Amazon: The Success Academies Of The Internets

There has been plenty written about how badly Amazon, the world's "Most Like Walmart" company that never seems to get the same hostility Walmart gets, treats its blue collar workforce.

Today the NY Times reports on how they treat their white collar workforce:

SEATTLE — On Monday mornings, fresh recruits line up for an orientation intended to catapult them into Amazon’s singular way of working.

They are told to forget the “poor habits” they learned at previous jobs, one employee recalled. When they “hit the wall” from the unrelenting pace, there is only one solution: “Climb the wall,” others reported. To be the best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles, 14 rules inscribed on handy laminated cards. When quizzed days later, those with perfect scores earn a virtual award proclaiming, “I’m Peculiar” — the company’s proud phrase for overturning workplace conventions.

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)

Many of the newcomers filing in on Mondays may not be there in a few years. The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff — “purposeful Darwinism,” one former Amazon human resources director said. Some workers who suffered from cancer, miscarriages and other personal crises said they had been evaluated unfairly or edged out rather than given time to recover.

Even as the company tests delivery by drone and ways to restock toilet paper at the push of a bathroom button, it is conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable. The company, founded and still run by Jeff Bezos, rejects many of the popular management bromides that other corporations at least pay lip service to and has instead designed what many workers call an intricate machine propelling them to achieve Mr. Bezos’ ever-expanding ambitions.

“This is a company that strives to do really big, innovative, groundbreaking things, and those things aren’t easy,” said Susan Harker, Amazon’s top recruiter. “When you’re shooting for the moon, the nature of the work is really challenging. For some people it doesn’t work.”

Gee, sounds like a wonderful place to work.

Perhaps they can pass out some Depends for the white collar workers, because God knows, there is NO TIME to go the bathroom when there is money to be made, businesses to be disrupted, innovation to be enjoyed, etc.

Sounds a lot like Success Academies, doesn't it?

And of course Dear Leader at Amazon, Jeff Bezos, is a supporter of education reformers like Success Academies.

Makes sense when you see the insanity of the company he created, the damage it does to its employees.

Comes out of the same mental, emotional and spiritual illness that Success Academies comes from.

Listen, if damaging your health, working 24/7 and never turning off the connection to work is what it takes to be a "success" in 21st Century America, then I'm happy to "fail".

BBC Story On Amazon's Warehouses

From the Times:

The recession might have cut deeper in Europe, making the question of new jobs even more crucial, but the attitude there is much cooler toward Amazon and its high-tech ways. In Germany, there is continuing labor strife. France is erecting barriers against the company’s aggressive discounting. And in Britain, the warehouses that so impressed President Obama have been compared, in a February story in The Financial Times, with a “slave camp.”

That shocking charge resurfaced in the latest investigation, when a BBC reporter, Adam Littler, went to work briefly at Amazon’s Swansea warehouse. His report, broadcast this week on the show “Panorama,” showed him hustling to keep up with the demands of his hand-held scanner, which gave him only a few moments to find each product.

In his ten-and-a-half-hour night shift, Mr. Littler said: “I managed to walk or hobble nearly 11 miles, just short of 11 miles last night. I’m absolutely shattered.” He added, “We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we’re holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves.”

Michael Marmot, a labor expert identified by the BBC as “one of Britain’s leading experts on stress at work,” told the show that with “the characteristics of this type of job, the evidence shows increased risk of mental illness and physical illness.”

Mr. Marmot went on to say that: “There are always going to be menial jobs, but we can make them better or worse. And it seems to me the demands of efficiency at the cost of individual’s health and well-being — it’s got to be balanced.”

In the United States, President Obama said Amazon warehouses are “a great example of what’s possible...I look at this amazing facility and you guys, you don’t miss a beat."

Nope - and the reason is, because employees at the warehouses are constantly under the gun to perform or be fired.

Fill your orders or be fired.

I noticed in the past year that more and more stuff I order from Amazon is coming damaged.

No wonder - the employees are treated like robots to run back and forth and keep filling orders so that their order scanners don't go off.

It's time for me to stop ordering from Amazon.

Amazon Runs Slave Labor Camps In Britain

That's how some critics of Amazon's labor practices see their fulfillment centers.

Frequent firings without warning (especially after taking a sick day), hourly targets that must be met, no talking while working, constant surveillance - that's the Amazon way.

No wonder they hired Neo-Nazi security to watch over employees in Germany.

They run slave labor camps.

No wonder Jeff Bezos is such a supporter of "No Excuses!" charter schools and teachers union busting.

It's the Amazon code.

Heil Bezos!

Amazon Sells Nazi Flags, Banners, And Armbands Too

So not only is Amazon using Neo-Nazi stormtroopers to keep the immigrant labor in line, they're selling Nazi paraphernalia on the site.

Wanna buy a Nazi flag?

They got you covered.

Need an SS battle flag for your jeep?

They got you covered on that too.

How about a swastika banner for the gymnasium?

Oh, yeah, Amazon's got that.

And something called a "Nazi Youth Knife" and something called an "SS Group Leader's Dagger" and something else called an "SS Death Head Visor Cap."

And of course if they have all this stuff, they also have Nazi armbands and Hitler Youth flags.

Because how you can sell an "SS Death Head Visor Cap" and not give the folks an armband to wear with it?

Gee, you can outfit a whole SS outfit - all from Amazon.

And then you can send the outfit that you've equipped at Amazon to work at Amazon.de and make sure the immigrants from Spain, Portugal and Eastern Europe aren't stealing stuff or taking an extra thirty seconds on their bathroom breaks or trying to escape to England.

How's that for entrepreneurship in action?

Some of the reviews of the Nazi stuff on the site are pretty offensive too. 

Take this one, for example:

Jews control the world today and look at how we care poisoning this planet.
The swastika is an extraterrestrial sign and in sanskrit means good fortune !
I am proud of the swastika !

Nice, huh?

It seems the Third Reich was not destroyed after all.

It is alive and well and living in Amazon's cloud and Amazon's warehouses.

Amazon Uber Alles...

Amazon Uses Neo-Nazis To Keep Immigrant Labor Under Control

This rivals Apple's use of slave labor in China to make iPads:

Amazon is at the centre of a deepening scandal in Germany as the online shopping giant faced claims that it employed security guards with neo-Nazi connections to intimidate its foreign workers.

Germany’s ARD television channel made the allegations in a documentary about Amazon’s treatment of more than 5,000 temporary staff from across Europe to work at its German packing and distribution centres.

The film showed omnipresent guards from a company named HESS Security wearing black uniforms, boots and with military haircuts. They were employed to keep order at hostels and budget hotels where foreign workers stayed. “Many of the workers are afraid,” the programme-makers said.

The documentary provided photographic evidence showing that guards regularly searched the bedrooms and kitchens of foreign staff. “They tell us they are the police here,” a Spanish woman complained. Workers were  allegedly frisked to check they had not walked away with breakfast rolls.

Another worker called Maria said she was thrown out of the cramped chalet she shared with five others  because she had dried her wet clothes on a wall heater. She said she was confronted by a muscular, tattooed security man and told to leave. The guards then shone car headlights at her in her chalet while she packed in an apparent attempt to intimidate her.

Several guards were shown wearing Thor Steinar clothing – a Berlin-based designer brand synonymous with the far-right in Germany. The Bundesliga football association and the federal parliament have both banned the label because of its neo-Nazi associations. Ironically, Amazon stopped selling the clothing for the same reasons in 2009.

ARD suggested that the name “HESS Security” was an allusion to Adolf Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess. It alleged that its director was a man, named only as Uwe L, who associated with football hooligans and convicted neo-Nazis who were known to police. The programme-makers, who booked in at one of the budget hotels where Amazon staff were housed, said they were arrested by HESS Security guards after being caught using cameras. They were ordered to hand over their film and, when they refused, were held for nearly an hour before police arrived and freed them. The film showed HESS guards scuffling with the camera crew and trying to cover their lenses.

ARD said Amazon’s temporary staff worked eight-hour shifts packing goods at the company’s logistics centres in Bad Hersfeld, Konstanz and Augsburg. Many walked up to 17 kilometres per shift and all those taken on could be fired at will. On arrival in Germany, most were told their pay had been cut to below the rate promised when they applied for jobs at Amazon.  “They don’t see any way of complaining,” said Heiner Reimann, a spokesman for the United Services Union (Ver.di). “They are all too frightened of being sent home without a job.”

Heil capitalism.