The warehouse distribution retail company Amazon apparently is implementing a secret policy where they only want to retain the fastest working percentile of their workers, and come up with excuses to fire the others, claiming they have "poor performance". But they do not have poor performance. Amazon makes their warehouse employees work at a very fast pace and demands perfection. The company makes it policy to fire employees with ease for little reason, even if it might not be the employee's fault, because they know it is easy to just hire new workers. That seems to be their business model. They know there is a "pipeline" of workers, and many become exhausted and burnt out and are on their way out. Amazon warehouses are notorious for having a super-fast inhumane pace of work, with managers under pressure to increase the speed of productivity. In my opinion, there seems to be some big labor rights issues with this policy. Probably no doubt Amazon knows that. I find this disgusting and "wrong". So to does the author of this article. To make matters even more outrageous, apparently the warehouse company is bringing in foreign immigrants through work visas to work in these unskilled low-paying jobs. If the immigrant doesn't perform well enough, working at a super fast pace, they will get fired and as a result be likely to lose their residency permit, since it can be hard to find another company to sponsor them, and then they will have to leave the country. This seems extremely exploitative. A former HR staffer at Amazon put employees on a performance-improvement plan known as Pivot. Then the HR staffer, who said they developed PTSD from the work, was put on their own PIP. I worked at Amazon in HR for several years. Not only did I administer Pivots, but it was eventually brought to my attention that I was going to be going through one. And it was driven hard by the HR VPs to show the metrics -- daily, weekly -- to make sure we knew who was in the pipeline. Not to improve, but who's in the pipeline to get out. There wasn't a lot of interest in improving people. You might be cutting some prime choice with the fat. And they were OK with that. They wanted that number. The managers who had to implement it and tell their people they were on Pivot -- I would say a majority of them hated it. The first thing you had to do is work with a Pivot consultant. So that was somebody in HR, besides the manager's business partner. And you'd talk about if it's the right time, if it's the wrong time to Pivot someone. I would say 80% of my time ended up focusing one way or another on Pivot. Either the Pivot appeal or the Pivot work that workers' managers had to do. And look, I'm not going to say you're going to ever find this somewhere, locked down in words. But the idea is, if you're putting somebody in Pivot, you make that so damn hard that they don't get out. Almost always, unless there was some really unique set of situations where it came out during the appeal, the success rate of that was virtually none. We had stack rank all of our employees. The way we broke it down, we called it top tier which was, you know, maybe 15-20% by the time it worked out. And then you had the middle. And then you have the bottom tier. The bottom tier was about 20-25%, maybe even up to 30%. We were way over how many people were actually underperforming or detrimental to the business. Maybe around 1%, 1.5 to 2% were actually not performing well. I was disgusted at what I was seeing with the Pivot process. This process alone has given me PTSD. It impacted me so much as a person that I had to get out of there. When it was justified, it was easier to push someone out. If it's deserved, there's no problem. But when it wasn't deserved, you had people crying and begging and they couldn't understand. You had visa-sponsored employees that once we Pivoted them and moved them out, they no longer were authorized to work in the United States. So they had to make immediate plans to get out of the country. And it's a long process to get sponsored by another group. In the years I was there, I never ever ever had any performance issue given to me -- not even anything close to being serious. I had no worries because I asked for feedback all the time. I'm like, "What can I do? How can I do better?" I didn't ever want to be blindsided by Pivot myself. And what a lot of people did -- if they got the indication that they were going down that track -- is they would transfer jobs right away. Some people were successful. A lot of people weren't. "I worked in Amazon HR and was 'disgusted at what I was seeing' with performance improvement plans. Then I got put on a PIP and knew I had to quit." by Tim Paradis Former Amazon HR Worker: Performance Improvement Process Gave Me PTSD (businessinsider.com) Nov 26, 2023 I thought I landed my dream job at Amazon. But after being put on an impossible performance plan, I quit even though I lost a $110,000 deposit on a house. Tim Paradis. Business Insider. October 8, 2023 related thread: Harsh work conditions in Amazon workplaces (posted Feb 4, 2018 in Economics & Trade) Part of this sounds like a very bureaucratic and dysfunctional system. Is this even fair to the labor force? For Amazon to demand unreasonable super-fast pace of work that is not even very realistic or sustainable for a very big segment of workers? Does it seem okay for Amazon to be picky and choosy about which employees they want? These jobs are not even skilled or management positions, they are unskilled lower level warehouse positions. Many workers are normal people and don't have anything wrong with them. But Amazon wants to fire them because they know a percentage of the workers can work faster than the others. It should be emphasized that it's not as if any of these workers are slow. If they were slow, they would have been quickly fired in the first week. The hiring of immigrants through work visas is concerning, because not only are most of these immigrants desperate and willing to do anything not to be fired, putting up with the unreasonably fast work pace, but also brining in immigrants makes the rest of the country's workforce have to compete with that. Look, I'm a free market supporter and for the most part believe companies should be allowed to have any policies they want, but something seems very wrong here. Especially since Amazon is a very large gigantic company has almost completely taken over the mail-order retail sector, I think there are some monopoly pressures here. The company feels they're in a position to do whatever they want. It's not really as if there is another similar company most of these workers could leave to.
some employers no longer respect employees like in the old days - thus not a surprise employees have less respect for their employers and customers sadly this has been the trend for some time... do not see it changing
Abusing employees probably explains when so many packages go to the wrong address, never used to happen
If it's located in a right to work state then they can be fired at any time for any reason or no reason at all. Kind of sucks but it is what it is.
I ordered quite a bit of stuff and I've never had a problem. I had a product missing parts twice but it always gets here
we would think they were lost, never received even though show delivered, but around here we take the packages to the correct address
Would not surprise me in the least if there are not already "moles" working at Amazon for the express purpose of collecting evidence about this Pivot program. When they have enough evidence of SYSTEMIC employee abuse it will be used in a lawsuit where Amazon will be FORCED to pay SEVERANCE to all of the workers they abused in this manner.
When you hire someone you're simply hiring an employee not hooking up with a single mother to take care of her children.
I prefer right to hire and right to terminate. It's a two-way street you know, any employee is free to go and work somewhere else at any time for any reason or no reason. A free agent in the business of selling labor. Imagine if you had to sign a contract to work there. With very specific conditions on how you are permitted to terminate your contract.
Not that this is the thread to get into that can of worms but if you want to talk about ironically named bills..... There's no shortage of material on either side there. There's nothing wrong with at-will employment, it protects both the employer and the employee.
I take a couple of issues with that statement of yours. First, I do not think lawsuits are the best way to deal with this problem, I think society and government should come up with a better way. The courts can be very dysfunctional and I do not think are best equipped to deal with these issues. Maybe there needs to be some sort of guidelines that companies cannot do this, and a regulatory agency to help oversee it, if it is thought there is a problem. Second, even in the case of a lawsuit, I think in this case that might only bring a small pittance of justice, and not really address the issue. The employees should be entitled to unemployment claims, something that the company cheated them out of by claiming the firing was "at-fault". But that is really only a small part of a bigger issue. Employers should not be treating people this way. Whether all the employees who got fired got a severance payment is not the main issue. It seems wrong to just hire lots of ordinary people, work them at an unsustainably fast pace, and just keep a small segment of those people who are able to work at a fast pace. Maybe in some other jobs where the pay was much higher that could be acceptable, but not in this case. They seem to be treating employees like a disposable commodity, chewing them up and spitting them out. The top managers even know full well that there is a "pipeline" built into their business model. They hire lots of new workers and then later eventually fire a large percentage of them, only wanting to keep the "cream of the crop". Is it acceptable to do that when the wage in those warehouses is only 15 to 18 dollars per hour (depending on location)?
There's a solution.... Don't buy from Amazon. I challenge you to find something you can buy from Amazon that you can't buy from someone else (albeit for more money and/or less convenience). Full disclosure: I don't like Amazon either. And I just bought (literally today) some crap from Amazon. So I'm not 'holier than thou.' I procrastinated some Christmas gifts, and they get it to me before Christmas. So its w/e. But still. You don't have to buy from them.
