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  • The Guardian

    'We deserve more': an Amazon warehouse’s high-stakes union drive

    Feb 23, 2021 13 minutes

    Darryl Richardson was delighted when he landed a job as a “picker” at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. “I thought, ‘Wow, I’m going to work for Amazon, work for the richest man around,” he said. “I thought it would be a nice facility that would treat you right.”

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    Richardson, a sturdily built 51-year-old with a short, charcoal beard, took a job at the gargantuan warehouse after the auto parts plant where he worked for nine years closed. Now he is strongly supporting the ambitious effort to unionize its 5,800 workers because, he says, the job is so demanding and working for Amazon has fallen far below his expectations.

    Last August, five months after the warehouse opened, Richardson began pushing for a union in what is not only the first effort to organize an entire Amazon warehouse in the United States, but also the biggest private-sector union drive in the south in years. “I thought the opportunities for moving up would be better. I thought safety at the plant would be better,” Richardson said. “And when it comes to letting people go for no reason – job security – I thought it would be different.”

    He complained about the fast, unrelenting pace of work and about seeing co-workers terminated for falling behind Amazon’s production quotas. As a picker, Richardson takes merchandise out of large metal bins that robots carry to his workstation, and he then hurries to put the items in various totes that a conveyor belt takes to packing. Nearby video monitors tell him what to do minute after minute. His quota is to pick 315 items an hour, five items a minute: toilet paper and toys, baby food and books destined for Amazon customers. “You’re running at a consistent, fast pace,” Richardson said. “You ain’t got time to look around. You get treated like a number. You don’t get treated like a person. They work you like a robot.”

    Working from 7.15am to 545pm four days a week, he complains that he often doesn’t get a break until 11.45, four and a half hours after he begins.

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