Retail giant Amazon’s Prime Day sale ends Friday night, and while specific numbers for the summer sales event aren’t yet available, Amazon is expecting to generate online sales equivalent to two Black Fridays.
But there’s a potential dark side to shopping with the retailer. A report by the National Employment Law Project explored how the company meets the “faster than ever” delivery speeds at the heart of its business model by using an army of Amazon Flex drivers, independent contractors who use their own vehicles to deliver packages in the final leg.
According to the report, that Uber-like system exploits workers and subjects them to what it says are illegal and unbearable conditions, in turn also having a ripple effect on the rest of the delivery sector.
“The Flex app is absolutely marketed to Flex drivers as an opportunity to have control over their own schedules, be their own boss, choose their own hours,” said Maya Pinto, a senior researcher and policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project who wrote the report. “But it’s actually Amazon that batches out the routes that sets the time frames.”
“Workers we spoke to for this report, flex drivers who are organizing in New Jersey, they reported that often they can be locked out of the app when they’ve worked a certain amount of hours,” Pinto said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News.
“It’s very unstable, and the hours are unpredictable,” she said. “The flex labor model is designed to give Amazon really the...
There’s a lot of information around The LAPD has issued a rare public statement pushing back on what it says is “misinformation” and “false claims” circulating in media reports about the investiga...