Amazon’s pioneering of worker dystopia is continuing apace.
Motherboard reported this week that Amazon is requiring warehouse workers to attend “WorkingWell huddles” in which they routinely watch videos describing ways to stretch and lift bins safely. Some of the videos also offer nutritional advice, such as reducing carbs and eating more vegetables.
At first blush, Amazon’s program would seem to be worthwhile. Encouraging worker safety and health is a good practice, particularly in work environments involving plenty of physical strain. But the huddles themselves, alongside other “wellness” features in Amazon’s warehouses, are garnering criticism from employees and seem alienating and creepy. In the broader context of Amazon’s fiercely exploitative workplace practices, they seem more of a diversion tactic than a serious effort to protect employees.
Amazon is charting new territory in worker alienation.
Safety instructions are a good idea. But the way these wellness huddles go down is distinctly antisocial and objectionable to many warehouse workers, according to Motherboard and online forums. They’re administered through brief instructional videos rather than live instructors. Employees can’t ask questions. While Amazon says the content is meant to be varied, employees have complained that they’re forced to watch the same videos over and over again. And some said while the instructions demonstrate sound technique, they’re too basic and repetitive to warrant routine viewing. “Hands down the most infantilizing experience I have to endure at work,” one user on Reddit’s forum for Amazon workers said.
The wellness huddles seem to be part of the same initiative that rolled out “AmaZen” meditation booths on warehouse floors. If a worker is stressed, they are to step into a tiny booth resembling a port-a-potty in which a computer offers a suite of "mental health and mindful practices." The Amazon employee who invented the booth said they’re intended to “recharge the internal battery” of employees. What an appropriately dehumanizing turn of phrase.
Amazon dealing with its workers’ physical and mental health by delegating it to computers that offer shallow instructions about wellness is worrisome enough. But in light of the company’s other exploitative practices, they seem more of a dismissal of worker health than an aid to it.
Amazon workplace injuries are 80 percent higher than competitors, according to a union-based study published last year — and the main culprit the study identified was the company’s "obsession with speed." Amazon is known for such a demanding pace of work and limited break time that employees have reported being afraid to get a drink of water or use the bathroom and reported being forced to urinate and defecate in water bottles and bags during their shifts. Amazon also deploys state-of-the-art surveillance technology to monitor worker productivity and even unionization energy— which it has used brazenly illegal tactics to crush.
In a climate of general exploitation, sending workers off to look at computer screens to get a few minutes of training on lifting, eating veggies and mindful breathing is not dealing with the heart of the matter. What it does do is give Amazon talking points about worker safety to use within the company and when dealing with outside observers — all while implicitly blaming employees’ behavior for injuries and ignoring the company’s punishing output demands.
The impact and cultural influence of Amazon's practices can’t be overestimated.
With these kinds of practices, Amazon is charting new territory in worker alienation. Its far from the first corporation to pay lip service to employee well-being with flashy but superficial wellness initiatives. But as the second-largest employer in America, and probably the most widely watched company in the retail space in the world, the impact and cultural influence of its practices can’t be overestimated. While Amazon continually invents new ways to surveil and pantomime care for its workers with less effort, it remains steady in its commitment to making sure its workers stay as overworked and disempowered as ever.
