Amazon Offers Free Delivery of Workplace Hell

from truthdig:


Amazon Offers Free Delivery of Workplace Hell

Posted on Aug 26, 2015
By Sonali Kolhatkar


A lengthy exposé by The New York Times about Amazon’s work environment recently revealed the depths to which American workplace culture has plummeted, particularly for white-collar workers. Journalists Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld interviewed more than 100 current and former Amazon employees and concluded, “The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions.”

“Amazonians,” as employees are referred to, are constantly monitored by their higher-ups and their time micromanaged ruthlessly. They are encouraged to engage in a brutal “Hunger Games”-style practice of snitching on one another to management. Those struggling with unexpected illnesses, caregiving needs or even childbirth are often pushed out for supposedly not being committed enough to their jobs. Regular performance evaluations are designed to weed out employees who don’t meet Amazon “standards,” and reasonable interpretations of work-life balance are frowned upon. One former worker told the Times, “Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.”

But it’s not just office workers at Amazon. The company’s poor treatment of its lower-paid warehouse workers has been well documented. Author Simon Head, in his 2014 book, “Mindless: Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans,” wrote, “Amazon’s system of employee monitoring is the most oppressive I have ever come across,” and its management model is based on “pushing up employee productivity while keeping hourly wages at or near poverty levels.” Head described a level of brutality analogous to the barbarism of upper-level jobs that The New York Times found later.

Head told me in a recent interview on “Uprising” that what the Times described at Amazon “crossed serious moral frontiers.” He added, “There is a broad ethical question: Is it justified in pushing human beings and undermining their dignity for such utterly trivial reasons ... as getting a doll to someone in New York City 23 minutes faster?” Head went as far as to compare Amazon’s Anytime Feedback Tool, which managers use to bad-mouth their colleagues, to the methods of the Stasi, the East German secret police. ................(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/amazon_offers_free_delivery_of_workplace_hell_20150826