It’s called ‘peak season’ – the time of year when ten-hour days for some of the nation’s more than one million Amazon employees extend into eleven-hour shifts packed into a backbreaking blur of six-day work weeks.
“They work us like crazy with hardly any days off, especially during the holidays. They don’t care about the safety of their employees,” says Johnny Acejo, who spent five years employed at an Amazon facility in Phoenix.
Amazon declined to answer the majority of questions posed for this story.
Unwinding after a long shift while facing the prospect of doing it again involves video games, booze, or weed, according to about a dozen employees interviewed by the Current. Others turn to the sleep aid Unisom, purchased online from Amazon.
The job is consuming.
“They literally keep track of your restroom time,” Acejo says of a scanner worn by employees that allows Amazon to track their movements. “I took five minutes in the restroom because I had real bad stomach pains and I was throwing up. I got a write up. All they care about is the numbers.”
The numbers are good.
Ecommerce sales in the U.S. topped $800 billion in the last year. As of October, Amazon owned 41% of the market share, followed by Walmart at 6%, according to Statista.
Amazon’s net income for the twelve months ending September 30, 2021 was $26.263 billion, up 51.14% year-to-year.
Amazon is the second largest employer in the U.S. (behind Walmart) with more than a million workers. Amazon employs more than...
Singhania hires top defamation lawyer after being wrongly portrayed as a predator during Vitaly's livestream Santa Ana Today Streamer Vitaly Zdorovetskiy has apologized after wrongly branding Akash...