Amazon makes us sick!
Hi, I am Patrick. Now I am 29 years old.
I have been working for Amazon for more than 6 years.
Today I took part in the strike.
Interviews with Amazon workers from Poznań, Leipzig and Orléans, July 2017
I have been working for Amazon for about 3 years.
I have been working for Amazon for nearly 2 years. In November it's 2 years.
I started working for Amazon on August 1, 2016.
My name is Jean Francois.
I have been working for Amazon in the Pick department for 5 years.
I am Mike Oberländer. I have been working for Amazon since October 15, 2009.
For nearly 8 years.
I am a so-called Picker, so my job is to collect the items.
I work in the vendor area.
We send back products which have not been sold.
During picking I walk up to 20 kilometers per day.
I have a hand scanner which always tells me where I have to go.
I collect the item from the shelves.
I put it into the transport box. That's my everyday life as a picker.
We lift many loads which are more or less heavy.
With items and boxes which are being processed at the time.
During picking we move around a lot.
About a dozen kilometers per day.
In Pack, we spend most of our time packing,
standing up on one spot.
In Pack, I take the box from the belt.
I choose an item and take a cardboard box,
put the item into the box, take the tape,
tape the box shut and throw the package on the belt,
where it goes on.
How does this work affect your health?
The health problems you can see are problems with the joints,
tendonitis,
back problems...
You have to constantly look at the monitor and check the products non stop.
Whether everything is alright or not,
and you have to turn the neck, left, right.
That strains the neck.
You do feel that.
I have no problems with the arms,
but many problems with the legs and the spine.
Recently, I had cramps in my legs and problems with my sciatic nerve.
After 8 years you do feel that it strains your joints,
the brachial joints, the knees, the ankles.
They hurt more now than 8 years ago.
You simple cannot move there, you stand on one spot the whole time.
That harms your health.
The lighting conditions at Amazon aren't the best.
You feel that the eyesight deteriorates over time.
Some people also have problems with the skin.
Due to the dry air and the dust my sinuses often hurt.
You feel it when you enter the building, the air is not circulating.
Thank god, I don't have any problems with that.
But I know colleagues who suffer from neurodermatitis
and who have real problems with that.
or are slightly allergic to dust
and are struggling and have to take antiallergic agents.
At Amazon, many people get sick in my opinion,
especially in winter
when the flu epidemic comes and you easily catch a cold.
The people are scared to take a sick leave,
scared to lose their jobs or get into trouble somehow.
Since they are scared they come to work and infect others!
So one becomes infected by someone else and so on.
In addition, Amazon has introduced a system called "Comperior", a subcontractor
which controls the people on sick leave.
This company controls them,
and the people are even more scared to take a sick leave
because they don't know how they should behave when they get controlled.
What they should say and what not.
That's why they come to work sick.
The 10,5 hours of standing up have the biggest impact on my health.
There are two breaks of 15 minutes and one of 30 minutes.
But that is not enough to recover as we have to stand up all the time.
We have no opportunity to sit down shortly and take a rest.
So, eventually, we stand up for 10,5 hours.
Plus the journey to work...
... so we spend 13 to 14 hours out of the house and are on our feet the whole time.
We cannot sit down for this whole period
since we would have to report that to the manager.
But it is clear that the manager would not allow us to rest.
He would have to report that to the medical doctor,
and it would have to be a severe illness to be allowed to rest.
It would be nice to have the chance to sit down for 2 minutes or so
and to take a rest, but we cannot do that, unfortunately.
In our pick towers there is no seating possibility
where you could take a short rest.
If you sit down, let's say, on a box,
or you have a short rest on the stairs,
then it can happen that you will immediately be asked
to stand up again as you should not sit but continue to work.
If you don't scan any product for more than 3 minutes
then it shows up in the system and is counted as an additional break.
The breaks we get are absolutely not sufficient.
No break is long enough.
If you want to eat at Amazon, the queues at the serving counter are long.
The time is just long enough to line up and eat.
But there is no time left to go to the toilet.
Is there big pressure to reach the quota?
When they try to put pressure on us,
because of numbers or quotas, then I tell myself
numbers are not mentioned in my work contract.
Amazon tries to use that again and again to put pressure on us,
but that never appeals to the permanent workforce.
But it has an effect on new colleagues who have limited contracts
because they are told they need to reach the quota
and they have to work a bit faster.
You see the effect as they start to really run then.
At Amazon you got this pressure to send out the CPT-packages.
They have to be sent out by a certain time.
It is stressful as we are continuously pushed
so that it works out at all.
The managers and leaders run around
and make sure that each package is sent out.
I am already nervous on the way to work.
At work I am continously under pressure,
where they place me, whether the workplace functions,
and the stress is terrible, and that is the most exhausting for me.
The stress is caused by the boxes they put down close to us.
On the one hand you take things from the belt and you pack them.
Then there are the (Process Guides) who place more boxes at our feet.
Boxes and TODs for packing.
We don't know whether we should take the items on the left
or those standing below, on the right of our feet.
Because we don't know what we should do first
we are under great pressure and stress.
The working speed is a problem, for sure.
You get feedbacks regularly
where you are told a quota that you need to reach in one hour.
And you get told at what point you are
and that you could do even more.
If you are working too slow they come and say: "You are working too slow,
your rates are too low,"
and they ask you, or rather: force you to work faster.
Sometimes people are told they should not go to the toilet that often.
That sounds a bit funny.
They try to built up pressure by all means,
as I mentioned, also through feedbacks which happen regularly.
You are asked to go to your place, and they show you the curve
that shows how many items you have picked per hour in the past two weeks.
And if you haven't reached the quota, you are clearly told
that you should increase your performance.
Those are targets set by Amazon.
In my view, it is not really possible to reach them.
When I started working at Amazon
I made a point of meeting the targets
and reach the quota.
So I did not go to the toilet often and I drank less,
and the result was
that I got problems with my kidney at some point.
For that reason I was in hospital twice.
I had developed kidney stones.
The doctor said that my body had dehydrated a lot and was exhausted.
And the reason for that was that I had drunken less.
After that, I also had an accident at Amazon
so that I was on sick leave for almost 5.5 months.
When I came back to work after 5.5 months,
I was completely shocked:
The female colleagues with whom I had started working there
and who had worked well,
without warnings, times of absense or feedbacks...
They had quit the job!
Not because of the physical pressure but because of the psychological pressure.
The psychological pressure started when they began working at one place
but soon after were sent somewhere else.
They were treated without respect, and that also created stress,
and this atmosphere led to the situation that they preferred to leave.
How are you affected by the working hours?
The shift system has a big effect on my body.
Because after a night shift I sleep until 1 p.m.,
because a human being is not able
to get used to such a rhythm.
Then, after changing to the day shift,
you have to adjust again.
That destroys the body.
Because of 10.5 hours of work and the 80 minutes commute each way
I can't normally participate in family life.
When I get home at 6 a.m.
I have to prepare the child for school.
I don't sleep until 7 a.m. because then my child gets up.
I have to make sandwiches and take it to school, then it's 8 a.m.
Then I can lie down and rest,
but not for long because at 11:30 a.m. the child gets back from school
and I have to prepare lunch as my wife works until 2 p.m.
I have to do everything, and then I have to leave for the night shift at 4 p.m.
I have less than 6 hours of sleep.
The work at Amazon is exhausting for me. After 4 days of work I am dead beat.
When the weekend is coming
I need 1.5 days just to rest.
I cannot do anything else but rest.
My muscles are hurting, my legs, my back.
That's also why I don't have any hobbies.
Work accidents?
Work accidents happen here and there.
An item might fall down from a shelf on your head
or you slip in spilled liquids and hurt your joints
or sprain or tear your ligaments.
You are told you should be more careful.
The working conditions don't get changed
but the responsibility is always shifted to us employees.
The people generally don't know that they need to go to the medical station
and to the casualty doctor,
and that they need to get the tendonitis acknowledged as a work-related injury.
In France, we have a system that makes it possible
to not lose that much money when you have a work-related injury.
In France, the first three days of sick leave are not paid.
But if it is a work-related injury then those days are paid, for instance.
People don't know that the doctor should open a file
in order to acknowledge all that.
I came to work on August 21, 2016,
and was consigned to a place that did not function.
Instead of shifting me somewhere else they just left me there.
After two hours, the paper dispenser fell onto my foot.
It crushed my ankle.
I did not get any help.
The medic determined
that I had scratched myself and could still work.
So I continued to work... with the crushed foot... for 11 hours.
- Was the medic from Amazon or not? - From Amazon.
I asked to be taken to hospital by an ambulance to have an X-ray.
That was not permitted.
It was the day shift and I was told that I should work until the end of the shift
and drive to the hospital after work to get an X-ray then.
As a result of this denial of help,
I will have problems with my foot for the rest of my life.
When I returned to work after 6 months of sick leave
with a splint
my first task was to work at the shelves
where I had to climb up and down a ladder for 11 hours.
As a result, after two weeks my foot was wasted again
and I was on sick leave again for 2.5 months.
How do you try to protect yourself?
In fact, in this respect the workforce has rather given up.
We are the only people who resist at the moment as part of the labor dispute.
Currently, we want to formulate a collective agreement on health issues
with a list of measures for health protection at work.
We frequently send demands to the employer
and try to built up pressure through the works council
so that risks are assessed and actually observed
but that is rather difficult.
Amazon has this "health day" and several "fruit days."
But all that goes back to the fact that the colleagues who are on strike outside
said they want a collective agreement that also regulates health issues,
a collective agreement on health
so that you can regulate certain issues like procedures, rotation etc.
And because we started with that topic Amazon reacted
and declared a "year of health", and after that all those "smart every day",
health days, fruit days, etc. followed.
We submit applications to the labor safety commission
that Amazon does not respect.
We report to the managers
when something does not work, something is not permitted,
that you don't get boxes put in front of your feet.
Managers and leaders just walk past us
and don't respect that at all.
For instance, we reported repeatedly that the water dispensers need to be repaired.
They still didn't get repaired for one month.
The pallet trolleys are also a cause of work-related accidents.
But nobody from Amazon does react.
Allegedly, at Amazon the guiding principle concerning health
is "Safety First."
The problem is that health concerns us all,
safety is a problem for all.
But actually...
if they were honest they had to say: "Productivity first, business first."
In my opinion, Amazon is lying all the time
and plays with the workers.
in cooperation with the "Cross-Border Meeting of Amazon-Workers" https://amworkers.wordpress.com