A BBC reporter, Adam Litter, went undercover to investigate the Amazon warehouse in Swansea, England. He documented his findings in this article. He was assigned the job called a "picker", whose duty it is to collect orders throughout a total storage area of 800,000 square ffet. What the BBC team captured on its hidden camera was insightful for me.
Some of the details of his job, to begin, was the ten and a half hour night shift that he worked. On the job, these employees are constantly monitored. His scanner handset was his disciplinarian. It counted down the set amount of time he had to retrieve his item, and when he made a mistake, it would beep, and report it to his mangers. It was calculated in the article that the "undercover worker was expected to collect orders every 33 seconds". Mind you, that is covering the 800,000 square foot area. In response to his tiresome night, Litter stated as an employee that "we are machines, we are robots...we don't think for ourselves, maybe they don't trust us to think for ourselves as human beings". This quote shows the treatment of workers, and how they are reduced to objects, no longer seen as people.
In my mind, this situation as a whole situation connected to the issue of sweat shops and exploited laborers, that I have previous studied this month: grueling tasks with a wage exploitation, specifically in England, which is intersting to me because it is not a third world country like the other countries that are better known for their sweatshops. To me, this information makes me question the labor conditions in the United States, which leads me back to Black Friday. On such a gigantic shopping day, is there something consumers can do to ensure a fair background of the products they are purchasing? After all, the customer is the one who is creating income for the companies which they buy from, so that seems to generate some power. If consumers decided to boycott a specific retailer on Black Friday, the company might suffer major economic losses. As the consumers, we hold the power to change such circumstances.
I also was shocked when I read that England was the location where all of this worker mistreatment was taking place. I had really never imagined sweatshops in England, the United States, or other first world countries. I would be interested (although a little nervous too) to find out the number of people in the US who work in conditions resembling sweatshops.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that a boycott would be a great way to show certain companies that we want working conditions to change. Similar to the piece we did in AS earlier this year, I think a simple search for articles on companies would reveal a lot. When I did this project, I researched Land's End, and I found that the actual working conditions are different from those described on the website. If consumers read articles from various sources rather than relying on the information directly from the company's website, they will most likely get a more truthful idea of how the company treats employees, and will then be able to make better decisions about which companies to support.
I totally agree, Alex. The education of consumers may be the most important first step to take in order to change such conditions.
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