Tech

A warehouse worker struggles with Amazon shareholders


Amazon’s Organizer Warehouse workers rattled the e-commerce giant, victory in the union electionand organize a walk agitation for better working conditions. Now, a worker is trying a novel stop. Today, Daniel Olayiwola will become the first warehouse worker in the company’s history to introduce himself Resolution at Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting.

Earlier this year, Olayiwola bought shares of Amazon, giving him the power to come up with a resolution he’s come up with with the workers’ advocacy organization United for Respect. A picker who has worked at warehouses in Florida and Texas since 2017, Olayiwola is provocatively calling for an end to supervisory and productivity quotas for all Amazon warehouse and delivery workers, including drivers and other third party contractors. His proposed resolution specifically calls out Amazon’s controversial “Task Off Time” (TOT) policy, which penalizes workers who perform a certain number of minutes without scanning products – including bathroom breaks. He also called for an end to the pricing system, the number of products that employees are expected to scan every hour. Workers who accumulate too many TOTs or fail to reach them risk termination of interest.

Olayiwola argues that the system prioritizes productivity over safety, leaving workers exhausted and injured. The data, he argued, supported him. one april report from the Center for Strategic Organization, a coalition of labor unions, found that serious injuries at Amazon were more than double those of non-Amazon injuries last year. The company acknowledges that its injury rate has increased from 2020 to 2021 as it trains a large number of new employees, but says its record injury rate has dropped by more than 13% between 2019 and 2020. 2021.

The proposal is one of more than a dozen made this year related to environmental and social issues such as working conditions, diversity, equity, inclusion and the misuse of technologies. like face recognition. (All face long odds; Amazon’s board has advised voting no on every environmental and social proposal it makes.)

WIRED spoke with Olayiwola about his tenure at the Amazon, his background as a military medic, and why, win or lose, he thinks it’s important to question people. labor before shareholders. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your proposal addresses working conditions for workers across Amazon’s warehouses and distribution network, including “pickers” like you. What does being an Amazon picker entail?

A person who selects items for packaging and delivery. You stand at your station for 10 hours, usually every two and a half to three hours, picking stuff at a rate of no less than 300 to 350 an hour. If you drop below that, they’ll either send you a text or come up to you and say, “Hey, why is your pick so slow? You need to accelerate it in the second part of the day. ”

My shift starts at 7:30 a.m., and I have to prepare two lunches because I don’t leave the building to rest. [Ed note: Olayiwola gets one 30-minute break and two 15-minute breaks.]



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