Amazon’s organizing warehouse workers rattle the e-commerce giant, win union elections and organize strikes to protest for better working conditions. Now an employee tries a new tack. Today, Daniel Olayiwola becomes the first warehouse worker in the company’s history to present his own resolution at Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting.
Earlier this year, Olayiwola bought shares of Amazon, giving him the right to file a resolution, which he made with the advocacy organization United for Respect. Olayiwola, a picker who has worked in warehouses in Florida and Texas since 2017, is provocatively calling for an end to surveillance and productivity quotas for all Amazon warehouse and delivery workers, including drivers and other outside contractors. Its proposed resolution refers specifically to Amazon’s controversial “Time Off Task” (TOT) policy, which penalizes employees who earn a certain number of minutes without scanning a product, including bathroom breaks. He also argues for an end to the tariff system, the number of products that employees have to scan per hour. Employees who accrue too much TOT or fall short on their interest rate risk termination.
Olayiwola argues that this system prioritizes productivity over safety, leaving workers exhausted and injured. The data, he says, supports him. An April report from the Strategic Organizing Center, a coalition of unions, found that serious injuries at Amazon last year were more than double those at non-Amazon warehouses. The company acknowledges its injury rate increased from 2020 to 2021 as it trained an influx of new hires, but says its recorded injury rate fell by more than 13 percent from 2019 to 2021.
The proposal is one of more than a dozen due this year addressing environmental and social issues such as working conditions, diversity, equity, inclusion and misuse of technologies such as facial recognition. (All of them face great opportunity; Amazon’s board has advised voting no to every environmental and social proposal it has recommended.)
WIRED spoke to Olayiwola about his tenure at Amazon, his background as an army medic, and why, whether he wins or loses, he cares about bringing employee concerns to shareholders. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Your proposal concerns working conditions for employees in Amazon’s warehouse and distribution network, including “pickers” like yourself. What does it mean to be a picker at Amazon?
A picker selects the items for packaging and delivery. You stand at your station for 10 hours, usually two and a half to three hours straight, picking items at a rate of 300 to 350 per hour. If you drop below that, they’ll message you or come up to you and say, ‘Hey, why are you choosing slow? You have to speed it up during the second part of the day.”
My shift starts at 7:30 am and I have to prepare two lunches because I am not leaving the building for a break. [Ed note: Olayiwola gets one 30-minute break and two 15-minute breaks.]
