Gerald Bryson, an Amazon employee, had spent three days manually counting thousands of products in his warehouse’s inventory when his manager handed him a ‘Supportive Feedback Document.’
According to the 2018 report, Bryson had made 22 mistakes, including counting 19 items in a storage bin that actually contained 20. The notification warned that Bryson would lose his job at the Staten Island warehouse, one of Amazon’s largest in the United States, if he made mistakes like this six times in a year.
Internal Amazon documents that have never before been made public show how frequently the business evaluated each employee’s performance down to the last detail and reprimanded those who fell even marginally short of goals, sometimes even before their shift was over. One attorney for Amazon claimed in court documents that during the one year ending in April 2020, the business issued more than 13,000 alleged ‘disciplines’ in just Bryson’s facility. At that time, there were roughly 5,300 workers at the factory.
Records and interviews with current and former employees reveal the intense pressure Amazon line workers face to complete tasks as quickly and accurately as the company requires. Some workers told Reuters that this environment has sparked unionisation efforts across the nation. Bryson’s place of employment voted in March to become Amazon’s first organised warehouse in the United States.
The biggest online retailer in the country, Amazon, provided these records in response to an NLRB complaint on the termination of Bryson in April 2020. Many of these records were also part of a different, ongoing federal court case in which the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) attempted to end what it called Amazon’s ‘flagrant unfair labour practises’; the corporation refuted these claims in court documents.
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