Amazon’s pioneering of employee dystopia is continuous apace.
Motherboard reported this week that Amazon is requiring warehouse employees to attend “WorkingWell huddles” through which they routinely watch movies describing methods to stretch and elevate bins safely. Among the movies additionally provide dietary recommendation, equivalent to lowering carbs and consuming extra greens.
At first blush, Amazon’s program would appear to be worthwhile. Encouraging employee security and well being is an effective follow, notably in work environments involving loads of bodily pressure. However the huddles themselves, alongside different “wellness” options in Amazon’s warehouses, are garnering criticism from workers and appear alienating and creepy. Within the broader context of Amazon’s fiercely exploitative office practices, they appear extra of a diversion tactic than a severe effort to guard workers.
Amazon is charting new territory in employee alienation.
Security directions are a good suggestion. However the way in which these wellness huddles go down is distinctly delinquent and objectionable to many warehouse employees, in line with Motherboard and on-line boards. They’re administered by way of transient educational movies fairly than reside instructors. Workers can’t ask questions. Whereas Amazon says the content material is supposed to be different, workers have complained that they’re compelled to observe the identical movies over and over. And a few stated whereas the directions reveal sound approach, they’re too primary and repetitive to warrant routine viewing. “Arms down probably the most infantilizing expertise I’ve to endure at work,” one person on Reddit’s forum for Amazon workers said.
The wellness huddles appear to be a part of the identical initiative that rolled out “AmaZen” meditation booths on warehouse flooring. If a employee is burdened, they’re to step right into a tiny sales space resembling a port-a-potty through which a pc gives a collection of “psychological well being and aware practices.” The Amazon worker who invented the sales space stated they’re meant to “recharge the internal battery” of workers. What an appropriately dehumanizing flip of phrase.
Amazon coping with its employees’ bodily and psychological well being by delegating it to computer systems that supply shallow directions about wellness is worrisome sufficient. However in mild of the corporate’s different exploitative practices, they appear extra of a dismissal of employee well being than an assist to it.
Amazon office accidents are 80 percent higher than competitors, in line with a union-based examine revealed final 12 months — and the primary offender the examine recognized was the corporate’s “obsession with velocity.” Amazon is thought for such a demanding pace of work and restricted break time that workers have reported being afraid to get a drink of water or use the bathroom and reported being forced to urinate and defecate in water bottles and bags throughout their shifts. Amazon additionally deploys state-of-the-art surveillance technology to watch employee productiveness and even unionization vitality— which it has used brazenly illegal tactics to crush.
In a local weather of basic exploitation, sending employees off to take a look at pc screens to get a couple of minutes of coaching on lifting, consuming veggies and aware respiratory will not be coping with the center of the matter. What it does do is give Amazon speaking factors about employee security to make use of inside the firm and when coping with exterior observers — all whereas implicitly blaming workers’ habits for accidents and ignoring the corporate’s punishing output calls for.
The affect and cultural affect of Amazon’s practices can’t be overestimated.
With these sorts of practices, Amazon is charting new territory in employee alienation. Its removed from the primary company to pay lip service to worker well-being with flashy however superficial wellness initiatives. However because the second-largest employer in America, and doubtless probably the most extensively watched firm within the retail area on the earth, the affect and cultural affect of its practices can’t be overestimated. Whereas Amazon frequently invents new methods to surveil and pantomime take care of its employees with much less effort, it stays regular in its dedication to creating positive its employees keep as overworked and disempowered as ever.
