Amazon workers can be sacked by robot production line masters if they don’t work fast enough picking and packing orders for the e-commerce giant.
Amazon’s automated system tracks every second of its worker’s days — warnings for under-performance are auto-generated when too much time has been spent “off task.”
If a worker receives six warnings within a 12-month period, Amazon lawyers have confirmed that the employee will then receive an automatically generated termination notice.
The Verge reports that in response to an unfair dismissal claim, an Amazon lawyer stated in a legal letter that the company had developed a productivity metric for measuring each employee.
The letter said: “Amazon’s system tracks the rate of each individual associate’s productivity and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors.”
Stick to the ‘Amazon pace’
Workers in the warehouse are encouraged to pack and scan orders at an “Amazon pace” — described as a speed in between walking and jogging.
Employees often process hundreds of orders an hour and skip toilet breaks, going to the toilet in bottles out of fear of being sacked for failing to “make rate.”
In 2017 it was reported that staff at Amazon warehouses were suffering from panic attacks and working long hours as they struggled to keep up with demand.
The legal letter that contains the claims was sent in response to an employee who was sacked for not meeting their targets.
Prior to their sacking, the worker had complained to human resources about their manager for their “rude and disrespectful attitude” and “false accusations about my time off task.”
In the letter, Amazon countered that the manager “had no ability whatsoever to modify production rates.”
It said: “While managers have no control over rates, they can override the automatically generate notices if a policy was applied incorrectly.”
The letter went on to say that the dismissal was justified and Amazon has terminated hundreds of employees in this way for failure to meet productivity rates.
It said: “Amazon consistently terminates fulfillment center associates for failing to repeatedly meet the standardized productivity rates.”
“In fact, Amazon has terminated hundreds of employees at the Baltimore facility alone since August 2017 for failure to meet productivity rates.”