In the middle of the corona pandemic, on 30 March 2020, Chris Smalls lost his job at Amazon. On the same day, he had launched a spontaneous strike, where the employees demanded protective equipment at work during the pandemic. He believes he was fired as a reward. Since then, Smalls has started the world’s first trade union for Amazon employees, the Amazon Labor Union. They have thousands of members. But still the giant group refuses to give them the right to negotiate wages for their members. Chris Smalls at a union event outside Amazon’s warehouse on Staten Island in New York. Photo: Seth Wenig / AP Hard-hitting productivity requirements Chris Smalls has been invited to Norway by LO and the Labor Party’s youth organization AUF. At the beginning of August, he visited AUF’s summer camp to talk about what it’s like to work on the floor for the world’s largest online store. – When I was a middle manager, I used to tell new employees that they should sign out of the training centre. You walk, stand, pull, stretch, bend and make repetitive motions for 10 to 12 hours a day. And then comes the fast travel time of three hours a day. – When you do it every day, it wears on your body. I have seen people in their twenties who have been completely destroyed by working for Amazon, says Smalls to news. Employees at Amazon in Sacramento, California prepare packages for shipment. Photo: Rich Pedroncelli / AP He also tells how the employees are extremely closely monitored. – The entire company is run on measurements, numbers and data. My job as a manager was to track the productivity of all my employees, hour by hour. If they did not work quickly enough, they were reprimanded or fired, he says. – I did my best to protect people. But the company is run on technology. People get fired through an app here, says Smalls. – How does it work? – You are fired. They will then delete access to the app, and you will not be able to log in. Your access card will be deactivated and you will not be allowed to go to work the next day. – I have seen many good employees who have been fired for idiotic things. That’s how Amazon works. Hire them and fire them. They just want to get what they can get out of people, and then move on to the next one, he says. news has submitted allegations to Amazon, which do not confirm what Smalls says. See the full response from Amazon further down in the case. Huge amounts of packages leave Amazon’s warehouses. Photo: Ross D. Franklin / AP Amazon does not disclose sales figures for individual countries. According to Nets, one in ten Norwegians shop on Amazon. In the second quarter of 2024, the company sold goods for 148 billion dollars. So approximately one and a half trillion kroner. The income is almost NOK 150 billion. Around a fifth come from outside North America. Call it union busting The giant revenues come with a downside. Smalls says that the warehouse he himself worked in was equipped with around 4,000 cameras. – You are tracked, from the time you arrive until you leave, he says. If you work as a “picker”, you have to pick four hundred packages an hour, for ten hours every day, he says. – There will be 5,000 packages a day. If you don’t reach that number, they’ll find a way to get rid of you, says Smalls. Chris Smalls stood out strongly at the AUF camp this summer. “You’re a fucking icon”, someone shouted when he gave his speech. Photo: Aslak Borgersrud The union leader no longer works picking goods to be sent to, for example, Norwegian consumers. Until this summer, he instead worked on organizing the employees in a trade union. It has not been easy to achieve. – They have thrown everything they have at me. All that exists of union busting. They have spent over fourteen million dollars to stop us, says Smalls. He says that Amazon hired people to go around the workplaces to encourage employees not to join the union. – They wallpapered the building with anti-union propaganda. At the same time, they had the police arrest me and other workers when we collected signatures outside the building, he says. The latter, Smalls believes, was the moment that convinced many employees to join the union. – Jeff Bezos is so rich and powerful that he doesn’t have to worry about anything. But he worries about what we are doing. He has done that for four years, he says. At the warehouse in Goodyear, Arizona, Amazon has robots that transport finished packages from the assembly line and organize them by zip code. Photo: Ross D. Franklin / AP Bezos is the owner and founder of Amazon, and is among the world’s richest people. According to Forbes, he is worth 194 billion dollars in 2024. news has submitted Small’s criticism to Amazon. They write in an e-mail that their employees have the freedom to choose whether they want to join a trade union or not. See the full response from Amazon here: Amazon responds to criticism news has asked Amazon to comment on the statements from Chris Smalls. A spokesperson for the company writes in an email that employees at Amazon can choose for themselves whether they want to join a trade union. – They have always had that choice. Our focus is on working directly with our employees so that Amazon will continue to be an excellent place to work, writes the spokesperson. – How do you use data collection, cameras and artificial intelligence to organize the working day for employees? – We appreciate the good work our departments do and use technology to enrich the experience of our employees, to support them in their roles, and to deliver to customers. We take privacy seriously and believe that our existing rules and processes are in line with national laws and EU regulations. Fear of surveillance in Norway too In Norway, too, there is a lot of surveillance at work. At least that’s what Sindre Hornnes, who is the project manager for LO’s summer patrol, thinks. For 30 years, LO has sent people out to check how things are with work rights in the summer. Hornnes says that many young people on summer jobs find themselves being watched by their boss. – More and more employers are using technology and cameras to keep an eye on the company and workplaces. But also several employers who use it to control young workers in a way that is not right, he says. Sindre Hornnes leads LO’s Summer Patrol. He says that many young people are monitored at work. Photo: Aslak Borgersrud – It is a development that is a bit worrying, says Hornnes. – How can it look concretely? – There are, for example, company managers who may have an app on their mobile phone which they use to check how employees are doing at work, while they themselves are abroad or around, he says. In recent years, they have registered what they believe to be breaches of the rules for camera surveillance at work: Alexander Cascio, head of the legal services at NHO, however, does not have the impression that there will be more surveillance in Norwegian workplaces. – We don’t have any figures on that. The Norwegian Data Protection Authority probably knows more, but we cannot see any particular trend one way or the other, he says. Alexander Cascio in NHO believes there are differences between the USA and Norway. – My impression is that we have quite a different working life here in Norway. Quite trust based. So an employer will always need a certain degree of control, but I think there is probably quite a big difference between the US and what we see in Norway, he adds. The Norwegian Data Protection Authority confirms to news that cases involving cameras and working life gradually increase from year to year. – It is nevertheless difficult to determine whether this involves increasing use of camera surveillance. The increase is probably compounded, writes senior legal advisor Marte Skaslien at the Norwegian Data Protection Authority in an email to news. She believes they are seeing more use of remote access, where the employer can monitor without being present at work. – It is easy to abuse such solutions, writes Skaslien. Have bought one thing on Amazon Back at the AUF camp on Utøya, Chris Smalls can say that conditions have improved somewhat after they got a union. Among other things, they have taken the lead in getting a new law in place to protect warehouse workers in New York, the so-called “Warehouse workers protection act”. , or if productivity demands make it impossible to take proper breaks. The young people at AUF’s summer camp on Utøya turned up enthusiastically to hear the trade unionist from Amazon’s stories. Photo: Aslak Borgersrud – Many Norwegians shop a lot on Amazon. Do you? – Absolutely not. I have never bought anything from them. Except when they fired me. Then I bought a megaphone, which I was going to use to demonstrate against them. But I never shop at Amazon. Then the shop that our mums and dads run in the neighborhood goes bankrupt. He thinks everyone should stop shopping there. – Yes, one thousand percent. I don’t think Jeff Bezos needs more money. Published 14.08.2024, at 09.14
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Worked in Amazon – recommends people to stop shopping there – news Norway – Overview of news from different parts of the country
