![]() “I want the public to know that there is a cost to their 2-day Prime shipping,” she says. Fee describes herself as previously dependent on Amazon, but now shuns its online store.Ĭrane says she wishes more of Amazon’s customers knew about the humans working behind the scenes when they click Buy Now. Ortega now tries to shop mostly from small businesses, she says. All have either reduced what they order from Amazon or stopped buying from the company altogether. Kelly, the Amazon spokesperson, says that the San Bernardino facility is fully staffed and that the ear protection provided to employees is designed to allow people to hear their surroundings.įor Ortega, Fee, Crane, and Hamilton, the intensity of peak season has dampened their enthusiasm for this time of year outside of work. “Most of the day now the conveyor alarms are going off, it’s just so loud in there,” she says.Īmazon provides workers with foam earplugs, but Ortega says those who want to be aware of their surroundings or able to talk with coworkers choose not to wear them most of the time. In peak season, they sound more often because more packages come through, and more of them are larger, Ortega says. On her floor, alarms sound every time a conveyor belt or chute is jammed or full. Ortega works on one of the teams that feeds those chutes, maneuvering large boxes full of bags, and moving bags or boxes onto robots. “It’s sort of like a jam-up point,” Fee says. Too many blue lights and the workers upstairs have to stop work. If she and her coworkers don’t move fast enough, the chutes that deliver packages from the floor above will fill up, turning on a blue warning light. Her department is significantly understaffed compared to peak season last year, she says, creating additional pressure to work as fast as possible. It has become a massive freight and air hub for Amazon and other logistics operations serving Los Angeles and southern California.įee works with one other person to manage five stations that are part of the process of moving packages from planes onto trucks. Peters, Sara Fee and Anna Ortega work similar shifts for Amazon in San Bernardino, California, in a region known as the Inland Empire. Nearly 2,000 miles across the US from St. “Part of that clearly is deliberate on the company’s part.” Kelly of Amazon says the company invested $300 million last year on worker safety improvements. “It’s very difficult for people outside the company to understand the facts about what’s going on inside,” he says. “I’ve got a 20-year old who comes out walking like he’s a 50-year old man,” Crane says.Įric Frumin, SOC’s health and safety director, says the data needed to know whether Amazon’s injury rate is worse during peak season is not available. ![]() When she hands over the car to her sons at the start of her day shift and the end of their night shift, the exhaustion on their faces is painful to see. “I can’t come home and sit down and sleep like I would like to,” she says. When Crane gets home from work after her day shift, she has three teenage boys at home to feed and put to bed. They both work the night shift, but the family, with Crane as a single mother, has only one car, so they pass the car back and forth in the parking lot every morning and night between shifts. Two of Crane’s seven children, sons aged 20 and 31, also work at the same fulfillment center. ![]() “Trying to make rate is hard, and if you don’t make rate they write you up.” And dealing with that, trying to make rate, means I compensate on my left side,” she says. She’s one of the thousands of workers with musculoskeletal injuries caused by repeated motion in logistics jobs at Amazon and other companies. She places anywhere from 70 to 280 items into boxes each hour, for 11 hours.Ĭrane has been battling a nagging injury in her left arm and wrist since October that she says was caused by her work’s repetitive packaging motions. The company still hired extra staff to manage the seasonal rush, announcing in October it would add 150,000 temporary workers to its warehousing and delivery operations.Īs an exhausted Hamilton is falling asleep each morning in Minnesota, Jennifer Crane is already several hours into her day shift at Amazon’s St. Amazon also lost almost 100,000 warehouse and delivery workers this year, it told investors, mainly by not replacing people who left the company, which has a high rate of turnover in those roles. In 2022, the company’s revenue grew at the slowest rate in more than 20 years, and in November it began laying off 10,000 corporate employees. This year’s holiday season occurs at a difficult time for both Amazon’s leaders and its logistics workers.
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