Since the high demand of online purchases, the conditions are getting worse from pandemic that affects to the employees.
There are two men, Arash and TK, who don’t want to show their last names for the fear of reprisal, who is working as a deliver packaging for Amazon in the Greater Toronto Area, tried to organize unions in 2017 and 2018.
“When the company realized I had started to talk to the other drivers about having a union, they started an anti-union campaign,” said Arash. “The company called an all-hands-on-deck meeting. In that meeting, the owner of the company, he said that Amazon has a problem with unions so if you decide to go unionize they’re just going to cut off our company and give the work to one of the other companies.”
Some employees are also trying to explain about the difficulty in working conditions has been getting tougher, they seem like Amazon is trying to neglect the circumstance and showing the unfair practices and retaliation behaviour to them.
The delivery company “fired me and 14 other of my colleagues,” said Arash.
However, Amazon has policies to track deter workers from staying around too long without doing nothing. For instance, they won’t have any annual raises after 3 years unless employees are promoted.
These are mechanisms “to kind of turn the workforce over to make sure the work force doesn’t get entrenched and disgruntled,” Stone said, and there is “an allergy to unionization.”
He used to work shifts of 10 to 12 hours and Amazon’s targets are intense for expecting to deliver around 17 packages per hour. Amazon put a handheld GPS device to him called a rabbit that tracked his package deliveries.
Even Though, he has to keep delivering all the packages from 7 to 9 days continuously and there wasn’t much time for lunch or bathroom breaks, which made him feel overworked and underpaid.
“If we had an issue, we’d talk to the company and the company would say, ‘It’s out of our hands, it’s in Amazon’s hands.’ And if you talk to Amazon, they’d say it’s out of our hands, it’s in the company’s hands…. That’s why I reached out to the union.”
Arash and TK say it was important for them to try to hold Amazon accountable.
“Me and Arash are not the only ones,” said TK. “I’m sure there are so many others that are feeling what we felt and are continuing to feel that. Maybe all this awareness kind of brings out what is to light, what is happening at Amazon.”