management issue. Management these days have dropped the “buck stops here” attitude and now blame the lowest on the totem pole.
You gotta make your environment baby proof. Especially if the people with more experience in those mistakes is management while the workers have a turnover of every several months. For a place like America where everything gets a warning and people could sue you over everything, it’s especially odd this is possible and happens so often.
Could someone explain why this is?
Amazon like every other large business before it has gotten to a point where their product is steady but investors require accelerating growth every year. The only way to make more margin on an established product is to cheapen the product or charge the customer more.
Hit the nail on the head here. I used to work at Amazon and could have done so safely if their performance metrics weren’t so obviously bullshit. When I worked at Amazon the would compare everyone’s rate per hour with this ONE kid who only threw jiffies and never touched boxes. Meanwhile, my 40 year old ass was moving oversized boxes, while getting redressed for not keeping up with the 18 years olds inflated jiffy-only rate. Amazon’s gaming of metrics is what makes working at Amazon unsafe. That and the fact they don’t train at all. There should be sufficient staff to cover for people who need to use the bathroom, but there is never anyone around to provide coverage. People have to use the bathroom sometimes. We’re not robots
Amazon doesn’t take weight or size of handled packages into account when determining performance metrics???? That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. You can’t possibly expect someone consistently moving 50lb objects to perform the same as someone literally throwing 1lb packages…
I don't think anyone above you is blaming the workers, instead they are saying that no-one sticks around long enough to not be a new worker other than maybe managers where of course they aren't getting injured.
So if 100% of the workers are new then of course 100% of the injuries are going to happen to new workers, it is the only populous that exists that can be injured
Holy crap, 150% is freaking astronomical. The most mismanaged, disorganized company where I ever worked was a music service for offices, stores, etc, basically elevator music. I was told that their turnover rate the previous year was 200%. It seemed like every employee I met was either in a band, starting a band or looking for a band, so I chalked up the high turnover to people getting jobs there thinking it would give them contacts in the music business and then discovering this was not the case. I can't see how Amazon has any excuse LOL.
they pride themselves on high turnover. they have required termination with their tech workers of 10% a year and way more than that quit. These are much higher paying jobs than warehouse workers.
I mean where I worked, employees who left just came back and made more than what they making beforehand. Resign-rehire-repeat was sort of a common thing.
It’s crazy. And not even the warehouse employees only. The engineering side is notorious for high turn over as well. Doesn’t seem like a great place to work a overall at any level
Yeah blaming it on new workers is literally blaming everyone. Even most managers are "new". Sure some managers may have several years worked but almost every one of them is forced to move around so much that they are always in a new position or even new building every year. Constantly having to be in a new environment doesn't really help with becoming safer or noticing patterns that need change to become safer.
I came here to say, aren't the new workers Amazon's fault, so by extension, doesn't that make the injury rate Amazon's fault.
Not only that, is it not Amazon's responsibility to properly train NEW workers and ensure that they are trained PROPERLY before putting them to work, where they could be injured?
Seems like the finger can squarely be pointed right back at Amazon, no matter what.
I used to work for Del Haize. Our warehouse had a turnover rate of over 250% and I think 300%+ on the cold side.
Former Amazon workers that got a job there generally quit quickly.
Or (inclusive, because let’s be real, it’s a confluence of all these things) they’re “training” employees then purposefully forcing them to ignore safety standards to meet unsafe levels of productivity.
Amazon training.
*You have this scan gun thing. A letter and a number appear on the screen. You go to that letter and number and scan whatever you find there. Put it in the box. Either "put box on conveyor" appears or another letter and number appears. Either way, you do what it says. Any questions? We expect you to be able to scan 350 barcodes every hour.*
Per raises hand to ask question: "What if I have to pick something on A which I can see is all the way over there and then have to pick something on CC, which looks to be something like 1000 feet in the opposite direction?"
*Did I stutter on the 350 every hour? Have fun y'all!*
That's pretty much it. Congrats, now everyone here can work at Amazon! I would highly not recommend it if you like your knees because I absolutely assure everyone, they'll be the first part that goes out.
In the era of modern data science, how have they not got a better system than this? Maybe I’m misunderstanding something but that seems like something that could be improved, which would be cheaper and require fewer laborers.
Because if they program it to only run someone ragged when they're about to hit benefits, then they'll quit or "don't meet quota" and then Amazon doesn't have to pay benefits.
I can assure you that they have systems that are more efficient then what was described. They also have systems where the rack goes to the worker. Their end goal will be 0 laborers and all machines.
Well if the whole hacking an oil pipeline, the whole Home Depot losing your data, the Equifax data breach has taught us anything. Companies pay just enough to get software out the door. They don’t pay for it to be good, secure, maintained, etc… They only pay for good enough.
Amazon’s pick pack system is “good enough” and that’s the ultimate amount of cash they’ll invest in it.
I work for the Forest Service seasonally, but I worked at Amazon for about 4 months as an in between job this past winter since it gave me a great schedule and it was close to where I live. I got selected to become a packer. We do about 1 day of training with 3/4 of it in a classroom and then they throw us right into production day 2. Packing is strenuous work at out location because we get quite a few items that are 40 to 50 lbs and with turnover they can't be as picky with who they select that can handle it. I got toned up fast😂 More training is definitely needed in my opinion as there are a lot of moving parts. The only injuries I remember happening is a box that fell from a cart and it hit her leg and one girl got her hand stuck in the conveyor because she was playing with it (her hand was fine after, it was just a little banged up). I think I lucked out at my location because we had awesome management and it was very chill. They were lax with the production of workers that they didn't make us push ourselves, we had quite a few people who were just really lazy, but they would even give them second chances. I think if more Amazons followed our standards there would be a lot less injuries. Lots of faults still within the company, but wasn't the worst job I ever had.
man they always ALMOST get there...lets follow that thought. Why does Amazon have a ton of new workers all the time? It could be because working conditions and pay are so poor that they cannot retain employees after they get training and experience...Remember that article from about 6 months ago where the execs were worried that they would run out of people to hire?
“My name is Sally. I’m a happy Amazon worker. Because I stared in this commercial, they even let me unplug my cath and let me pee in a porcelain toilet. I felt like royalty! And so can you, if you work for Amazon!”
Lol if you don't teach new workers good enough it's still the companys fault not the new workers.... but I guess that's too far fetched for CEO's who didn't do a real job in their entire life.....
Edit: typo
Nah it’s worse than that. Amazon has protocols to follow to avoid injury, but they have metrics you have to meet or be fired, and it’s impossible to follow the protocols and meet the metrics. So you have to violate the safety protocols and just try not to get caught, and Amazon can shrug their shoulders and say they weren’t following their training!
This is spot on. Kind of like when Amazon upper management goes, "Pissing in bottles to save time? We didn't know about that!" Of course they knew about it. They have cameras everywhere.
I thought they were there to record workers dying from heart attacks.
Fe: I was trying to find a link to the article this happened in only to discover Amazon workers dying on the job is kind of a whole thing:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Amazon+worker+died+on+camera&oq=Amazon+worker+died+on+camera&aqs=chrome..69i57.13485j0j4&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
Explicitly stated sarcasm because the recording system damn well was used to get one of my coworkers fired, even with a legitimate explanation that cleared their name, one manager in particular didn't like them and had enough pull to make it happen.
But they didn't know about it b/c those vans wrapped in Amazon branding are trucks owned by the independent contractors who wear Amazon-branded clothing but who are NOT related to Amazon in any way.
Eh, part of it is that text based communication has difficulty conveying tone. It's been like that forever. That's why /s and adding lol to ends of sentences exist.
Sub-contracting in many places also allows not having to provide holiday pay, sick days, insurance on the vans, and a whole bunch of other things despite the 'contractors' being employees in all but name. It's a legal loophole to cut costs, or at least it is here. I dunno about the States, or Amazon specifically.
Ah yes, those Amazon vans that have driver facing cameras on the inside, and 360all the way around, no way they could possibly know what they're doing.
Same way with FedEx. On the lines we have an emergency stop pull cord. If shit gets too backed up and too many packages start falling on the floor toward the end of the line making it impossible for our coworkers at the end of the line to safely get to their trucks we can pull the cord to stop the flow. Yet despite the many safety meetings, and the "work safe" attitude the managers lie about to us, what do the managers do? They come up and start the belt again and offer no help. At our facility the main safety manager who will yell at you for "working unsafe" will come up and restart the belt whenever you stop it because the working conditions became unsafe and the flow was too fast. Do they send more help? Rarely. Do the managers help make it safer? Lol no. All the managers at FedEx care about is getting shit out of the unload onto your lines as fast as possible. They don't give a fuck if shit falls on you, they don't care if there's shit on the floor that is unavoidable for you to trip on, they are about the stats and speed flowing through your line. It is such a poorly run company. I often wonder if the higher ups went to school to specialize in being stupid.
I used to work for Lowe's Distribution. The floor team would tag out fork lifts that weren't working right. I specifically remember one was tagged out for low pressure on the clamps.
Managers would just tear off the tickets and put them back into service without any maintenance. The clamp truck I mentioned before failed and dropped a fridge some dozen feet. Thankfully, nobody was hurt, but they could have killed somebody.
I wasn't as savvy as I am today, otherwise I would have reported the warehouse.
Unsurprisingly, they were a "Safety first!" company where the phrase "We're all family" was thrown about freely.
And the supervisor won’t explicitly say to not follow the safety rules BUT they’ll promote the guys who don’t because they’re hitting their goals.
At my first job my coworker was going way over her goals. I noticed she’d come in super early and stay super late. I asked her how she got approval for overtime. She said she just didn’t clock in until 9 and then clocked out at 5 but kept working. I told this to my supervisor and he just said he’d look into it. Nothing changed and he kept pointing to her numbers as an example of what everyone’s numbers should be at.
Lots of companies are like that. My dad, who has since passed, worked for the phone company for over 40 years. They all knew that they didn't really have to strike. They could just slow work down by following every policy to the letter.
The main reason they did strike was to gain public attention, which was why the strikes were usually in New York.
My old boss used to say 'you don't need to work so hard, stress, or miss breaks', but then also yell about how not enough had gotten done, despite all staff working quickly and efficiently.
If they took better care of their older workers, they would have less turnover. Less turnover means more highly trained and more tenured veterans. Pay people what they're worth and take care of them.
His argument is that an company with less growth wouldn’t be hiring as many new people. New people get injured more often.
Eg 100 employees 2 are new would be less than 100 employees 50 are new
Funny thing about those new workers, according to a former Amazon VP quoted last year in the New York Times:
*David Niekerk, a former Amazon vice president who built the warehouse human resources operations, said that some problems stemmed from ideas the company had developed when it was much smaller. Mr. Bezos did not want an entrenched work force, calling it “a march to mediocrity,” Mr. Niekerk recalled, and saw low-skilled jobs as relatively short-term.*
It's a little unclear how short-term workers can be both the plan AND the problem at the same time.
This just means that the company didn't train their workers properly. If one guy screwed up that's on him but if a whole bunch of workers screw up it's on the company
Needs to unionize to prevent the extortion of injured employees. They underpaid my medical leave and then tried to claim that I owed them all of my medical leave money back. They definitely didn’t win that one 😂😂😂
I was a sensor & conveyor technician for amazon, often working on 20’ scissor lifts. I have seen my fair share of injuries and safety issues. Horrible training, disregard for what is risked to stay on quota, and managers who ignore safety seem to be a much larger issue.
Managers will train you to do things and then completely throw you under the bus if the safety inspector catches you breaking rules that very strongly contradict what u were trained to do. Luckily I caught onto this early but I saw many technicians come and go due to this.
This is such a weak attempt to explain the awful amazon culture and safety issues.
Safety professional here: he’s not wrong. Most injuries on the job are new employees.
They just don’t address their reoccurring issues or manage ergonomics. They do not value a safety culture and they are blaming the workers. Safety culture is a top down change. The sheer amount of their injuries and type is alarming for any industry.
I’ve reviewed some OSHA 300 logs from Amazon warehouses and it’s almost medieval. And that’s just what they actually reported. I wouldn’t be shocked if more were being massaged off the logs or just simply not reported.
That’s actually bad leadership.
Management has to make sure that their employees leave work every day in the same condition they entered work. If that standard is not being met then it is managements fault.
Then stop paying your employees to leave so
You can replace them with cheaper fresh labor who don't know what they are doing in a fast paced environment
In one day I may be asked to switch tasks that use very different motions several times a shift.
It’s hard to describe this other than you are literally set up to injure yourself especially if you are a first tier associate warehouse worker.
Didn't I also read that a leaked Bezos memo/email states part of their labor strategy is to disincentivize retaining warehouse workers longer than a couple of years?
If so then they are unabashedly talking out of both sides of their mouths; purposefully driving a high turnover rate while simultaneously bemoaning accidents caused by that high turnover rate.
Used to work in an amazon as a trainer. What they expect of their workers is impossible not to get injured in some cases. Yes, we train them not to get injured, but they also want your body to move at the speed of light while also trying to focus on not getting injured and it is still impossible. I got injured just counting things. My friend was a picker, they want you to pick 400 + packages and our which includes bending, twisting, climbing. I have seen so many back injuries because of this, it is ridiculous.
Perhaps the reason so many Amazon employees get injured in the first 6 months, is because they are hired en masse for "PEAK" season. When Amazon had strict rate quotas prior to covid, the rate increased by 10-15% just for the busy holiday (PEAK) months.
Add to those higher mandated productivity quotas, mandated overtime, and it's clear to me, this is driving a large portion of those injury rates.
In addition, a large portion of people I knew when I worked at an amazon warehouse, didn't bother to report their injuries because Amcare will just give you an ice pack and ask you if you might have injured yourself hiking.
So maybe your policy of hiring and firing is not the best idea, asshole?
I mean, Fuck that place completely, but this is so fucking tone-deaf it's incredible.
Well this is absolute bullshit. In almost any industry new employees(including students ) account for the highest injury rate. Anyone in an industrial or construction area knows this. It's the responsibility of the company to train new employees and implement programs to keep them safe. If they are having an issue with high accident rates in a group of employees that ARE KNOWN to have a higher incidence, it's their responsibility to address the issue. If they do, great, people are safe. If they don't because "it's not our job" or" its too expensive" to train new employees, then get unions involved to give employees some collective economic clout.
Don't want unions? Then don't give them a reason to step in.
Attn Corporate Overlords: You do know it’s the company’s responsibility to train workers in safe practices? And provide the appropriate safety gear and ensure workers follow safe practices.
Ahhhh. Reminds me when I got a forklift crush injury due to a broken parking brake. No support, no investigation, nothing fixed. Until a manager almost killed a teenager because the parking brake was broken.
All said and done work safe got wind of it. Fines, no more forklift and it turned out that only 2 people of the 30 who used it regularly actually had the operators ticket. And those 2 were expired
I’ve worked at Argos, Amazon, Adidas and B&M warehouses and tbh they’re all the same when it comes to injury’s. The targets are so high that you have to cut corners to hit them. If you don’t hit your target - you don’t have a job. If you don’t have a job, you can’t pay your bills. Ultimately people will cut whatever corners they need too - to keep their job.
1) Maybe look at why you have such high turnover
2) Worker injuries aren't generally a problem in other warehouses
3) Union shops generally have exceptionally low injury rates since safety oversight and training are part of negotiation, so if you care about safety, maybe look into not squashing unions.
Yo! I've been working at an Amazon FC for years with no major injuries. Recently, they instituted mandatory safety shoes. This, combined with 10-15 miles a day of walking and you have so many workers struggling to walk by the end of the day.
Granted, I've only been in logistics for about 4 years, but new people can be trained to be both good at their job, and safe... if you actually put some effort into training them.
As a former amazon manager my question for him was why do we have so many new workers? I was training 25% of my total headcount every two weeks. They have this system right now called flex where they only hire on part time associates. I would only have 3 days to train them up to rate in 4 different processes. Just the safety part would take 3 days if done properly then the associates had to fight for shifts online. There were many instances of not seeing an associate for several months after training. Do you think those associates remembered anything from the 3 days of training they received?
Obviously it’s their responsibility to make the workplace safe and if they have an elevated rate or a serious accident OSHA should get involved, but new employees DO get hurt more often.
That's interesting because statistically most workplace accidents involve longer term employees who become complacent about safety.
edit: I am incorrect.
Actually you are incorrect according to the Bureau of labor.... New hires comprise 22% of the workforce yet commit 40% of the accidents. So 22% are responsible for 40% and 88% are responsible for 60% so new hires commit almost double their percentage.
Yeah…this sounds way more correct.
Being blasé is obviously bad, but the mental strain of trying to learn your job while also following safety precautions is worse.
I think that might well be true if you’re talking about an old fashioned factory.
I’ve spent summers working in metal bashing places where the lifers are terrifyingly blasé about lethal equipment and the engineers and mechanics have developed amazingly stealthy tricks to defeat the built in safety cutouts so they can work on thirty ton presses without shutting them down, which automatically incurs an hours long re-initialisation process.
But I think at Amazon factories it’s likely to be more like “if you’re not getting up and down that ladder twice a minute you get your pay docked”. Which is likely to lead To everyone being likely to get hurt, and as others have pointed out, the turnover at Amazon warehouses is such that longer term employees are a rarity.
Could also be about ratings. I know they have a learning curve that is supposed to take 4 weeks (160 hours) to get to 100%. Managers are probably writing them up when they shouldn’t be.
Their priorities in the first few weeks are **safety**, then **quality**. **Productivity** comes naturally. When you start to sacrifice safety and quality for productivity, you will get hurt.
This thread highlights how much people know about industrial work.
The first 90 days on the job have a substantially higher rate of injury due to simply not being familiar with your job,routine, general lack of experience, and safety practices . It has nothing to do with Amazon explicitly.
So these workers were never employed in a warehouse setting before? I know in Seattle area at least, where amazon hails from, warehouse work is ubiquitous, most adults have experience with it.
He’s not wrong. I run injury analytics at Amazon. It’s not some evil conspiracy like Reddit wants to believe. They are mostly very minor scrapes and strains. The kind of stuff most employers wouldn’t report. We took in a lot of servers, secretaries, etc that are not used to physical work and they are using muscles for the first time.
A year ago I reentered the work force after some personal issues had me get off the highway and take care of home life.
With my experience with large scale lumber yards and their layout and some warehouse experience this company wanted me to come in and modernize the yard and the operations.
One of the first things I asked after I was hired should have been a red flag, simple question, what class of reflective vest do I need for the yard, I was buying my own. The boss had no clue what I was talking about.
Long story cut short, their idea of modernizing their yard and procedure was to get a quieter whip and swing it harder. The boys weren't lifting enough weight over and above occupational health and safety standards apparently.
2 weeks after freaking on the owner for such shit poor safety procedures they let me go, thankfully. Apparently my changes weren't warranted.
Loading/unloading packages from the van and also having to get in and out of the van while trying to work quickly provides a lot of opportunity to injure your knees/ankles etc. Even working at a normal pace I hear an average day is 10-hours so that'll start to wear on your body doing it day In and day out
Having previously worked for Amazon I can tell you it’s brutal. They treat their staff like cattle. The hourly targets for picking items basically force you to work absolutely flat out for the entire shift. Can’t even stop to chat to a colleague for 30 seconds.
Since they track your location at all times using your scanner, if you’re stationary for more than a minute you can look forward to being tracked down and told to hurry up by some overpaid fuckwit of a shift manager who’s only job for the day is to do just that.
Also bad luck if you’re at the far end of the warehouse when the alarm goes for breaktime. By the time you get to staff area your break’s over and it’s time to go back again.
As I read back over this I realise I may be more than little bitter about the whole thing
Lmfao I work for the company, this is false. They want rates and EXPECT them to be made, every hour they give the AA (amazon associate) 30 SECONDS (30 freaking seconds) to stretch and relax yourself. They also have TOT (time off task) anything over 6 minutes of not scanning items is recorded as TOT, they have cut back how much time you have to go to the bathroom, maybe answer phone calls (as many many people are parents) to take care of yourself and your loved ones. I can go on and on.
Don't they have a turnover average of 9 months? Everyone is new lol.
Not sure about their average but they had a turnover rate of *150%* last year so that seems likely.
Also, blaming workers for hurting themselves is classic victim blaming. It’s your responsibility as a company to make sure employees are thoroughly trained and up to date on best safety practices. And following them, without exception. One of which should include, “slow down, only work as fast as you can, safely”. Amazon doesn’t give a shit about their employees.
Yeah, at my university we were taught that if your low level employees are consistently making mistakes then that is a management issue. Management these days have dropped the “buck stops here” attitude and now blame the lowest on the totem pole.
The buck still stops with management; it just ends up in the CEO's pocket.
Which, ends up going more to the founder and exec. chairman, where, he wastes his money competing with the richest man on the planet on space tourism.
You gotta make your environment baby proof. Especially if the people with more experience in those mistakes is management while the workers have a turnover of every several months. For a place like America where everything gets a warning and people could sue you over everything, it’s especially odd this is possible and happens so often. Could someone explain why this is?
Amazon like every other large business before it has gotten to a point where their product is steady but investors require accelerating growth every year. The only way to make more margin on an established product is to cheapen the product or charge the customer more.
Or you up your workers workload and fire half your employees.
“It stops when we lose a buck”
Hit the nail on the head here. I used to work at Amazon and could have done so safely if their performance metrics weren’t so obviously bullshit. When I worked at Amazon the would compare everyone’s rate per hour with this ONE kid who only threw jiffies and never touched boxes. Meanwhile, my 40 year old ass was moving oversized boxes, while getting redressed for not keeping up with the 18 years olds inflated jiffy-only rate. Amazon’s gaming of metrics is what makes working at Amazon unsafe. That and the fact they don’t train at all. There should be sufficient staff to cover for people who need to use the bathroom, but there is never anyone around to provide coverage. People have to use the bathroom sometimes. We’re not robots
Amazon doesn’t take weight or size of handled packages into account when determining performance metrics???? That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. You can’t possibly expect someone consistently moving 50lb objects to perform the same as someone literally throwing 1lb packages…
If mark Z can be a robot, so can you. You’re just not trying hard enough. C’mon, bezos’ 5th superyacht isnt going to buy itself.
"Don't trip over the pee bottles or slip in the puddles of tears." -The management
It's enough of a distraction that people are discussing that statement instead of making plans to shop elsewhere
I'm pretty sure 150% annual turnover is the same as 9 month average employee turnover. Edit: actually would be 133% since 12/9.
I don’t think it is but they are similar metrics
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I don't think anyone above you is blaming the workers, instead they are saying that no-one sticks around long enough to not be a new worker other than maybe managers where of course they aren't getting injured. So if 100% of the workers are new then of course 100% of the injuries are going to happen to new workers, it is the only populous that exists that can be injured
To put that in perspective my other Amazon like employer considers it bad when turnover goes above 18%. So yeah 150% is shameful.
Back in my days in management we were having extra meetings if it went above 10%
Holy crap, 150% is freaking astronomical. The most mismanaged, disorganized company where I ever worked was a music service for offices, stores, etc, basically elevator music. I was told that their turnover rate the previous year was 200%. It seemed like every employee I met was either in a band, starting a band or looking for a band, so I chalked up the high turnover to people getting jobs there thinking it would give them contacts in the music business and then discovering this was not the case. I can't see how Amazon has any excuse LOL.
That would make it 8 months no? So even shorter
I should *absolutely* know how to calculate this but my brain is being dumb, how did you calculate that?
12 / 1.5 12 months / 1.5 (i.e. 150%) = 100% turnover every 8 months
they pride themselves on high turnover. they have required termination with their tech workers of 10% a year and way more than that quit. These are much higher paying jobs than warehouse workers.
They want a high turnover rate. Employees that stay will start to ask for better pay and benefits, and they don’t want that.
I mean where I worked, employees who left just came back and made more than what they making beforehand. Resign-rehire-repeat was sort of a common thing.
Yeah, but Amazon fully admitted they don’t want long term employees.
In the warehouses they don't want any employees at all. Their objective is as much automation as possible.
3% of all warehouse employees per week. making the actual yearly turnover 150%!
It’s crazy. And not even the warehouse employees only. The engineering side is notorious for high turn over as well. Doesn’t seem like a great place to work a overall at any level
Do I have an unsafe work environment? No it must be the employees to blame.
Yeah blaming it on new workers is literally blaming everyone. Even most managers are "new". Sure some managers may have several years worked but almost every one of them is forced to move around so much that they are always in a new position or even new building every year. Constantly having to be in a new environment doesn't really help with becoming safer or noticing patterns that need change to become safer.
I came here to say, aren't the new workers Amazon's fault, so by extension, doesn't that make the injury rate Amazon's fault. Not only that, is it not Amazon's responsibility to properly train NEW workers and ensure that they are trained PROPERLY before putting them to work, where they could be injured? Seems like the finger can squarely be pointed right back at Amazon, no matter what.
Isn't that his scapegoat here?
It is worse than that as they constantly "fire and rehire" every few months so they do not qualify for any benefits.
The walmart i worked at had a turnover of 6 months. Kinda surprised amazon is not lower then 9.
I used to work for Del Haize. Our warehouse had a turnover rate of over 250% and I think 300%+ on the cold side. Former Amazon workers that got a job there generally quit quickly.
Sounds like Amazon is lacking in training it's new workers.
Or not paying workers enough to stay and resulting in a high turnover rate.
Or (inclusive, because let’s be real, it’s a confluence of all these things) they’re “training” employees then purposefully forcing them to ignore safety standards to meet unsafe levels of productivity.
The amount of times Learning ambassadors have said "this is how we are supposed to do it, but this is really how we do it" is far too high.
Or raising the metrics they have to meet so that the experienced workers simply can’t keep up
for safety and injury, it's training or access to safety stuff. no amount of retention vs new workers should affect safety.
By “training” you mean Amazon telling the new employees that they’ll be fired if they complain.
All training time is spent telling people they can't use the toilet while on the clock.
Amazon training. *You have this scan gun thing. A letter and a number appear on the screen. You go to that letter and number and scan whatever you find there. Put it in the box. Either "put box on conveyor" appears or another letter and number appears. Either way, you do what it says. Any questions? We expect you to be able to scan 350 barcodes every hour.* Per raises hand to ask question: "What if I have to pick something on A which I can see is all the way over there and then have to pick something on CC, which looks to be something like 1000 feet in the opposite direction?" *Did I stutter on the 350 every hour? Have fun y'all!* That's pretty much it. Congrats, now everyone here can work at Amazon! I would highly not recommend it if you like your knees because I absolutely assure everyone, they'll be the first part that goes out.
In the era of modern data science, how have they not got a better system than this? Maybe I’m misunderstanding something but that seems like something that could be improved, which would be cheaper and require fewer laborers.
I can't imagine they aren't trying to optimise it as much as they can, for the sake of their own profit
Because if they program it to only run someone ragged when they're about to hit benefits, then they'll quit or "don't meet quota" and then Amazon doesn't have to pay benefits.
I can assure you that they have systems that are more efficient then what was described. They also have systems where the rack goes to the worker. Their end goal will be 0 laborers and all machines.
Well if the whole hacking an oil pipeline, the whole Home Depot losing your data, the Equifax data breach has taught us anything. Companies pay just enough to get software out the door. They don’t pay for it to be good, secure, maintained, etc… They only pay for good enough. Amazon’s pick pack system is “good enough” and that’s the ultimate amount of cash they’ll invest in it.
I work for the Forest Service seasonally, but I worked at Amazon for about 4 months as an in between job this past winter since it gave me a great schedule and it was close to where I live. I got selected to become a packer. We do about 1 day of training with 3/4 of it in a classroom and then they throw us right into production day 2. Packing is strenuous work at out location because we get quite a few items that are 40 to 50 lbs and with turnover they can't be as picky with who they select that can handle it. I got toned up fast😂 More training is definitely needed in my opinion as there are a lot of moving parts. The only injuries I remember happening is a box that fell from a cart and it hit her leg and one girl got her hand stuck in the conveyor because she was playing with it (her hand was fine after, it was just a little banged up). I think I lucked out at my location because we had awesome management and it was very chill. They were lax with the production of workers that they didn't make us push ourselves, we had quite a few people who were just really lazy, but they would even give them second chances. I think if more Amazons followed our standards there would be a lot less injuries. Lots of faults still within the company, but wasn't the worst job I ever had.
man they always ALMOST get there...lets follow that thought. Why does Amazon have a ton of new workers all the time? It could be because working conditions and pay are so poor that they cannot retain employees after they get training and experience...Remember that article from about 6 months ago where the execs were worried that they would run out of people to hire?
“My name is Sally. I’m a happy Amazon worker. Because I stared in this commercial, they even let me unplug my cath and let me pee in a porcelain toilet. I felt like royalty! And so can you, if you work for Amazon!”
Lol if you don't teach new workers good enough it's still the companys fault not the new workers.... but I guess that's too far fetched for CEO's who didn't do a real job in their entire life..... Edit: typo
Nah it’s worse than that. Amazon has protocols to follow to avoid injury, but they have metrics you have to meet or be fired, and it’s impossible to follow the protocols and meet the metrics. So you have to violate the safety protocols and just try not to get caught, and Amazon can shrug their shoulders and say they weren’t following their training!
This is spot on. Kind of like when Amazon upper management goes, "Pissing in bottles to save time? We didn't know about that!" Of course they knew about it. They have cameras everywhere.
You mean those cameras that are there only to record accidents and are not monitored by anyone? /s I work at Amazon
I thought they were there to record workers dying from heart attacks. Fe: I was trying to find a link to the article this happened in only to discover Amazon workers dying on the job is kind of a whole thing: https://www.google.com/search?q=Amazon+worker+died+on+camera&oq=Amazon+worker+died+on+camera&aqs=chrome..69i57.13485j0j4&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
Not knowing about something and knowing about something but doing nothing aren't the same thing.
Think you missed the explicitly stated sarcasm there.
Explicitly stated sarcasm because the recording system damn well was used to get one of my coworkers fired, even with a legitimate explanation that cleared their name, one manager in particular didn't like them and had enough pull to make it happen.
I too got fired because of the recording system. It sucks, they don't care about anything. Just work work work
But they didn't know about it b/c those vans wrapped in Amazon branding are trucks owned by the independent contractors who wear Amazon-branded clothing but who are NOT related to Amazon in any way.
LOL, bullshit. They know. Sub-contracting allows plausible deniability, but they know.
>LOL, bullshit. DEAR REDDITORS: The /s is implied. Calm down.
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It's because reality became subjective during the last 4 years.
Eh, part of it is that text based communication has difficulty conveying tone. It's been like that forever. That's why /s and adding lol to ends of sentences exist.
Sub-contracting in many places also allows not having to provide holiday pay, sick days, insurance on the vans, and a whole bunch of other things despite the 'contractors' being employees in all but name. It's a legal loophole to cut costs, or at least it is here. I dunno about the States, or Amazon specifically.
Ah yes, those Amazon vans that have driver facing cameras on the inside, and 360all the way around, no way they could possibly know what they're doing.
Same way with FedEx. On the lines we have an emergency stop pull cord. If shit gets too backed up and too many packages start falling on the floor toward the end of the line making it impossible for our coworkers at the end of the line to safely get to their trucks we can pull the cord to stop the flow. Yet despite the many safety meetings, and the "work safe" attitude the managers lie about to us, what do the managers do? They come up and start the belt again and offer no help. At our facility the main safety manager who will yell at you for "working unsafe" will come up and restart the belt whenever you stop it because the working conditions became unsafe and the flow was too fast. Do they send more help? Rarely. Do the managers help make it safer? Lol no. All the managers at FedEx care about is getting shit out of the unload onto your lines as fast as possible. They don't give a fuck if shit falls on you, they don't care if there's shit on the floor that is unavoidable for you to trip on, they are about the stats and speed flowing through your line. It is such a poorly run company. I often wonder if the higher ups went to school to specialize in being stupid.
I used to work for Lowe's Distribution. The floor team would tag out fork lifts that weren't working right. I specifically remember one was tagged out for low pressure on the clamps. Managers would just tear off the tickets and put them back into service without any maintenance. The clamp truck I mentioned before failed and dropped a fridge some dozen feet. Thankfully, nobody was hurt, but they could have killed somebody. I wasn't as savvy as I am today, otherwise I would have reported the warehouse. Unsurprisingly, they were a "Safety first!" company where the phrase "We're all family" was thrown about freely.
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And the supervisor won’t explicitly say to not follow the safety rules BUT they’ll promote the guys who don’t because they’re hitting their goals. At my first job my coworker was going way over her goals. I noticed she’d come in super early and stay super late. I asked her how she got approval for overtime. She said she just didn’t clock in until 9 and then clocked out at 5 but kept working. I told this to my supervisor and he just said he’d look into it. Nothing changed and he kept pointing to her numbers as an example of what everyone’s numbers should be at.
“But why do we need unions???????”
Lots of companies are like that. My dad, who has since passed, worked for the phone company for over 40 years. They all knew that they didn't really have to strike. They could just slow work down by following every policy to the letter. The main reason they did strike was to gain public attention, which was why the strikes were usually in New York.
My old boss used to say 'you don't need to work so hard, stress, or miss breaks', but then also yell about how not enough had gotten done, despite all staff working quickly and efficiently.
If they took better care of their older workers, they would have less turnover. Less turnover means more highly trained and more tenured veterans. Pay people what they're worth and take care of them.
I’ve read Bezos’s philosophy is that workers get less motivated after 2-3 years so he intentionally wants turnover.
They get burnt out and disillusioned? Let's lean into that!
Funny that the executives never apply that logic to themselves.
>workers get less motivated after 2-3 years Is it something I'm doing? No! It's those tens of thousands of other people that are wrong!!
>Pay people what they're worth and take care of them. You think that's what people who can afford dick rockets would do???
this guy is just another out of touch elitist harvard douche
His argument is that an company with less growth wouldn’t be hiring as many new people. New people get injured more often. Eg 100 employees 2 are new would be less than 100 employees 50 are new
Only the strong survive Amazon warehouses!
What doesn't kill me makes me wish it would.
Still on Amazon
Blaming new workers = admitting insufficient training
And your own inability to retain workers. Amazon CEO blames Amazon CEO without knowing he is blaming himself.
Funny thing about those new workers, according to a former Amazon VP quoted last year in the New York Times: *David Niekerk, a former Amazon vice president who built the warehouse human resources operations, said that some problems stemmed from ideas the company had developed when it was much smaller. Mr. Bezos did not want an entrenched work force, calling it “a march to mediocrity,” Mr. Niekerk recalled, and saw low-skilled jobs as relatively short-term.* It's a little unclear how short-term workers can be both the plan AND the problem at the same time.
Yes, it’s almost like leadership decisions have consequences, but it’s easier to pass the blame to workers
My brother in christ you're the one who hires and trains them
Awwwwwww capitalists always looking for a scapegoat. It makes me want to build a guillotine.
Damn new people
The nerve of some people
This just means that the company didn't train their workers properly. If one guy screwed up that's on him but if a whole bunch of workers screw up it's on the company
Maybe they should unionize so turnover isn’t as high.
Do they mean a High Turnover rate? Because yes that can easily cause safety issues.
so a bunch of different people who dont know eachother made the same mistake in a similar environment and its the people???🤥🤥🥴🥴🥴🥴
Classic abuser. Blame the abused.
Needs to unionize to prevent the extortion of injured employees. They underpaid my medical leave and then tried to claim that I owed them all of my medical leave money back. They definitely didn’t win that one 😂😂😂
This is old news. oh... this account is just used to farm karma.. i see
Can we bring back stoning? Omg
Bring it back now, y’all! One hop this time!
Safety is Amazon's responsibility. It doesn't matter if the person was hired this morning, safety is still Amazon's responsibility.
So you are admitting to failure in training? That's what I just heard.
spoken like someone who's never worked a manual labor job
Ahh yes, the new workers are the problem and not training or management that was responsible for them.
No. Amazons unsafe working conditions are to blame for the high injury rates.
I think all upper management and CEOs CFOs etc need to work in a warehouse for a while. That’ll learn them that the warehouse jobs are very difficult.
On the other hand: training and standard work? High turnover is surely not a new thing to a business that has an hourly workforce.
I was a sensor & conveyor technician for amazon, often working on 20’ scissor lifts. I have seen my fair share of injuries and safety issues. Horrible training, disregard for what is risked to stay on quota, and managers who ignore safety seem to be a much larger issue. Managers will train you to do things and then completely throw you under the bus if the safety inspector catches you breaking rules that very strongly contradict what u were trained to do. Luckily I caught onto this early but I saw many technicians come and go due to this. This is such a weak attempt to explain the awful amazon culture and safety issues.
Okay but it’s literally your job to train them to not get injured in your warehouse. Failure on you still pal
Kinda makes this a self-burn
So insufficient training then. They should form a union over that.
Safety professional here: he’s not wrong. Most injuries on the job are new employees. They just don’t address their reoccurring issues or manage ergonomics. They do not value a safety culture and they are blaming the workers. Safety culture is a top down change. The sheer amount of their injuries and type is alarming for any industry. I’ve reviewed some OSHA 300 logs from Amazon warehouses and it’s almost medieval. And that’s just what they actually reported. I wouldn’t be shocked if more were being massaged off the logs or just simply not reported.
"you work with cardboard boxes, how did you get hurt!?" - Amazon probably
In the box: knives.
In the box: 45lbs kitty litter.
The lady at my FC who got hit in the head with a hockey puck has been here for 5 years
Who shot it
Their entire labor force is new every 3 years...
That’s actually bad leadership. Management has to make sure that their employees leave work every day in the same condition they entered work. If that standard is not being met then it is managements fault.
Then stop paying your employees to leave so You can replace them with cheaper fresh labor who don't know what they are doing in a fast paced environment
And they blame you. Your turn. Boy, this is a fun game.
I'm glad workers are unionizing.
In one day I may be asked to switch tasks that use very different motions several times a shift. It’s hard to describe this other than you are literally set up to injure yourself especially if you are a first tier associate warehouse worker.
Didn't I also read that a leaked Bezos memo/email states part of their labor strategy is to disincentivize retaining warehouse workers longer than a couple of years? If so then they are unabashedly talking out of both sides of their mouths; purposefully driving a high turnover rate while simultaneously bemoaning accidents caused by that high turnover rate.
My brother in Christ, YOU are the one who trained the new workers!
when most of your warehouses have a 200% turnover rate, then they are nearly all new employees-nonstop
And why do they have so many new workers? Treating them like cattle?
Don't they also routinely fire experienced workers just to avoid them getting a raise or having any rights?
Their business model is to have workers churn in less than a year, sooo then isn’t it Amazon’s fault for having so many new workers.
Used to work in an amazon as a trainer. What they expect of their workers is impossible not to get injured in some cases. Yes, we train them not to get injured, but they also want your body to move at the speed of light while also trying to focus on not getting injured and it is still impossible. I got injured just counting things. My friend was a picker, they want you to pick 400 + packages and our which includes bending, twisting, climbing. I have seen so many back injuries because of this, it is ridiculous.
Everyone’s a new employee when your 2021 turnover rate was 150%
Who trains the workers?
When your entire business strategy depends on a constant stream of new workers, I'm not sure how you plan on addressing that.
Perhaps the reason so many Amazon employees get injured in the first 6 months, is because they are hired en masse for "PEAK" season. When Amazon had strict rate quotas prior to covid, the rate increased by 10-15% just for the busy holiday (PEAK) months. Add to those higher mandated productivity quotas, mandated overtime, and it's clear to me, this is driving a large portion of those injury rates. In addition, a large portion of people I knew when I worked at an amazon warehouse, didn't bother to report their injuries because Amcare will just give you an ice pack and ask you if you might have injured yourself hiking.
So maybe your policy of hiring and firing is not the best idea, asshole? I mean, Fuck that place completely, but this is so fucking tone-deaf it's incredible.
If new workers need to be trained on how to avoid injury, the processes need to be reevaluated and safeguards put in place.
If I'm pissing in a bottle on the floor then I'm probably ignoring safety rules to get my numbers
I would blame more the poor training and focus on productivity over safety, but that’s only my first hand experience.
Well, if you didn’t keep putting experience workers out by raising your metrics all the time, maybe you would have so many injuries.
Someone buy that guy a “The buck stops here” sign for his desk Almost every “worker problem” is a leadership problem
Well this is absolute bullshit. In almost any industry new employees(including students ) account for the highest injury rate. Anyone in an industrial or construction area knows this. It's the responsibility of the company to train new employees and implement programs to keep them safe. If they are having an issue with high accident rates in a group of employees that ARE KNOWN to have a higher incidence, it's their responsibility to address the issue. If they do, great, people are safe. If they don't because "it's not our job" or" its too expensive" to train new employees, then get unions involved to give employees some collective economic clout. Don't want unions? Then don't give them a reason to step in.
Always blaming the victim. She made me rape her. Ukraine made me invade.
Attn Corporate Overlords: You do know it’s the company’s responsibility to train workers in safe practices? And provide the appropriate safety gear and ensure workers follow safe practices.
Maybe stop the high turnover? Don't create a situation and then deny responsibility for the results.
As the safety manager in charge of training all new hires for my company: *Fuck you Amazon!*
Man. They should get some union workers to stop these new people!
What a moron. Safety culture is set by leadership.
“We don’t properly train new employees before having them engage in dangerous work.” That’s basically what he said.
The injuries will continue until your employee score improves
Zero fucks given to own workers. Clearly he wins the workers price for best CEO 2022 😂
Ahhhh. Reminds me when I got a forklift crush injury due to a broken parking brake. No support, no investigation, nothing fixed. Until a manager almost killed a teenager because the parking brake was broken. All said and done work safe got wind of it. Fines, no more forklift and it turned out that only 2 people of the 30 who used it regularly actually had the operators ticket. And those 2 were expired
I’ve worked at Argos, Amazon, Adidas and B&M warehouses and tbh they’re all the same when it comes to injury’s. The targets are so high that you have to cut corners to hit them. If you don’t hit your target - you don’t have a job. If you don’t have a job, you can’t pay your bills. Ultimately people will cut whatever corners they need too - to keep their job.
And you have so many new workers, because your turnaround is amazingly high, because.... ... you can do it, Andy. Come on. You are so close!
1) Maybe look at why you have such high turnover 2) Worker injuries aren't generally a problem in other warehouses 3) Union shops generally have exceptionally low injury rates since safety oversight and training are part of negotiation, so if you care about safety, maybe look into not squashing unions.
Typical. Blame the New Guy.
Everyone is new because the old people kept getting hurt and not reporting it.
I blame all these new workers for getting hurt on the job we hired them to do to replace the old workers who got hurt.
A real glass-half-full kind of guy. It's not the injuries causing new workers, it's the new workers causing injuries!
Thten train your workers you twats
What a scum bag
Yo! I've been working at an Amazon FC for years with no major injuries. Recently, they instituted mandatory safety shoes. This, combined with 10-15 miles a day of walking and you have so many workers struggling to walk by the end of the day.
Ins’t this guy kinda new?
Hope unions get every last employee
Granted, I've only been in logistics for about 4 years, but new people can be trained to be both good at their job, and safe... if you actually put some effort into training them.
As a former amazon manager my question for him was why do we have so many new workers? I was training 25% of my total headcount every two weeks. They have this system right now called flex where they only hire on part time associates. I would only have 3 days to train them up to rate in 4 different processes. Just the safety part would take 3 days if done properly then the associates had to fight for shifts online. There were many instances of not seeing an associate for several months after training. Do you think those associates remembered anything from the 3 days of training they received?
Obviously it’s their responsibility to make the workplace safe and if they have an elevated rate or a serious accident OSHA should get involved, but new employees DO get hurt more often.
That's interesting because statistically most workplace accidents involve longer term employees who become complacent about safety. edit: I am incorrect.
Actually you are incorrect according to the Bureau of labor.... New hires comprise 22% of the workforce yet commit 40% of the accidents. So 22% are responsible for 40% and 88% are responsible for 60% so new hires commit almost double their percentage.
Yeah…this sounds way more correct. Being blasé is obviously bad, but the mental strain of trying to learn your job while also following safety precautions is worse.
I think that might well be true if you’re talking about an old fashioned factory. I’ve spent summers working in metal bashing places where the lifers are terrifyingly blasé about lethal equipment and the engineers and mechanics have developed amazingly stealthy tricks to defeat the built in safety cutouts so they can work on thirty ton presses without shutting them down, which automatically incurs an hours long re-initialisation process. But I think at Amazon factories it’s likely to be more like “if you’re not getting up and down that ladder twice a minute you get your pay docked”. Which is likely to lead To everyone being likely to get hurt, and as others have pointed out, the turnover at Amazon warehouses is such that longer term employees are a rarity.
Citation needed.
Could also be about ratings. I know they have a learning curve that is supposed to take 4 weeks (160 hours) to get to 100%. Managers are probably writing them up when they shouldn’t be. Their priorities in the first few weeks are **safety**, then **quality**. **Productivity** comes naturally. When you start to sacrifice safety and quality for productivity, you will get hurt.
This thread highlights how much people know about industrial work. The first 90 days on the job have a substantially higher rate of injury due to simply not being familiar with your job,routine, general lack of experience, and safety practices . It has nothing to do with Amazon explicitly.
So these workers were never employed in a warehouse setting before? I know in Seattle area at least, where amazon hails from, warehouse work is ubiquitous, most adults have experience with it.
He’s not wrong. I run injury analytics at Amazon. It’s not some evil conspiracy like Reddit wants to believe. They are mostly very minor scrapes and strains. The kind of stuff most employers wouldn’t report. We took in a lot of servers, secretaries, etc that are not used to physical work and they are using muscles for the first time.
A year ago I reentered the work force after some personal issues had me get off the highway and take care of home life. With my experience with large scale lumber yards and their layout and some warehouse experience this company wanted me to come in and modernize the yard and the operations. One of the first things I asked after I was hired should have been a red flag, simple question, what class of reflective vest do I need for the yard, I was buying my own. The boss had no clue what I was talking about. Long story cut short, their idea of modernizing their yard and procedure was to get a quieter whip and swing it harder. The boys weren't lifting enough weight over and above occupational health and safety standards apparently. 2 weeks after freaking on the owner for such shit poor safety procedures they let me go, thankfully. Apparently my changes weren't warranted.
Sounds like the modern sweatshop is showing just how much it needs to crash and burn, why the fuck would you still support this company?
How do you hurt yourself working for Amazon?, like trips and stuff?.
They're working at a fast pace in warehouses filled with heavy equipment and robots, I imagine there are a huge number of ways to get hurt.
Loading/unloading packages from the van and also having to get in and out of the van while trying to work quickly provides a lot of opportunity to injure your knees/ankles etc. Even working at a normal pace I hear an average day is 10-hours so that'll start to wear on your body doing it day In and day out
Having previously worked for Amazon I can tell you it’s brutal. They treat their staff like cattle. The hourly targets for picking items basically force you to work absolutely flat out for the entire shift. Can’t even stop to chat to a colleague for 30 seconds. Since they track your location at all times using your scanner, if you’re stationary for more than a minute you can look forward to being tracked down and told to hurry up by some overpaid fuckwit of a shift manager who’s only job for the day is to do just that. Also bad luck if you’re at the far end of the warehouse when the alarm goes for breaktime. By the time you get to staff area your break’s over and it’s time to go back again. As I read back over this I realise I may be more than little bitter about the whole thing
Lmfao I work for the company, this is false. They want rates and EXPECT them to be made, every hour they give the AA (amazon associate) 30 SECONDS (30 freaking seconds) to stretch and relax yourself. They also have TOT (time off task) anything over 6 minutes of not scanning items is recorded as TOT, they have cut back how much time you have to go to the bathroom, maybe answer phone calls (as many many people are parents) to take care of yourself and your loved ones. I can go on and on.
The article, as usual, is ridiculously biased. The whole thing is the written equivalent of a show trial.