Tyler Hamilton has optimized his every waking minute. Between Black Friday and Christmas, five nights a week, he hauls himself out of bed, brushes his teeth, and hurries to his car just before sunset. On his drive to the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Shakopee, Minnesota, he stops at Wendy’s to buy two burgers with bourbon bacon, two large peppers, fries, and a drink.
Hamilton eats the burgers as he drives, then stocks up to start his shift arranging incoming product inventory just before 5 p.m. In the middle of the night he takes a thirty minute unpaid break and reheats the peppers. By the time he clocks out at 5:30, his car is frozen, so Hamilton huddles in the dark until it’s warm enough to drive home.
“Then I have to take a shower, because working at Amazon for 12 and a half hours means you get dirty,” he says. “I’ll drink some juice and maybe watch a little YouTube or something and pass out.” The next night he does it all again.
With holiday shopping peaking this week, Amazon’s two-day Prime shipping remains one of the few options left for desperate shoppers still hoping to order online. It’s a notoriously exhausting and demanding time for employees at the company, with the period between Black Friday and Christmas Day known as ‘peak season’.
During the peak, Amazon requires employees to add a full 10 or 11-hour shift to their already demanding weekly schedules, several employees told WIRED, and penalizes those who don’t by cutting a day of unpaid leave for each additional shift missed. The company also increases the daily expected productivity of employees, defined with metrics such as items packed per hour, employees say.
The four employees interviewed for this piece also say their managers talk less about safety during this time and instead emphasize speed. All have been involved in organizing colleagues to try to improve working conditions, but none work in an institution where a union request has been made.
Amazon spokesperson Steve Kelly denies the company is raising its productivity expectations for employees, saying they have been carefully set. “We assess performance based on safe and achievable expectations that consider time and tenure, peer performance and adherence to safe work practices,” he says.
Amazon has become the dominant online retailer in the US and in countries like the UK and Germany, thanks in large part to its massive logistics operations. But the company’s facilities have developed a reputation for penalizing working conditions. Amazon is the second largest private sector employer in the US – after Walmart – and employed nearly 800,000 workers in labor roles by 2021. the result.
This year’s holiday season comes at a difficult time for Amazon’s leaders and logistics staff alike. In 2022, the company’s revenue grew at its slowest pace in more than 20 years, and in November it began laying off 10,000 of the company’s employees. Amazon also lost nearly 100,000 warehouse and delivery workers this year, it told investors, mostly by not replacing people who left the company, which has a high turnover rate in those positions. The company continued to hire additional staff to manage the seasonal rush and announced in October that it would add 150,000 temporary workers to its warehousing and delivery operations.
