Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
25 April 2019 | | The Verge
Amazon’s fulfillment centers are the engine of the company — massive warehouses where workers track, pack, sort, and shuffle each order before sending it on its way to the buyer’s door.
Critics say those fulfillment center workers face strenuous conditions: workers are pressed to “make rate,” with some packing hundreds of boxes per hour, and losing their job if they don’t move fast enough. “You’ve always got somebody right behind you who’s ready to take your job,” says Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and a prominent Amazon critic.
Documents obtained by The Verge show those productivity firings are far more common than outsiders realize. In a signed letter last year, an attorney representing Amazon said the company fired “hundreds” of employees at a single facility between August of 2017 and September 2018 for failing to meet productivity quotas. A spokesperson for the company said that, over that time, roughly 300 full-time associates were terminated for inefficiency.
The number represents a substantial portion of the facility’s workers: a spokesperson said the named fulfillment center in Baltimore includes about 2,500 full-time employees today.
Assuming a steady rate, that would mean Amazon was firing more than 10 percent of its staff annually, solely for productivity reasons. The numbers are even more staggering in North America as a whole. Amazon operates more than 75 fulfillment centers with more than 125,000 full-time employees, suggesting thousands lose their jobs with the company annually for failing to move packages quickly enough [. . .]
The Most Revolutionary Act 
But yet Trump continues to claim that there are more Americans employed today than at any other time throughout history. According to this article, that would make him an even bigger liar than he already is seeing as how Amazon workers continuously face the ‘firing’ squad for not being ‘robots’. And if there are jobs available, you can bet that many of those jobs do not offer benefits and are not full-time. How often does a burger flipping job pay the rent/mortgage, lights, water, food and medical bills and the other necessities of life? The answer should be a no-brainer.
Americans just refuse to come up out of their apathy and complacency and get with the program that things are only going to get worse and add to the equation of climate change and millions are about to head into uncharted ‘waters’ for real, whereas, there is going to be nowhere to live or work because homes and businesses are going to continuously float down what’s left of a street or town. There is no light at the end of this dark and dismal tunnel.
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The US is quickly turning into a third world country, Shelby. No question about it.The only way Trump is going to win in 2020 is if hundreds of millions of people stay home or if they rig the computers. Too many people who voted for Trump last time are now homeless or unemployed.
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