Before I throw my opinion article at you (that was written for a boomerish audience, so you'll have to excuse the lame jokes) - I'm going to outline some facts that were meant to be published alongside it, on another page. Unfortunately the precise stats have been lost to the archives, but here's what I remember.

COVID SHIT:

With COVID happening, health and safety shoulda been a high priority. They promised that they'd give all of us disinfectant spray and blue rolls to wipe our work surfaces down with whenever we used them. On a few nights, I put on a bright orange vest and pretended to be involved with health and safety. I went around to every station and marked down whether they had the right supplies. 60% to 67% failed the test. I reported this to health and safety. They said that the factory doesn't have enough supplies. They were never able to fulfill their promise. There wasn't even enough antibac solution able to be brewed. I documented this, and this is how the article was stopped. Amazon said prove it. I provided pictures of a few stations. They said since I didn't document every single one, they have full right to deny all claims. The newspaper I published to crumbled under their pressure.

Next thing. COVID hazard pay. An extra £2 per hour. It ended whilst the pandemic was still in full swing. They baited us into contracts with good pay, and then took it away once we had committed. Also, they do short contracts of 2-3 months to create job insecurity, to make sure you keep your efficiency rates up. My cohort of workers had contracts that lasted until the 28th of June, iirc. We were a large batch. Our covid pay was stopped, then when we kicked up a fuss about that, after our contracts ended, they announced that anyone who worked from the 1st of June until the 30th would be eligible for a bonus instead of hazard pay. So they dodged all of us. We were ineligible to receive our hazard pay.

Then these next more general stats are in the article I believe, but I'll outline em for y'all who quite rightly can't be arsed to read the waffle.

As a trolley dolly, I used to walk 36km per night sometimes. As a scanner, I was expected to scan 250 items per hour. If I didn't, I was logged by the system as someone guilty of 'time theft'. Yes, it's that dystopian.

They did 'power hours' if the floor was behind schedule. The 3 fastest scanners would receive an extra 20 minute break. Most people on the floor would almost double their workrate, but get paid nothing for it.

The Amazon 'swaggies' and 'swagbucks' system. Sometimes the rewards for power hours, or perfect attendance, would be 'swagbucks' that you could redeem for Amazon branded t shirts and hoodies. RRP of about £10.

Overall it's a total hellworld, as I'm sure you've heard from other Amazon workers before.

Anyway, here's the fuckin article, the formatting is probably fucked because I copy and pasted it:

In February 2020, COVID-19 hit, and immediately the economy froze over. Retail chains, airlines and oil companies used credit markets to stay afloat, whilst smaller businesses went under the ice. However, one company showed no signs of slowing down. With the competition crushed, and the warheads Amazon-Primed, Jeff Bezos has stood at the prow of his ship as it cruised through these unprecedented times. He’s made over $24 billion in the last few weeks alone, but how? I worked in Amazon’s engine room for 2 months to find out.

Well, strictly speaking that last part isn’t true. I didn’t turn up to the warehouse with the purpose of finding out how Bezos is making his money. I turned up to make some money of my own. I saw that Amazon were offering an extra £2 per hour to employees who worked during the pandemic, and since I figured that Corona wasn’t going away any time soon, I signed myself on for a 2 month contract. On top of my night shift premium, I was set to be earning £14.75 per hour. That’s almost double what I was being paid at my last job.

My main role in the warehouse was to ‘stow’. For 11 hours (with 2 half hour breaks) I was expected to scan 250 items per hour, and use stepladders to place said items in 8 foot tall robots called ‘pods’. I was made to feel like Sisyphus, as every time I was near the end of my workload, a new cart full of items would arrive. The official company term for a cart is ‘U-Boat’, and why the company settled on using German naval lingo I’ll never know. Perhaps it’s to do with that sinking feeling it always gave me. Although you’re given a constant workload, stowing an item every 14.4 seconds becomes impossible if you end up with a bad batch of items; blow-up mattresses, industrial blenders, and giant salt lamps are a death sentence for your average Amazon worker. A death sentence where the judge was an amoral machine with only one thing in mind - productivity. Our rates were tracked by computers all day every day, and any deviance from total efficiency resulted in our names being fed to the executioner - a floor manager. It was their job to tell us that we had too much ‘time-off-task’ (toilet breaks) and that we were guilty of ‘time theft’. The process was straight out of Robocop, or Judge Dredd, except due to their close relationship with middle management they were incapable of one liners, preferring lame acronyms, company jargon, and platitudes about ‘customer obsession’.

One time, a manager threatened to get me ‘kicked out of the Amazon family’ if I didn’t go faster. Before I could blurt out that I didn’t want to be part of a dysfunctional family led by a wealth hoarding patriarch, I was told to ‘take pride in being an Amazonian’. I took his advice to heart and immediately started researching where I could buy a blowdart. Turns out they’re illegal in the UK.

At this point, I decided that I had to escape the panopticon. I’d heard rumours that the cart runners weren’t tracked. The next time one came over, I offered to swap with them, and the runner said ‘yes’ so quickly that I wondered if they didn’t know what they’d got themselves into. Who in their right mind would volunteer to stow?

36 kilometres later I found out. That’s right, I pushed heavy carts up and down the warehouse for a total of 36 kilometres. I did it for four nights in a row, and by the end of it I could barely walk to the bus station outside the warehouse.

After re-admitting myself to stow, I realised that the only thing keeping me there was the extra £2 per hour. Then that disappeared too. With the pandemic still raging on, Amazon cut our pay back to standard rates. By this point, they weren’t even bothering to stock us with the promised disinfectant and blue rolls (as documented on page 9) to clean our stations with, because their extremely high job turnover rates mean that by the time symptoms started showing, most of us wouldn’t be working for them anymore. You’d think it would spark an Amazon workers’ revolution, but realistically none of us could be arsed to take a stand, because we’d already been on our feet all day.

It’s now obvious that the bonus was never ‘hazard pay’ - and really, £2 to risk our lives seems like a bum deal - it was all about public relations and enticing new employees. They needed people to get them through a period of high demand, and they could afford to give out extras because of the profits they were set to rake in. The short contract I was signed on for now made sense - their plan was to extract my labour, exhaust me, and then discard me.