

But this year, the same annual shopping event that lines his already overstuffed pockets could potentially be a matter of life and death for those lower down on the company ladder.Īccording to at least one estimate, Amazon is expected to rake in close to $10 billion in sales from this year’s Prime Day, which usually takes place in July but was rescheduled this summer because of the pandemic. Because Bezos’s fortune has grown so astronomically throughout the pandemic-that is, during the same cataclysmic event that destroyed the economy and put as many as 40 million people out of work-updates on his snowballing wealth are at this point hardly shocking (if no less nauseating). You’re a robot, and you know, that’s how it goes.This year, in the lead-up to Amazon Prime Day, Forbes reported that Jeff Bezos and his ex-wife, Mackenzie Scott, had respectively gotten $8.8 billion and $3 billion richer over the course of a week, thanks to a rebound in Amazon share prices. No one wants to talk to you, and there’s no people skills whatsoever.

And I was on an overnight shift-Thursday, Friday, Saturday-and it doesn’t matter what’s going on medically unless you actually have a doctor’s note. I was on, like, a fifth write-up, and I ended up leaving because I actually mentally could not handle it because it’s like, the managers, they have no empathy. I ended up quitting before even any corrective action could be taken. And someone, like a trainer or an ambassador, would sort of watch what you’re doing and say, “OK, well this could speed it up,” or “Try this to see if there’s anything that you’re doing that could just help your rate go up.” I had that done to me and the trainer was like, “Well, she’s not doing anything different. They do have a corrective action, where you would be retrained. As these stories have piled up, Amazon has tried to improve public perception of the fulfillment centers, tasking some warehouse employees to defend the company on Twitter as “ Amazon FC ambassadors” and offering fulfillment-center tours. In January, the wife of a man who had a heart attack and died while working in an Amazon warehouse filed a suit against the company for not contacting 911 fast enough, despite only being a half-mile from a fire station. Several workers have died while working at Amazon fulfillment centers. Amazon has worked for years to quash employee efforts to unionize, and in a statement on the strikes, the company bashed unions for organizing around Prime Day as a way to “to raise awareness for their cause, in this case, increased membership dues.” Earlier this year, Amazon was sued by seven women who worked at their warehouses for firing them after they became pregnant. On Monday, thousands of Amazon fulfillment center workers across the world went on strike during Prime Day, demanding better working conditions. I am withholding her last name because she was unsure if she was allowed to speak to the press.) At the warehouse, Nicole packed boxes, picked items from shelves to be shipped out, and “stowed,” which means scanning products and placing them on shelves to be picked later. (I first encountered her on a Facebook group for Amazon workers who share memes about the fulfillment centers. To get a sense of how Amazon’s warehouse personnel experience Prime Day, I spoke to a woman, Nicole C., who worked at an Amazon fulfillment center in Illinois until this June, when she quit after feeling exasperated over her experience there. It’s also a time of year in which workers at Amazon fulfillment centers get very, very busy. And now every year we have Prime Day-a two-day online shopping blitz in which Amazon offers timed sales throughout the day, transforming an otherwise slow time for e-commerce into a money-minting holiday for the Everything Store.
#Amazon strike on prime day how to#
Here’s How to Handle It.įirst there was Black Friday. This Won’t Be the Last Time the East Coast Experiences Wildfire Smoke.

Won’t Destroy Us-if We Make a Crucial Change NowĪpple Is Ignoring Something Big About Augmented Reality
