Undercover BBC man exposes Amazon worker drone's daily 11-mile trek The Beeb has sent an undercover reporter into a British Amazon warehouse in a bid to show what life is like for its worker drones. Adam Littler, 23, strapped on a hidden camera and took a job as a "picker", collecting orders from an 800,000ft2 (74,322m2) warehouse. He claimed to have walked 11 miles (17.7km) each shift and …
Whether or not the picker took 33 or 35 seconds to pick the item you ordered and get it to distribution is completely irrelevant because Yodel will fuck it up and you'll still be waiting for days while the delivery man insists your house doesn't exist and you watch the tracking website play Depot Tennis. It's left the depot! It's on the van! It's on it's way! It's back at the depot!
I used to work for a large flagship uk airline, in the "logistics" dept.
Back then I thought it was the shittiest thing to ever be subject to, it was mind numbing monotony, and got even worse after they outsourced management.
We too trudged around a large warehouse ( or three) sometimes we got to drive machines, other times we walked, we had a little cart we put stuff in, it was not the picture of modern stock picking that amazon was.. another place we also had an automated machine ( which had a big habit of breaking)
when we had no real stuff to pick we had to re stock all the stuff that was returned ( quite often a lot of the stuff we had sent out before and was not used)
I thought I was better than that.
now, I work in an office, cube-hell, in a job I would rather bite my hand of daily then go to, but it was "in the career I wanted to be in" - or at least thought it at the time.
rose tinted hindsight tells me other wise though, the pay was fantastic the benefits were fabulous and I never once, ever, had to deal with work at home, knocking off time was exactly that you left the job, at work.
now I am not saying amazon is any better, it is not, this is a company that drives profit they do not pay as well as I had it, and they do not seem to care as much about their people, there is nothing new in this, it may seem a bit of a shock, but honestly seems the norm to me for most retailers now I am living in the US, it is not slavery because you are paid and it is 'voluntary'.
the supermarket I first worked in was a bit sad, but to be honest with that, it was not hard, it would have sufficed, I never would have been rich, but then again, I am not rich now, and I am expected to be always on the job.
Sometimes the grass is greener, but that's because of all the shit involved to make it grow
I will have to preface my comments by saying that I agree with much of what's been said here. I'm a big fan of hard work. It never killed anybody. (Not strictly true, but let's move on).
To be fair, it seems that the issue here is not completely to do with having to work hard, it's the complete lack of any kind of autonomy or control he has in doing the job.
There was a study done some time ago on the relative stress levels of high-level execs and low-level grunts. It took into account health markers such as heart disease, blood pressure etc. Everybody expected the execs to be coronary cases, but it turned out that the less control a person had over their environment, the more stressed they were, with knock-on effects on health.
I've done warehouse work. Part of the attraction for me at the time was the challenge of seeing how quickly I could get everything picked, processed and wrapped. I knew the best routes and had the different bins memorised, I knew that if a bin was half empty I could nip through to the row behind, and I knew when I could get away with climbing/reaching to get something, and when I needed to use the order picker.
The work wasn't great, but it was these small things that made it bearable. With a virtual cattle prod controlling my every move I think I'd have been a lot more stressed, and a lot less motivated.
I knew a guy with a job like that - he worked in a records office and walked about eight miles a day. He loved it. His plan was to 'walk around the world'. He'd calculate his progress on a map, and would get books about the places he was 'walking through' and once even went on a holiday to south-eastern France because visiting it in his head had been so pleasant.
When I knew him he'd 'done' Europe and Turkey and was planning his trip through the Middle East to India.
There is no heaven or hell, but people make it so ...
I've had a few jobs which I think qualify as worse than this, whilst finishing high school I worked NIGHTS in a salmon gutting factory, there wasn't as much walking involved, but it was a chilled warehouse with ice, water and fish guts being splashed over you at regular intervals.
I then upgraded to working the summer on a prawn trawler - similar conditions but better pay because of the threat of falling overboard...
I get what they are getting at with this documentary - the conditions are hard, the workers are stressed... but lets face it, their conditions are quite good by comparison to some people.
As for the walking, is this really a problem? I have a desk job but just the walk to work clocks up 3 miles a day.. and as for people saying "try doing it every day" yeah, it will be boring, but 11 miles isn't that much of a challenge, you might be stiff on day 2 if you are not used to it but a few days you'll be fine.
When I worked for Index (like Argos but a bit shitter) I used to pick across two floors for up to 12 hours a day at christmas - yeah try running up & down a set of stairs for 12 hours, a set of stairs with 4 twists.
I did that for 13 years, I wonder why my knees are fucked?
... and therefore ranks just above a politician on the truthfulness scale.
"He claimed to have walked 11 miles (17.7km) each shift"
This simply doesn't make sense. If he walked less than 11 miles on some shifts then this is a lie. If he walked more than 11 miles on some then he would say "at least 11 miles" for better effect. It is more likely that the 11 miles is the maximum he walked or the distance he walked on a couple of days.
"... pickers are expected to collect an order every 33 seconds."
Assuming a circular building with the collection point in the centre then the furthest shelves are 505 feet away (800,000ft2) which means they would have to travel 1010 feet (there and back) in 33 seconds or at an average speed of 21mph. Usain Bolt's average speed is 23.31mph. It seems that the Amazon warehouse is full of potential Olympic sprinters.
Working conditions at Amazon warehouses have been covered, properly I may add, by Le Monde Diplomatique in its August edition, by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung back in February this year (online here), and by Der Spiegel back in October-ish I think. The Financial Times has also published some interesting articles on it in the last year, but I can't remember exactly when and I can't log in right now.
Not just is the BBC late to the party, but they manage to go for the dramatic, sensationalist approach while skilfully avoiding any serious reporting or analysis of the issue. If anybody is actually interested on this, more factual and insightful accounts are to be found in the sources above (all equally critical of Amazon btw).
I suggest this reporter tries his luck as an unskilled helping hand on a building site next. He'll be expected to do a lot more than 11 miles, some of that will be up ladders or stairs too. He'll find that bricks, bags of plaster, tool boxes, etc. are on average heavier than a padded envelope containing a USB stick. Not least, he'll find that he doesn't get anywhere near the over 80 quid he picked up for his shift at Amazon.
One of the worst or at least most memorably uncomfortable jobs I had was working as a gut slasher/emptier at an abatoir back in 1981. It was quite disgusting and very cold, the only way to keep warm was by sticking my hands into the sheep's stomaches with the partly digested grass.
The most tedious job and the one most relevent here is as a 15YO working on a production line in a glue and ink factory where the Heath Robinson/Charles Dickens machinery gave one a real flavour of the nineteenth century.
The author of this peice is not whinging but making several valid points, one of which is unstated. As Edna Crabapple says to Bart, "Your work is going to be hot and dangerous" (someone will correct me on that but I think I have captured the essence). People who for whatever reason, social, familial, ecconomic, mental, whatever who are not attentive in class are more likely to have to do unpleasant, repetitivie jobs.
That said, there is the unstated point which I mentioned earlier. That is that there are different smokes for different blokes. An aphorism I coined and have maintained with a little paint and putty here and there for the last thirty years through thirty six jobs and twelve trades is that "All work is primarliy tedium and the job you do best at is the one whose tedium you can best tolerate". What the author demonstrated clearly is that whilst he can handle the tedium of thinking of new ideas(?) for TV shows and the drudgery of getting them to air, he cannot tolerate the tedium of being machine driven, and that is fine, there are those who can and those for whom the idea of having no responsibility, of having every step (eleven miles of them) dictated to them is just what the doctor ordered.
I once had a friend who worked for seven years in the CSSD (Central Sterile Supply Department) at Royal Melbourne Hospital. Seven years! I tried it when I was a theater orderly at the age of sixteen and couldn't take seven hours of it. I asked her how it was that she, an intelligent person was able to stand it, she said that she got paid to stand around and think anything she wanted to, all she had to do was stuff cotton balls into little envelopes.
Horses for courses.
As to Pollenta, make it with half milk and half water, add plenty of salt and go out and buy a block of Grana Padano and grate your own parmesan rather than using pre grated toe jam. Serve it with something strongly flavoured.
One more thing, mashed potato is not God's Own Food. Sorry to add that a bacon sandwhich is not either. I know I should burn in Hell for making such statements but Hell is closed due to lack of interest.
So we have 11 miles walk each day. That is for the rest of the world (how uses metric) around 17 km. That is a lot of walking and that is a lot of strain on a person. Regardless if that person is in a good shape or not.
I also wonder if Amazon have not heard of an invention called the wheel. It would improve performance to just to add motorized carts for the employers to work with when they go and pick up orders.
While I have not worked in a warehouse (since none-existed where I used to live) I did do jobs that where just walking around and cutting grass. Total km over the day was different depending on the, but the longest was often up to around 20 km. But then I had to drag heavy bags and land-mowers all over the place to cut the grass.
I'm sure I saw an Amazon promo video where workers had those shoes with a roller skate in the heel to get around on - able to walk when required, and scoot when not.
Until Amazon find robots which are cheaper, more efficient and more scalable than mechanical turks, these jobs will still need to be done.
"...we're holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves".
I read that phrase three times to try and work out WTF the guy was blithering about. Then I got it - he's using one of them metaphor things what shows how Amazon workers are all treated like robots.
What a clever little journalism grad. Here, have a bikkie.
tl;dr - shit job is shit, don't be a picker
anyway it's hardly unusual, i used to work in a big distribution centre up't north for Netto before they were swallowed by Asda and our veg pickers were expected to pick 300 shopping basket sized veg trays an hour, in a room that was esentially a giant fridge
We exploit the third world and extract as much profit as possible
So why is there such an outcry when it’s uncovered that we exploit our own citizen in the UK
He’s a reporter who has moved on because he can, but for some this is the best that they can get. Let’s wait and see what the program has to offer if there is more in sight available...
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