Amazon.com’s Whitestown, Indiana warehouse is a hell of a place to work

Here also are three articles published between 2011 and 2013 on Examiner.com on work conditions in Central Indiana.  I have worked industrial and warehouse jobs there as a temp since 2005, and these are complementary to two articles Central Indiana work conditions that also originally appeared on Examiner.com in 2014, and were reprinted by me on "Politically Incorrect Leftist"  in February 2015:  "Work, fatigue, frustration, and--finally!--creativity again" and "Dispatch from the work shift from hell.  "Work, fatigue, frustration" also covers working at Amazon, which I have done since 2009, and am presently employed doing; while "Dispatch" describes the hellish conditions at another Central Indiana warehouse--there not being a whole lot to differentiate conditions from one warehouse to another.  Choose your poisonous work environment, they are all toxic--GF

Online retail giant Amazon.com has its largest warehouse in the U.S. located in Whitestown, Indiana, about 30 miles north of Indianapolis.  A sprawling rectangle of a building that appears to stretch on endlessly, this Amazon warehouse seemingly provided me a pretty good job; or initially, what I thought would be a pretty good job. But as I write below, not nearly so good a job after all, not by a long shot.

As is pretty well known now, Amazon has come under national scrutiny for its working conditions ever since when, in September 2011, the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania newspaper The Daily Call ran a story on heat prostration at the Amazon warehouse in Allentown, where temperatures had gotten to 110 degrees; http://www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-allentown-amazon-complaints-20110917,0,7937001,full.story. 

The story was picked up nationally by the Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/20/amazon-allentown_n_971851.html, and Amazon came to national notoriety because of its warehouse working conditions, of which heat was only one of the problems. (The Whitestown warehouse is now air-conditioned, so while I worked there extreme heat was not a problem.)  Amazon working conditions also came under scrutiny the British press as well, in a 2008 story carried by the Times of London.

Still, such scrutiny and surely embarrassing resultant media coverage hasn’t dented either Amazon’s profits nor its market share, where it dominates the online retail market that has only bourgeoned in recent years.  Shopping online having become a commonplace now for all kinds of goods, quite a change from what it was only a few years ago.  The sluggish economy has also helped Amazon, as its warehouses everywhere across the U.S. and even overseas are an economic opportunity for many a fortuitously-located small town.  This is especially noticeable in Central Indiana, as the Hoosier state has moved to become a warehouse hub because of its midpoint location, where interstates and railroad lines crisscross, and Indianapolis International Airport is nearby.  This makes for a significant economic opportunity for the many small towns that dot the perimeter of Indianapolis such as Plainfield, Whitestown, Noblesville and others, which now boast warehouses as a major source of blue-collar jobs and community revenue. With the steep decline of manufacturing jobs in Indiana, once the mainstay of employment for its largely low-skill, ill-educated workforce, this new “logistics economy” of warehouses moving manufactured goods from one place to another steps in to replace those jobs lost; jobs often lost because goods that were produced in the U.S. are now made overseas. 

These warehouses have become a major source of employment now, especially for Amazon in the peak Christmas season, where thousands of temporary employees are put on the payroll, and constitute for many an opportunity that otherwise wouldn’t exist. And Amazon is a big employer in the Indianapolis area, with three warehouses in the vicinity—one in south Indianapolis itself, and one each in Whitestown and Plainfield, a small town 25 miles west of Indianapolis.  (The Whitestown warehouse alone increases its employment by 3,000 jobs over the Christmas season, from a normal of 2,000 to 5,000 at the holiday peak.  This was stated to us as we started work there in 2012, and comes from managers themselves.) This despite the relatively low wages common in Central Indiana for warehouse temp work, which range from $9.00 an hour in many places to Amazon’s top-end standard wage of $12.50 an hour, which even rises to $14.50 an hour when it’s difficult to fill these Amazon positions, as it was in the Christmas season of 2012.

That’s because Amazon really is a hell of a place to work.  Hell as in hellish, hellhole, “You don’t want to work here if you don’t have to.”  As this writer can personally attest, having worked as a temp three times now since 2009; and the Whitestown warehouse is the worst, the most hellish, the most demanding in its pace of work.  It chews up people and spits them out.  As I directly experienced there both in 2011 and 2012.

 

There are three categories of workers where temps are widely used during the holiday season:  in receiving, in inventory stowing, and in order picking, and the pace of work increases upward with each of these three categories.  There are production quotas to be met in each, and proficiency in meeting the quota is demanded after only a week’s experience learning the job and adapting to the harsh physical demands of the labor pace.  People are routinely dismissed for not meeting the pace and the expected quota, which would be grueling even for a twentysomething, but which positions also draw a lot of older workers—there being little opportunity elsewhere.  Of course people falling short do get warnings, and often written reprimands, but no slack is cut; these warnings are simply ultimatums, and only three are allowed.  Managers are sometimes up-front about the physical demands of the job, but not always; and one can leave early usually if the pace interferes with the physical ability to do the job, but there are penalty points assessed for that, and only a maximum of six points allowed for absences or leaving early, unless scheduled—one-half point for leaving an hour or less than before the end of the shift, a full point if leaving more than an hour before.  As for assistance in meeting this work pace, all management will do, in accordance with Amazon policy, is recommend that the workers wear athletic shoes and drink lots of water from the ubiquitous water fountains.  (Employees are also allowed to bring clear personal water bottles.) Gatorade was provided free in Amazon warehouses up to October 2012, but that was discontinued.

At Whitestown the normal work week was four 10-hour shifts, for a 40-hour full-time week.  There are no part-time positions.  During the Christmas season peak this increased to a 50-hour week, then to a 60-hour week (five days of 10-hour shifts, and five days of 12-hour shifts, respectively) and the overtime work is mandatory, with not working it subject to the same absentee/leaving early policies as given above.  There are day and night shifts, and I worked the night one. During the 12-hour shifts, the time allotted for the second break was lengthened, but the allotment for the first break and lunch remained the same.  Also, at the start of the shift and after returning from lunch, there are short bouts of stretching exercises gone through, but no resting during the time of actual work, and, of course, no sitting down during work time, ever.

I worked in receiving during 2012, which I thought would be a job I could handle, as my time spent in 2011 stowing had not worked out; but would this time, as the pace of receiving was slower.  As I found out, not slow enough not to be a major physical strain, especially when the 10-hour shifts became 12-hour shifts.  I had really wanted this job to work out, as I badly needed the money, especially the time-and-a-half for the mandatory overtime.  In fact, I was making quota pretty consistently, and was not having trouble with the 10-hour shifts, but the extra two hours that later got added on turned out to be more than this person in his mid-sixties could handle.  I left the shift exhausted, and even after waking from a very sound sleep, was still exhausted.  I somehow managed to get through two days of 12-hour shifts in a row, but on the third day major exhaustion made me have to leave early—and I do mean major exhaustion, complete with grogginess, disoriented sense of space and time, and of course, making a lot of mistakes—which fortunately I caught, but which slowed me down considerably.  The day after leaving early I woke up still absolutely exhausted and barely able to move.  So I called the office of Integrity Staffing Services, the temp agency that fills these Amazon positions nationwide, and resigned; that ended my career at Amazon, as there is a policy that one must give two weeks’ notice when resigning, no matter for what reason, in order to be allowed to ever return.  I had been able to return in 2012 despite problems working in 2011 because instead of resigning, I had luckily called in sick (because I had a virus).

When the group of us in receiving started work, we were told that the work would be demanding, but the grueling extent of this “demanding” work was not indicated.  An impression was given that it would be strenuous, but not as severely so as it turned out to be, at least in my case.  I believe fully that Amazon is aware of just how grueling the work is, but that it’s much more profitable to work employees as inexhaustible mules rather than make conditions more humane.  That is why it especially uses this small army of temps to handle its peak business times, and tries to psych its employees, temp and regular alike, into thinking Amazon is a hip place to work with the offering of Amazon.com logo merchandise, special meals occasionally, and other small perks. (However, even when a special meal is provided, served cafeteria-style during the normal lunch break with a queue in line to get the food, no more time is allotted to eat than the normal half-hour; but it may take up to ten minutes in line just to get the food.)  One special way Amazon tried to psych up us workers during the 2012 season’s mandatory overtime period was to have a live DJ play a continuous stream of pop music interspersed with occasional promotional patter for the last five hours of the shift; music and patter that was piped throughout the warehouse at quite loud volume.  While this helped make us feel better, distracting us from the actual harshness of the workload and thus making the work more pleasant as the adrenaline provided by the music overcame the exhaustion, this turns out on examination to be only an all-too-typical Amazon palliative, a psychological cheap shot to make the worker feel good, not actually work good, work at a pace and in a way that enables proper rest of body and mind.  Which is to say that the workers at fiercely anti-union Amazon very badly need a union: need a union because, without one, the work will still be hell, people will continue to be chewed up and spit out, leave at end of shift  exhausted, and manipulated by psychological perks to perform in a way that simply shouldn’t be tolerated.  But as of now, Amazon has prevented unionization anywhere in its sprawling network of warehouses and order call centers, which makes it the Wal-Mart of online retailers.  (In contrast to unionized Powell’s Books, still a significant competitor of Amazon despite allegedly costly unionization.)