Many of us take advantage of Amazon.com’s free shipping offer, adding one or two more cheap items to our baskets to achieve the $25 minimum. But what we may not realize is the real moral cost of “free” shipping – unfair and often brutal working conditions for shipping employees. Like many online retail warehouses across the country, Amazon’s are located in low-income areas, giving local residents looking for work little choice but to live with the less than desirable conditions. As of late, more and more of these issues have been coming to light, making us wonder if we wouldn’t mind paying a few bucks more for shipping so that others can have a higher quality of life.
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One of the warehouses in question ships Amazon.com’s goods from Lehigh Valley, and was recently investigated by a reporter for the newspaper The Morning Call. During the summer, the warehouse, which is not air conditioned or ventilated, can reach up to 102 degrees F. In the sweltering heat, the employees are expected to perform a laundry list of manual labor, from packing to heavy lifting. Several employees passed out from the hard labor and heat that would make a person ill even if they were relaxing.
The Amazon warehouse in Lehigh is not staffed by Amazon employees, but rather contracted out to a temporary agency. The Morning Call interviewed 20 employees of the Lehigh warehouse, and were horrified at what they learned. Many employees reported they were forced to work at an unrealistic pace while temperatures inside the warehouse blazed. Failure to comply or meet quotas resulted in losing their jobs. Since jobs in the area are very sparse, employees just put up with it.
The Morning Call also reported that Amazon had medical help, ambulances and paramedics, on call during the hottest times of the summer, and when employees fell ill, others were ready to replace them. It may sound unthinkable that this is going on today, but with our current economy, people are happy to find jobs that pay $12 an hour. Unfortunately, it is because of these low wages that companies like Amazon can offer “free” shipping. Food for thought the next time you opt for the Super Saver shipping option.
Via The Morning Call
Images ©TORLEY
Just curious if you or The Morning Call reporters have ever visited any warehouse beyond this report? I can’t speak to the conditions in Lehigh, but high temperatures, no air conditioning, long work hours and manual labor are all just part of the day-to-day life in many distribution facilities across the US.
It has LONG been the practice of small-to-midsized businesses and huge enterprise companies, like Amazon, alike to select locations for distribution facilities for a number of factors. Location, location, location. You bet cost of labor is one of them. As is cost per sq. foot for the building itself. Proximity to transportation hubs. Tax incentives…
I’m not really seeing Amazon and it’s “free shipping” as the culprit here. They are just maximizing profits like any other corporation in America. Other companies with high-tech DC facilities, such as Zappos–who also offers free shipping–are fully automated and don’t employ near the number of workers as more manual facilities with humans picking, sorting and packing orders. Is their technology contributing to unemployment rates?
We’re not talking child labor here…
Would you also advocate paying higher rates to construction workers because they might be at risk for skin cancer, or your roofer, b/c it’s hot up there?
Sorry to rant, just seems like a pretty weak argument.
If they didn’t do it somebody else would charge low cost or otherwise free shipping. Why not look at some of the really dangerous work in America like being a cop, loggers, commercial fishing, mining. Don’t compare warehouses to sweatshops. While East Asia has embraced large numbers of sweatshops, sub-Saharan Africa has not. Those conditions may appear inferior by the standards of developed nations, they are actually improvements over what the people in developing countries had before. It is said that if jobs in such factories did not improve their workers’ standard of living, those workers would not have taken the jobs when they appeared.
If I choose a paid option on Amazon, do you think the money is going to pay higher wages for the packaging personnel? Not likely. The problem isn’t the free shipping. Articles like this are a good thing because they bring to light pressure on companies with poor working conditions. But paying for a more expensive shipping option isn’t the way to tell Amazon we aren’t happy. Writing to them and buying from other retailers will bring about change.
I’m not certain what giving Amazon more money would accomplish and I’m pretty sure that the problems reported are not due to the result of getting free shipping. Workers would be required to do these tasks whether they get paid $12/hour or $24/hour. Higher wages will make even more people flock to these jobs, and the problem seems to be that there is already way too much demand for the positions so that the workers don’t have to be treated well. This is a problem with the overall economy. Shame on Amazon for taking advantage of it, but I just don’t believe that not getting free shipping is going to make any change at all. Pretty sure that Amazon is doing well and could spend the money to make this a better workplace if they wanted to.
This article’s argument is a form of denying the antecedent. Even if you could show that free shipping invariably results in exploitive labor practices, you can’t conclude that paying for shipping results in fair labor practices.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent
That said, there’s more to the problem of free shipping. Free shipping on new items means that otherwise acceptable used items do not get sold because they price higher. Free shipping also encourages overconsumption as people buy items to meet the minimum level to get it. Lastly, nothing is really free when shopping on the internet. The cost gets shifted into the product or has some other consequence.
I completely agree with what “djinc” said.
FYI, I like amazon, they sell literally everything. Hell, over the past 2 months I’ve spent over 3k on Amazon.
Your facts are wrong. See below statement from Amazon:
There’s been recent news coverage regarding temperatures and working conditions in our Breinigsville, Pennsylvania, fulfillment center.
Certain parts of the country experienced unusually high temperatures this summer. We spent more than $2.4 million urgently installing industrial air conditioning units in four of our fulfillment centers, including our Breinigsville facility. These industrial air conditioning units were online and operational by late July and early August. This was not mandated by any governmental agency, and in fact air conditioning remains an unusual practice in warehouses. We’ll continue to operate these air conditioning units or equivalent ones in future summers.
We have temporary employees working in our facilities for two reasons – to manage variation in customer demand throughout the year and as a way of finding high-quality full-time employees. There are 1,381 full-time employees in Breinigsville, all of whom receive full-time benefits including healthcare. Since January of this year, 850 temporary employees in Breinigsville have been converted to full-time employment.
We welcome and embrace questions about our preparedness and planning, and indeed we routinely ask those internally, but those who know us well don’t doubt our intent or our focus on employee safety.
Amazon is only one of a growing list of employers who are stepping into the tragic reality of the Third World that America is entering because our politicians are cowards, liars and pigs at the trough that used to feed the hopes of the world’s oppressed. Our state and federal governments support welfare to illegal aliens and locally-grown professional parasites, corporate tax breaks that families are forced to absorb, entitlements to morons and corrupt financial institutions, bail-outs to financial institutions that gave loans to people who had no business getting them, stimulus packages that (ya think?) include bribes and kickbacks to politicians, fertility treatments and sex change operations for convicted felons and welfare cheats, generous contributions around the world to governments that would bleed us dry while laughing, thereby wasting resources desperately needed at the homefront where ordinary Americans are scared and struggling, but these good people who love this country and want to work are often ignored or abused. Open your eyes. Speak up to your elected officials! Call their bluff! That’s YOUR ENTITLEMENT. Get a spine. Vote the scum out. They piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining.
I have never worked in a warehouse that was climate controlled. Almost none of them are. Whether it is a soft drink company, a moving company or the feed store. Almost no warehouse is climate controlled. The exceptions are mainly for food storage and other special situations.
In college I worked in a frozen food warehouse. -20 degrees with a 20 mile an hour wind. Normal weather for folks in MN for half the year I am sure, but downright cold for a Texas boy.
Tell construction workers, farmers, and oil field workers about the “brutal conditions” in a warehouse and they will laugh!