The average length of an Amazon US worker? Much less than a year, despite the awards
An untold story about Amazon's workforce is the high turnover rate even before the virus pandemic, which reaches a frankly embarrassing value for any company that does not have a purely seasonal job. The renewal of the workforce is proceeding at the rate of 150% per year. The average life span of an employee is nine months.
Many of the more than 350,000 workers hired by Amazon in 2020 only stayed with the company for a couple of weeks. Others have lasted longer, but the turnover figures are impressive.
“ Even before the pandemic, previously unreported data shows, Amazon was losing about 3% of its hourly employees each week, meaning that its workforce was recycled around 150% per year . That rate, nearly double that of the retail and logistics sectors, has some executives worried about running out of workers across America, ”the NYT said.
Even after Amazon's massive hiring spate last year, and the fact that the e-commerce giant recently started offering $ 1,000 contract signing bonuses to new employees, executives are very worried they won't be able to find new ones. workers.
The problem is not the pay, but the working conditions at the limit of the inhumane that does not distinguish between the automatic and the human system. The company treats its employees like robots, so there is continuous tracking of movements in the warehouse to monitor employee productivity step by step. A situation that, on a full working day, is intolerable. And the 10-minute break in the “Zen Box”, the closets that Amazon wanted in its warehouses for the “Meditation”, is useless.
The funny thing is that the various certification companies give a high score from the point of view of ESG, social and ecological awareness, to the company. After all, the fact of calling itself “Woke”, green or “Gender friendly” does not in any way limit the company's ability to exploit its employees to the bone, on the contrary it makes it easier. Ultimately ESG scores are nothing more than Linus blankets to reassure investors and executives, but they do nothing from the workers' perspective.
The first phase of the pandemic had hidden the problem because many workers expelled from the service sector had converged. As soon as bars and restaurants reopened, these people changed jobs, returning to their previous business.
Paul Stroup, a former Amazon data scientist who studied the company's hourly workforce, told NYT that he became frustrated with the company because there was no plan to keep workers for long-term periods. He likened the abandonment of workers to the use of fossil fuels. They burn and go, without a future.
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The article The Average Life of an Amazon US Worker? Much less than a year, despite the awards comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/la-durata-media-di-un-lavoratore-amazon-us-molto-meno-di-un-anno-nonostante-i-premi/ on Sat, 19 Jun 2021 07:44:30 +0000.