Amazon's human robots: They trek 15 miles a day around a warehouse, their every move dictated by computers checking their work. Is this the future of the British workplace?
Between a sooty power station and a brown canal on the edge of a small Midlands town, there is a long blue building that looks like a smear of summer sky on the damp industrial landscape.
Inside, hundreds of people in orange vests are pushing trolleys around a space the size of nine football pitches, glancing at the screens of their hand-held satnav computers for directions on where to walk next and what to pick up when they get there.
They do not dawdle — the devices in their hands are also measuring their productivity. They might each walk between seven and 15 miles today.
Before they can go home at the end of their eight-hour shift, or go to the canteen for their 30-minute break, they must walk through a set of airport-style security scanners to prove they are not stealing anything.
Many in Rugeley have been taken aback by the
conditions at Amazon's warehouse and bitterly disappointed by the
insecurity of much of the employment on offer
If you could slice the world in half here, you could read the history of this Staffordshire town in the layers. Below the ground are the tunnels of the coal mine that fed the power station and was once the local economy’s beating heart. Above the ground are the trolleys and computers of Amazon, the global online retailer that has taken its place.
As online shopping explodes in Britain, helping to push traditional retailers such as HMV out of business, more and more jobs are moving from High Street shops into warehouses like this one.
Under pressure over its tax arrangements, Amazon has tried to stress how many jobs it is creating across the country at a time of economic malaise.
The undisputed behemoth of the online retail world has invested more than £1 billion in its UK operations and announced last year that it would open another three warehouses over the next two years and create 2,000 more permanent jobs.
Amazon even had a quote from the Prime Minister, in its September press release. ‘This is great news, not only for those individuals who will find work, but for the UK economy,’ said David Cameron.
The undisputed behemoth of the online retail world has invested more than £1¿billion in its UK operations
Most people are still glad Amazon has come, believing that any sort of work is better than no work at all, but many have been taken aback by the conditions, and bitterly disappointed by the insecurity of much of the employment on offer.
Like almost everyone without a job in Rugeley, 54-year-old Chris Martin started scouring the internet for application details as soon as he heard Amazon was coming.
He was thrilled when he passed the Amazon recruitment process, which includes drug and alcohol tests, and was given a job on the night-shift.
A global employment agency called Randstad, which had handled the recruitment process for Amazon, was also to arrange his shifts, manage him on the warehouse floor and pay him his near-minimum wage.
Amazon's software calculates the most efficient walking route to collect all the items to fill a trolley
One of the benefits for clients, it says, is the ‘removal of the administrative burden of recruiting and managing large numbers of staff’.
There was an electric atmosphere in the big blue warehouse that autumn as the operation geared up for the first time. ‘At the start it was buzzing,’ said a member of the Amazon management team who didn’t want to be named. ‘Everyone was just so pleased to have jobs. Everything was new.’
Workers in Amazon’s warehouses — or ‘associates in Amazon’s fulfilment centres’ as the company would put it — are divided into four main groups. There are the people on the ‘receive lines’ and the ‘pack lines’: they either unpack, check and scan every product arriving from around the world, or they pack up customers’ orders at the other end of the process.
Another group stows suppliers’ products somewhere in the warehouse. They put things wherever there’s a free space — in Rugeley, there are inflatable palm trees next to milk frothers and protein powder next to kettles. Only Amazon’s vast computer brain knows where everything is.
The fourth group, the ‘pickers’, push trolleys around and pick out customers’ orders from the aisles.
Amazon’s software calculates the most efficient walking route to collect all the items to fill a trolley, and then directs the worker from one shelf space to the next via instructions on the screen of the handheld satnav.
Even with these efficient routes, there’s a lot of walking. One of the new Rugeley ‘pickers’ lost almost half a stone in his first few shifts. ‘You’re sort of like a robot, but in human form,’ said the Amazon manager. ‘It’s human automation, if you like.’
Amazon recently bought a company that makes actual robots, but says it still expects to keep plenty of humans around because they are so much better at coping with the vast array of differently shaped products the company sells.
The unassuming efficiency of these warehouses is what enables Amazon to put parcels on customers’ doorsteps so quickly, even when it is receiving 35 orders a second. Every warehouse has its own ‘continuous improvement manager’ who uses so-called ‘kaizen’ — the word means ‘change for the better’ — techniques pioneered by Japanese car company Toyota to improve productivity.
Marc Onetto, senior vice-president of worldwide operations, told a business school class a few years ago: ‘We use a bunch of Japanese guys, they are not consultants, they are insultants, they are really not nice . . . they’re samurais, the real last samurais.’
'The feedback we're getting is that it¿s like being in a slave camp' said one Rugeley resident
Every day, the managers in Rugeley take a ‘genba walk’, which roughly means ‘go to the place’ in Japanese. ‘We go to the associates and find out what’s stopping them from performing today, how we can make their day better,’ says Pedersen.
Some people also patrol the warehouse pushing tall little desks on wheels with laptops on them — they are ‘mobile problem solvers’ looking for any hitches that could be slowing down the operation.
What did the people of Rugeley make of all this? For many, it has been a culture shock. ‘The feedback we’re getting is that it’s like being in a slave camp,’ said Brian Garner, the chairman of the Lea Hall Miners Welfare Centre and Social Club, still a popular local drinking spot.
One of the first complaints was that employees were getting blisters from the safety boots some were given to wear, which workers said were either too cheap or the wrong sizes. One former shop-floor manager said he always told new workers to smear their bare feet with Vaseline.
Warehouse workers can each walk between seven and 15 miles a day
‘People were constantly warned about talking to one another by the management, who were keen to eliminate any form of time-wasting,’ one former worker said.
In a statement, Amazon said: ‘Some of the positions in our fulfilment centres are indeed physically demanding ... many associates seek these positions as they enjoy the active nature of the work. Like most companies, we have performance expectations for every employee — managers, software developers, site merchandisers and fulfilment centre associates — and we measure actual performance against those expectations.’
Former employees described a strict ‘three strikes and release’ discipline system — ‘release’ being a euphemism for getting sacked.
In the early days, people were ‘released’ frequently and with little warning or explanation, workers said. A very large number were laid off after the first busy Christmas period, some of whom had assumed their jobs would be permanent.
Chris Martin says his job lasted less than a week after he took a day off for blisters and returned to find the night shift he was on had been abruptly cancelled.
It is this job insecurity that has most disappointed Glenn Watson, manager of economic development at the district council. ‘Our definition of a good employer is someone who takes on people and provides them with sustainable employment week in week out, not somebody who takes on workers one week and gets rid of them the next,’ he said.
The council had understood Amazon would use the first 12 months to gradually build up its own local workforce, transferring agency staff on to its payroll, but by last autumn, Watson thought there were still only about 200 Amazon employees, with the rest supplied by Randstad and two smaller agencies. He said Amazon was supposed to send the council employment data every six months, but it had not done so. ‘We had no idea Amazon were going to be as indifferent to these issues as they have been: it’s come as a shock to us how intransigent they are,’ he said.
Inside the warehouse, Amazon employees wear blue badges, and the workers supplied by the agencies wear green badges. In the most basic roles they perform the same tasks as each other for the same pay of £6.20 an hour or so (the minimum adult wage is £6.19), but the Amazon workers also receive a pension and shares.
Across Britain, the number of people in temporary jobs has swelled 20 per cent since the financial crisis hit in 2008
Chris Forde, a professor of employment studies at Leeds University, says arrangements such as Randstad’s with Amazon are becoming increasingly common in Britain. He has encountered situations in which workers on these sorts of contracts make up 90 per cent of a company’s workforce in sectors such as car manufacturing, food processing, hotels and restaurants.
Across Britain, the number of people in temporary jobs has swelled 20 per cent since the financial crisis hit in 2008, and the proportion of that group who say they cannot find permanent jobs has increased from 26 per cent to 40 per cent.
Amazon said it employed ‘hundreds of permanent and temporary associates’ at Rugeley, and had recently given a further 200 permanent jobs to temporary workers there.
It said it was proud of giving its ‘associates’ a ‘great working environment’, including on-the-job training, opportunities for career progression, competitive wages, performance-related pay, stock grants, healthcare, a pension plan, life assurance, income protection and an employee discount.
Rugeley is a mostly white working-class town of
about 22,000 that has never fully recovered from the mine¿s closure in
1990 - but the arrival of Amazon promised jobs
Certainly, not everyone in Rugeley is upset about Amazon. A group of workers having a pint on a picnic table outside The Colliers pub near the warehouse said they liked their jobs, albeit as their managers hovered nervously in the background. One young agency worker said he was earning about £220 a week, compared with the £54 he had been receiving in jobless benefits.
Across the table, an older man said slowly: ‘It gives you your pride back.’ Many in the town, however, have mixed feelings. They are grateful for the jobs Amazon has created, but they are also angry about the quality of them.
From behind her desk in Vision estate agents, Dawn Goodwin sucks the air in through her teeth at the mention of Amazon.
‘We all thought it was going to be the making of the town,’ she says. She expected an influx of people, including well-to-do managers, looking to buy or rent houses. But she hasn’t had any extra business.
People are cautious because they don’t know how long their agency jobs with Amazon will last, she says. One of her tenants got a job there but lost it again after she became ill halfway through a shift. She struggled to pay her rent for three months while she waited for her jobseeker’s benefits to be reinstated.
‘It’s leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouths,’ Goodwin says with a frown.
Elsewhere, Britain’s economists are also puzzling over why the economy remains moribund even though more and more people are in work. There are still about half a million fewer people working as full-time employees than there were before the 2008 crash, but the number of people in some sort of employment has surpassed the previous peak.
Economists think the rise in insecure temporary, self-employed and part-time work, while a testament to the British labour market’s flexibility, helps to explain why economic growth remains elusive.
Angi Cooney, who runs C Residential, the biggest estate agents in Rugeley, thinks the nature of employment is changing permanently, and people should stop pining for the past.
It’s ‘bloody great’ that a company like Amazon chose to come to ‘this little old place’, she says fiercely, looking as if she’d like to take the town by the shoulders and give it a shake. ‘People expect a job for life, but the world isn’t like that any more, is it?’
This is an abridged version of an article that originally appeared in the Financial Times
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