The first thing Daniel Olayiwola typically does when he clocks in for work at a 1-million-square-foot Amazon warehouse in San Antonio, Texas, is look for a forklift.
Next, he grabs a hand scanner to scan items stacked on 40-foot-high racks of pallets, strapping himself into a harness to clamber up and down.
Then he affixes a “cage” to the forklift’s rear that will hold dressers, 50-pound bags of dog food, and other heavy items.
Finally, he’s ready to scan his first item. Everything Olayiwola, 29, has done to prepare for his first scan can be deemed “idle time” by Amazon, he said. If he racks up too much idle time, he risks a written warning from Amazon management.
Olayiwola points to the characterization of these tasks as “idle time” as one of many indignities that stem from Amazon’s drive to get the most from the workers who staff its more than 1,200 warehouses and fulfillment centers.
To cut the time it takes to scan items, Olayiwola said, he and his coworkers sometimes urinate into empty bottles they keep with them in their forklifts. They plan ahead when possible, urinating in bottles in their car right when they pull up at the warehouse before their shifts, he said.
“It feels like you’re in jail,” said Olayiwola, a member of the worker-advocacy group United for Respect who is circulating a petition to push for better pay for workers at his San Antonio warehouse. “It’s just too much to be worried about how quickly you can go to the bathroom or undo a harness so you can go to the bathroom.”
Amazon has said warehouse workers can take breaks for activities like using the bathroom, talking to coworkers and managers, and grabbing snacks. It’s also said its buildings have bathrooms and break rooms on each floor, giving all employees access to them.
“The health and safety of our employees is always our top priority, and, overall, we have robust safety protocols and more than 8,000 safety professionals across our operations who work every day to support our teams,” an Amazon representative, Paul Flaningan, said in a statement.
People like Olayiwola are at the heart of Amazon’s quest to get goods to its customers at speeds that were unheard of just a few years ago. Customers may now expect one- and two-day shipping, but those workers say it has made the job an endless chase to hit quotas.
Across the US, unions are raising the alarm that the way Amazon runs its warehouses could soon spread throughout the warehousing industry — and they see a fresh chance to build union membership within one of the country’s fastest-growing forms of employment.
Retailers like Amazon and Walmart perfected warehouse efficiency
In its 2021 annual report, Amazon told investors it’d take just two hours for an item to land on a truck from one of its fulfillment centers. Two decades ago, that process could have taken up to 18 hours.
That efficiency is the result of decades of warehouse innovation, pioneered by Walmart and then turbocharged by Amazon, David Weil, who headed up the US Department of Labor’s wage and hour division under President Barack Obama, said.
Walmart invested in technology to remake the warehouse from a place that simply stores large amounts of inventory to a facility that constantly moves goods in response to consumer demand.
Amazon refined this model as it made two-day-shipping times a key selling point for its Prime subscription program. Other retailers competing in e-commerce are optimizing their distribution centers to keep up — in many cases poaching Amazon talent to do it.
When it comes to hiring people to oversee warehousing and logistics operations, “Amazon is a gold standard with a halo,” Martha Josephson, a partner at the headhunting firm Egon Zehnder, said.
Amazon’s model changed what workers did and how fast they did it, Weil said.
Warehouse workers traditionally moved huge pallets, but now they’re more often unloading those pallets for shipping to individual customers. A worker on an Amazon warehouse floor can be tasked with packing hundreds of boxes an hour. The repetitive movement and accidents tied to that kind of work are linked to greater injury rates.
Unions see Amazon and warehouses as a prime opportunity to organize.
There are roughly 1.8 million warehouse and storage workers in the US, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Amazon is by far the largest employer of warehouse workers, with more than 750,000 operations employees in more than 1,200 facilities.
Unionization rates in the industrial sector have been declining for decades. A 2.3-percentage-point decline in membership from 2020 to 2021 dropped the ratio of unionized warehouse and transportation workers to 14.7%.
Labor advocates point to laws that allow employers to force workers to sit through anti-union meetings. Amazon spent $4.3 million on anti-union consultants in 2021, according to HuffPost’s reporting on Department of Labor filings.
Amazon successfully fought off unionization efforts — until this year.
As the coronavirus pandemic supercharged e-commerce and put more pressure on warehouses to deliver, an underdog union win by Amazon workers at the JFK 8 facility on Staten Island, New York, in April was seen by some as a sign of a resurgent labor movement in the US.
There were other union drives in Alabama, New York, and New Jersey, but, to date, Staten Island remains the lone victory.
In Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon workers voted against unionizing with the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union in two separate elections in 2021 and 2022.
“When people say stuff is hard, I’m like, there is no job hard at Amazon,” CoCoa Eatman, a Bessemer worker, told Insider in March when explaining why she voted no. “None! I pick just like a robot.” Other workers told Insider they trusted Amazon’s processes or had negative experiences with unions in the past.
But the Amazon Labor Union, a new union led by current and former Amazon workers, said its Staten Island victory had energized other workers.
Even as the ALU is fielding legal challenges from Amazon over the outcome, workers in other states, including Minneapolis, California, Tennessee, and New Jersey, have reached out, looking to develop their own organizing drives, Seth Goldstein, an attorney for the ALU, told Insider.
“ALU is becoming a movement,” he said. “If you run an aggressive, worker-based campaign that strives to improve people’s lives, I think you can be successful.”
But workers at an Amazon facility outside Albany, New York, voted against unionizing with the ALU on Tuesday. The final count included 406 against unionizing and 206 in favor, according to the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees union elections.
Heather Goodall, a 50-year-old worker there who helped organize the union effort with the ALU, said the campaign focused on warehouse safety and wages. She said that during a shift on a hot July day, she got tangled while climbing the stacks and became increasingly dizzy hanging in her harness high above the warehouse floor. She was taken away by an ambulance and the medical episode kept her out of work for weeks, she said.
“We’re glad that our team in Albany was able to have their voices heard,” an Amazon representative, Kelly Nantel, said in a statement after the vote, “and that they chose to keep the direct relationship with Amazon as we think that this is the best arrangement for both our employees and customers.”
In September, Amazon said it was increasing average pay for “frontline” fulfillment and transportation employees by an average of about $1 an hour, raising average pay for those employees to above $19 an hour from $18.
Warehouse workers elsewhere — such as those at the beverage maker Keurig Dr Pepper — have unionized in part to stave off Amazon-style management. Keurig warehouse workers aren’t bound by onerous productivity quotas common to e-commerce warehouses, said Adan Soto, who was heavily involved in organizing 300 of his coworkers in Victorville, California, underneath the Teamsters.
Previously, six Keurig Dr Pepper facilities in Southern California had unionized with the Teamsters. Workers at a facility in Redford, Michigan, have also organized, and a warehouse in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is attempting to organize as well, but the majority of workers at Keurig Dr Pepper warehouses and factories are not unionized.
The contract the Victorville union signed with Keurig this year included changes that Soto believes will help stave off Amazon-style productivity requirements.
Soto wants to unionize Amazon workers next. “There’s one Amazon facility that’s being built right behind the Victorville facility as we speak,” he said. “And guess what? I’m going to be out there with flyers to help those people organize as well.”
Sean O’Brien, the general president of the Teamsters, said warehouses were an “ideal situation” for unionizing.
In e-commerce and nonunion sectors, workers face tremendous pressure to perform and conditions have deteriorated, O’Brien said, blaming a “high demand for instant gratification.”
“It’s given us an opportunity to organize in a lot of these industries, whether it’s Amazon or food distribution or any warehouse in general,” O’Brien said.
Meanwhile, Olayiwola is still working on his petition but is considering other options, including an organizing drive with a union.
“It’s difficult to get change, and looking at a union of some sort might be in the cards,” he said. “I’m very optimistic because there’s power in numbers.”
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