A leaked internal document revealed that Amazon could run out of new employees to hire by 2024, with the company burning through its entire warehouse workforce annually thanks to grueling shifts.
Doc, which was first mentioned by recoding, It includes the words: “If we continue with business as usual, Amazon will exhaust the supply of labor available in the US network by 2024.”
The document was published internally in 2021. According to Recode, an Amazon spokesperson has not refuted its veracity.
Areas where staffing is expected to be scarcer include Inland Empire, California, an hour and a half east of Los Angeles. The area is about a two-hour drive from Amazon’s 20 million potential customers.
Amazon could run out of new workers in the Inland Empire by the end of 2021 or in 2022, the document said, though warehouses in the Inland Empire continue to operate, and it’s unclear what, if any, staffing issues they currently face.
Mesa, Arizona, could also run dry on staff very soon, as stats show that Amazon — notorious for its harsh working conditions and tight oversight of warehouse employees — loses more workers than it hires each year.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (above) said employee safety is the company’s top priority
In 2020, six out of every 100 Amazon workers were infected, according to The Washington Post.
The report showed that Wilmington, Delaware and Memphis, Tennessee, are also at risk of running out of staff.
According to Amazon’s own data, the company had an attrition rate of 123 percent last year.
This means that over the course of the year, there were equal numbers of workers leaving the company as there were all workers there at the start of the year—with an additional 23 percent on top.
Many Amazon workers stay longer, especially those in senior positions. But others come and go within a year, inflating the attrition number.
Amazon employs about 1 million people in the United States, including head office employees, making it the second-largest private employer, behind Wal-Mart’s family of 2.3 million.
Its attrition rate is well above the national average for the most popular jobs at Amazon, in warehouse and transportation work.
The national rate of warehouse and transportation attrition was 46% in 2019 and 59% in 2020.
While for the retail business, the average in 2019 was 58% and in 2020 it was 70%.
In 2020, six out of every 100 Amazon workers were infected Washington Post.
In September, company CEO Andy Jassy said in an interview on CNBC: “For us, employee safety is our number one priority in our fulfillment centers.”
Jassy took over as CEO from founder Jeff Bezos in July 2021.
In the years before Covid-19, Amazon lost workers at an average of 3% per week along with a turnover rate of 150% annually, according to reports. New York times.
Among the many reasons for the potential shortage of workers are Amazon’s controversial hiring practices and worker health and safety
Jose Pagan, pictured here, said he was ejected after taking two days off to deal with an infected tooth
One anecdote quoted in the Recode article mentions an Amazon supervisor from The Bronx, New York.
Jose Pagan, 35, who supported his wife and children on his Amazon salary, said he was fired electronically after missing work to treat an infected tooth.
Pagan said he did not have sufficient notice to use the vacation days and did not have sufficient unpaid leave which led to his termination.
He went on to say that even though he had a doctor’s note, the company didn’t care.
Pagan worked a full week after his health problems and found out he had been fired when he showed up to work one night and his keycard didn’t work.
Then he was told that he was no longer employed by the company.
Pagan went to a human resources representative who told him the company would welcome him back in 90 days and in the meantime he should try to get some work as a driver with Uber or Grubhub.
At the time of his dismissal, Bagan was on the brink of promotion.
‘It was almost impossible to fire as a worker,’ said a former manager.
There is no ‘silver bullet’ to magically make Amazon facilities safer, Jassy said in an April 2022 internal memo to employees.
Despite multiple reports of casual firings, a former Amazon Phoenix factory manager told Recode that the culture is now geared more toward employee retention due to high attrition rates.
“They were so concerned about attrition and losing people that they rolled back all the policies that we as managers have to enforce,” said Michael Garrigan.
Managers joked about not bothering with writing citations for workers because HR would “exception” them, Garrigan said.
“It was almost impossible for him to be fired as a worker,” he said.
There’s no ‘silver bullet’ to magically make Amazon facilities safer, Jassy said in an April 2022 internal memo to employees, according to reports. CBS News.
“We don’t seek to be average,” Gacy said in part. We want to be the best in the class. We still have a ways to go.
Whereas in December 2021, six Amazon employees were killed in Edwardsville, Illinois, when a tornado struck the facility.
Workers who survived the hurricane later filed a lawsuit against the construction company that built the facility. In it, prosecutors said there was no suitable shelter available inside, it reported kmov May 2022.
After the hurricane, Amazon denied allegations by employees at the Edwardsville Center that the company prevented them from using their cell phones at work, according to reports. Business interested.
According to the activist group: a more perfect union, Two workers died at the company’s Bessemer, Alabama, facility within 24 hours of each other.
The group said that one of the deceased men had his request to go home denied by the human rights organization. Hours later, he suffered a fatal stroke while working.
The group alleges that a total of six people died at the Bessemer facility in 2021 and that Amazon covered up the deaths.
Amazon denies these allegations.
In April 2022, Amazon was accused of attempting to illegally influence a defeated vote to unionize at a Bessemer facility, according to reports. CNBC.
