Ambulances Were Called to Amazon Warehouses 600 Times in Three Years
vice.comTowards the end of the article, Amazon says: "Amazon has 43 percent fewer injuries on average than other companies conducting transportation and warehousing activities in the UK". The authors of the article don't seem to dispute this claim, so it seems its more that transportation/warehousing work is somewhat dangerous, not that Amazon is particularly bad.
I worked at Amazon in Distribution operations management in the very early days(1997-2001).
Culture in the distribution centers(now called fulfillment centres) was definitely one of no excuses performance.
I take responsibility for my role in how the culture evolved.
In the early days, we were hiring like crazy, trying to “average up” with every single early hire, while trying to keep the customer happy with orders backing up with exponential growth.
We worked nutty hours, often packing a bag to stay overnight or for a few days.
Hourly associates and temps were often compelled to work 50+ hours per week.
Terminations were very quick and cold as we didn’t feel we had the time to do it properly with customers orders clogging up.
Something had to give. So we were all pretty ruthless. Perform or leave.
I’m proud of what we achieved, but it came at a significant personal cost to many people.
I burned out after 3+ years.
I believe it’s a fair bit better now, but still a challenging environment that requires good performance or risk of termination.
It’s not a place to “coast” or “Be a grey man/woman”.
20 years ago we had scanners than could measure productivity.
Nowadays, everything is measured.
You can’t hide from your productivity data.
It seems like Amazon warehouse worker are slaves to robots. Robots have no compassion and show no pity. It would be terrible to be a slave to a robot.
The real problem is that the variation of human performance is so large. Variation of performance between individuals can be addressed by firing the weak. But an individual’s performance from day-to-day and over the long term also varies greatly.
The incentives to raise performance standards to unsustainable levels is enormous. How could Amazon’s robots (and managers) resist the temptation?
[edit: 200 vists stat is for UK only. Ignore everything I said here. ]
For scale, Amazon had 566,000 employees at the end of 2017. With 200 trips per year, that’s about one trip per 2,800 employees.
For comparison, US ambulances made about 16.2 million trips in 2003 on a population of 290 million, or one trip per 17.9 people.
If we assume that employees spend 1/4 of their week at work, then while working at Amazon you are 39.5 times less likely to need an ambulance than an average American.
;)
You didn’t actually read the article: “ambulances have been called to Amazon's UK warehouses at least 600 times in the last three years“
There are way less warehouse workers in Amazon UK so your calculations are off.
There may be health & safety regs in the UK that require ambulances to be called in situations where they might not be called in the US. (Just speculating, I don't know.)
That number seems unusually high.
Having worked in all the very early US distribution centers(pre automation and now called fulfillment centers) and privy to early UK, German, French, and Japanese distribution operations ambulance calls were less than common, but more than rare.
That was before Amazon hit a headcount of 16k(when I left).
I recall several ambulance calls.
Mostly legit, things like heat/humidity, ankles, pre-existing issues such as obesity/poor fitness, and the rare workers comp lotto attempt.
Typical amazon employees are below 60. Typical ambulance needers are above 60.
Who knew holding in your pee was so dangerous?
Amazon’s first warehouses in Seattle were tiny(maxing at 60k sq ft as I recall), then 200k in Delaware, then 600k+ in the next few in Nevada, Georgia, Kansas, and Kentucky with the first generation of partial automation(tilt tray sortation systems).
It was easy to sneak off to the bathroom in the smaller facilities.
The bigger facilities had dispersed bathrooms, but depending on the specific job role/location it could be quite a long walk back/forth to use it.
Most of a break period could be spent traveling to/from a break area.
I’m just guessing, but I suspect facility design for the many more recent fulfillment centers(100+ since the early ones) take into account employee traffic/movement/efficiency based on data from existing centers.
A few of my former peers and direct reports are now in quite senior roles in operations for the company.
They are genuinely good people, good managers, and good leaders.