Amazon’s Warehouse Tracking System Can Automatically Fire Employees.

Amazon’s fulfillment facilities are the engine of this company; massive warehouses where workers monitor, pack, sort, and shuffle each order before sending it to the customer’s door on its way.


Amazon’s demanding culture of employee productivity has been unveiled in numerous investigations. However, a new report indicates that the company does not just track employee productivity it also has.

Critics say those satisfaction center workers face severe situationsEmployees are pushed to “make rate,” with packaging hundreds of boxes per hour, and losing their job if they don’t move quickly enough. “You’ve always got somebody right behind you who’s ready to take your job, ” states Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and a prominent Amazon critic.

Amazon has fired over 300 workers, referring productivity, in a single facility in Baltimore in one year (from August 2017 through September 2018), “The Verge’s Colin Lecher reported.” “The Verge” cited a letter with an Amazon lawyer as part of an instance with the National Labor Relations Board.

“Approximately 300 employees turned over in Baltimore related to productivity in this timeframe. In general, the number of employee terminations has decreased over the last two years at this facility as well as across North America.” an Amazon spokesman said.

The system automatically produces warnings and termination paperwork without human interruption, and that a human supervisor ultimately agrees to fire them and tells the employee so, or overrides the system and keeps the employee.

The letter also details Amazon’s strict standards broadly. “Associates must be detailed and efficient in processing each order,” the letter reads.  To ensure that performance continues, the company has produced “a proprietary productivity metric.” Amazon says that they’re focused at metrics such as customer demand and location, and those goals are set objectively, of course.

Employees have, at times, pushed against the productivity requirements of the company. Last year, East African immigrant employees at a Minnesota facility coordinated protests from the business, saying they did not have adequate break time, including for prayer.

In response, Amazon has continued to praise the benefits of working for its business, pointing to their hourly pay rates and policies like parental holiday. However, the documents make clear that some workers, failing to meet productivity standards, won’t obtain the benefits of a job.

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