Littrell said he walks 15 miles or more every shift as a picker because his warehouse does not have robotics technology where items are brought to pickers. And it doesn’t matter if you were doing your job – you were not meeting the expectation,” said Littrell. “Each one of those instances where I was taking too long to find an item counted against me, and that is all added up, and then they count that as your total time off. One issue is Amazon’s “time off task” metric, he said, where Amazon monitors employees’ productivity and issues write-ups, which can lead to termination if too much “time off task” is accrued. Matt Littrell, 22, a picker at Amazon in Campbellsville, Kentucky, since early 2021, who is trying to organize a union at the warehouse, said Amazon’s hiring practices, productivity quotas, attendance policies and unequal enforcement of rules are contributors to the lack of job security that drives Amazon’s high turnover. Workers and labor groups have long decried Amazon’s working conditions and high employee turnover amid high injury rates. As the US’s second largest private employer, it is now struggling to replace all the workers it loses. But Amazon also faces a problem of scale. In part, Bezos’s change of heart is down to a wave of unionization efforts at the company’s warehouses. Amazon will commit to being “earth’s best employer and earth’s safest place to work”, he wrote. But in his final letter to shareholders as chief executive last year, Bezos said the company had to “do a better job” for its employees. Bezos originally welcomed high turnover, fearing long-term employees would slack off and cause a “march to mediocrity”. By contrast the annual average turnover in transportation, warehousing and utilities was 49% in 2021 and in retail it was 64.6%, less than half of Amazon’s turnover.Įven Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, is worried. Before the pandemic, Amazon was losing about 3% of its workforce weekly, or 150% annually. Amazon is right to be worried – its staff turnover rate is astronomical.

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