How Old To Work At A Amazon Warehouse

[Mariela Laflam]

Thejournalists at BuzzFeed News are proud to bring you trustworthy and relevant reporting about the coronavirus. To help keep this news free, become a member and sign up for our newsletter, Outbreak Today.

When Amazon workers, including some of my coworkers, have spoken out about unsafe conditions and demanded the facility be shut down and sanitized after positive COVID-19 cases were identified, some have been fired in apparent retaliation.

Rina Cummings works at the Amazon JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island and is a member of Make the Road New York. She testified before the New York City Council on Tuesday in support of the proposed Essential Workers Bill of Rights.

So while eating ramen one night and reading a local newspaper, I saw an ad that Amazon was hiring for their Vancouver warehouse and knew this was the perfect opportunity to finally get my tour! Best of all, by working for Amazon for a few days, I would get a clearer narrative of how an Amazon FBA warehouse actually works than I ever could from a tour.

For some odd reason, they hired me after the Christmas rush in January, which was probably a good thing as working during the holidays means working a mandatory 60-hour workweek. Amazon has basically five positions:

I wish I could have taken more pictures of the inside of the warehouse, but Amazon has a very strict no cellphone/no pictures policy and entering and leaving the warehouse is akin to going through airport security in Israel.

Upon entering the building you must go through a locked turnstile that requires your employment badge. When you actually enter the warehouse you're forbidden from bringing your cell phone (officially because they would not be able to verify if it was your phone or merchandise but unofficially for productivity reasons).

I only worked there for a week (I planned on making it two weeks but ran into some childcare issues) but it was more than enough time to get a good feel for things. Here's some of my observations over my few days working for Amazon.

The first day consisted mostly of safety and corporate culture training. The most surprising thing from all of the training though was the lack of indoctrination of overall Amazon culture into warehouse staff.

I fully expected for at least one of the videos to include a welcome message from Jeff Bezos. Instead, we got a poorly edited welcome message from one of the ex-vice presidents. I'll bet the tech support in Bangalore even gets a welcome message from Jeff! It sort of felt like warehouse employees were treated as second-class citizens within Amazon.

After the initial training day, we were basically thrown to the wolves and worked a regular day of work. Every day began with a short 5-minute group stretch. After that, everyone picked up a bar code scanning gun and went to work.

Once you had your scanner, you would take a cart (a glorified shopping cart basically), and walk around the warehouse picking items as your scanner guided you until your cart was full. Once your cart was full, you would drop it off at a parking area for all of the full carts.

The packers would then take these carts and pack everything. One of the most baffling things was how there was a complete lack of carts. I would wait around 5 or 10 minutes sometimes to get a cart and many others would do the same thing. And on top of this, many of the carts were in horrible shape with missing or broken wheels. Really Amazon? What would it take to have an excess of carts in excellent shape?

The overall positive morale of the warehouse probably had a lot to do with the pay. Amazon seems to have a bit of a recruitment issue and subsequently, they tend to overpay. They start you off at $13.75 and there's a lot of opportunity for mandatory overtime and voluntary overtime. One can easily earn $40,000+ working at their warehouse. It's a tough job, but you get paid well and you work with good people.

This probably doesn't come as a surprise but Amazon warehouses are big. The warehouse I was working at didn't have any of the capacity issues that many of the warehouses in the U.S. seem to be having because a) Amazon FBA isn't quite as popular in Canada yet, b) Amazon is planning for growth and basically had just doubled this warehouse's size.

Speaking with one of the area managers, he told me that they try to get every truck unloaded and received into inventory within 24 hours. When I asked about any backlog he was visibly puzzled as they clearly didn't have such issues at this warehouse. I've actually shipped products to this very warehouse and the products were always received into stock in a timely manner.

The warehouse I worked at consisted of several zones. Some of the zones were organized logically. For example, zone B had all of the small items (despite this being an oversize warehouse, they still had thousands of small items such as DVDs and USB sticks) on bookshelves like you would find in a library. Zone C was pallet racking stacked about 3 stories high that you needed a PIT truck to get access to (I never got to drive one of these, unfortunately). However, many other zones were basically just pallets stored away with seemingly no logic, as I'll get to later.

As a testament to the size of the warehouse, on the second day my supervisor came up to me and asked why the system showed me as inactive for 55 minutes (the crux of pretty much every position at Amazon rests upon a bar code scanner that tracks everything, including your activity). Despite what my supervisor may have thought, I wasn't snoozing somewhere, I was simply walking from one end of the warehouse to the other and trying to find the aisle!

With that being said, Amazon has a constant stream of trucks ferrying items back and forth between their warehouses. So for example, if a customer made an order on Amazon for that same Oven and Oven mit, Amazon would put the oven mitt on a truck and send it to the oversize warehouse so the two items could ship together and save on shipping costs.

It felt like 25% of the entire warehouse was occupied with TVs and boxes of diapers. This might be an exaggeration but they warehoused and sold a LOT of both of these items. On a side note, it made me appreciate how much waste is caused by baby diapers.

My favorite tool for this is Jungle Scout's Supplier Database tool which costs less than $50 a month (other more expensive options include Import Genius and Panjiva). These tools will neatly summarize all of the information included on a particular company's Bill of Lading information such as product type, quantity, and supplier name/address.

What Amazon does have in place is an EXCELLENT tracking system. Every picker and packer has a bar code gun which is their absolute lifeline. It tracks how many items you pick in an hour, where in the warehouse you've travelled to, what types of items, etc.

They evaluate you completely on objective and fair performance metric. The result was a) the culture seemed to be extremely good and b) no one gives a crap how you do your job as long as you do it (so much in fact that one of my coworkers every day would disappear for 25 minutes and nap on a dog bed in some far-flung corner of the warehouse).

Anyone who uses Amazon FBA knows how much stuff they lose and or damage, so much so that I've heard conspiracy theories float around that Amazon purposely loses and damages items just so they can resell them and lower the effective price of your items.

The fact is, Amazon loses a lot of stuff. If a picker accidentally places an item in an adjacent bin, it will go missing for quite a while. Also, given how rapidly their warehouses are expanding (especially YVR3 that I was working at) many people don't even know where certain sections of the warehouse are, let alone where a single item in that warehouse is. Eventually, the item will turn up but you'll likely have been reimbursed by then.

That was the other striking thing about losses, how little rhyme or reason there seemed to be to organization. They would have a $2000 laptop stacked randomly in the same gaylord with an oven and bowling ball (and of course pickers were less than gentle sorting through a Gaylord while trying to meet their rate).

In Canada at least, this means Amazon has to pay 1.5x pay for 20 hours of overtime per week. Given that Amazon already has to overpay ($13.75 starting) to recruit enough staff, this means they're paying $20+ an hour in many cases for a relatively unskilled and uneducated worker. And their turnover is huge.

This is especially true during the holidays when they're working 60-plus hours! After this, I learned that Amazon isn't ruling the ecommerce world through some black magic and alien technology, they're doing it through air-tight standard operating procedures.

Amazon is a big a part of lorge mnc comonay that to big full fillment center in india and states and distcs etc my 2019 to 2022 my best role of Inbond associate but present I want to direct amazon in any job role with only full fillment center role

Thank you amazon

Hi David, I have read your article. IAs a small businessman, if I have to find suppliers from overseas like India, Indonesia or China and rest other parts of countries.Is their any directory of suppliers listed.

The site is secure.

The ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

OSHA cited the multinational e-commerce company for not providing safe workplaces in violation of the OSH Act's general duty clause. The inspections follow referrals from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York that led the agency to open inspections and find similar violations at other Amazon warehouse facilities in Florida, Illinois and New York in July 2022. OSHA later opened inspections in Aurora, Nampa and Castleton on Aug. 1, 2022.

At all six locations, OSHA investigators found Amazon exposed warehouse workers to a high risk of low back injuries and other musculoskeletal disorders. The risks they faced are related to the following:

3a8082e126