It has been Day 1 at Amazon ever since the company began
more than a quarter-century ago. Day 1 is Amazon shorthand for staying hungry,
making bold decisions, and never forgetting about the customer. This startup
mentality — underdogs against the world — has been extremely good for Amazon’s
shoppers and shareholders.
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Day 1 holds less appeal for some of Amazon’s employees,
especially those doing the physical work in the warehouses. A growing number
feel the company is pushing them past their limits and risking their health.
They would like Amazon to usher in a more benign Day 2.
The clash between the desire for Day 1 and Day 2 has been
unfolding in Alabama, where Amazon warehouse workers in the community of
Bessemer have voted on whether to form a union. Government labor regulators are
getting ready to sort through the votes in the closely watched election. A
result may come as soon as this week. If the union gains a foothold, it will be
the first in the company’s history.
Attention has been focused on Bessemer, but the struggle
between Day 1 and Day 2 is increasingly playing out everywhere in Amazon’s
world. At its heart, the conflict is about control. To maintain Day 1, the
company needs to lower labor costs and increase productivity, which requires
measuring and tweaking every moment of a worker’s existence.
That kind of control is at the heart of the Amazon
enterprise. The idea of surrendering it is the company’s greatest horror. Jeff
Bezos, Amazon’s founder, wrote in his 2016 shareholder letter: “Day 2 is
stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline.
Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”
But it is now the second-largest private employer in the
country. There is widespread pro-worker sentiment in the United States and a
pro-union president. In Bessemer, many of the pro-union workers are Black,
which makes this a civil rights story as well.
“Amazon is reorganizing the very nature of retail work —
something that traditionally is physically undemanding and has a large amount
of downtime — into something more akin to a factory, which never lets up,” said
Spencer Cox, a former Amazon worker who is writing his doctoral thesis at the
University of Minnesota about how the company is transforming labor. “For
Amazon, this isn’t about money. This is about control of workers’ bodies and
every possible moment of their time.”
Amazon did not have a comment for this story.
The confrontation between Day 1 and Day 2 has been sharpest
over bladders.
The topic erupted last month when Representative Mark Pocan
tweeted at the company, “Paying workers $15/hr doesn’t make you a ‘progressive
workplace’ when you union-bust & make workers urinate in water bottles.”
Amazon’s social media account fired back: “You don’t really
believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would
work for us.”
This isn’t the way corporations usually talk to members of
Congress, even on Twitter. On Friday, after days of being pummeled on the issue,
Amazon apologized to Pocan, saying: “The tweet was incorrect. It did not
contemplate our large driver population and instead wrongly focused only on our
fulfillment centers.” Amazon blamed COVID-19 and “traffic”, not its punishing
schedules.
Pocan responded on Saturday with a sigh. “This is not about
me, this is about your workers — who you don’t treat with enough respect or
dignity,” he wrote.
The bathroom question is one on which the company has long
been vulnerable. Enforcement files from regulators in Amazon’s home state of
Washington indicate that questions about whether the company had an appropriate
number of bathrooms in its Seattle headquarters have arisen over the past dozen
years.
The company has “insufficient lavatory facilities for male
employees” according to a 2012 complaint received by the state’s Department of
Labor and Industries. “Employees routinely traverse multiple buildings in
search of available facilities.”
The complaints went beyond Amazon’s white-collar offices. A
warehouse worker told Labor and Industries in 2009 that a manager and a human
resources representative had told her that “there would be disciplinary action
against me if I continue to use the bathroom on company time” — she meant
unscheduled breaks. The employee said HR told her that “it was not fair to the
company that I was getting paid when I’m not working because I’m in the
bathroom.”
Amazon did not respond to questions about the enforcement
reports. A spokesman for the Department of Labor and Industries declined to comment,
except to note that outside of Amazon, “We really don’t get a lot of
bathroom-related complaints.”
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