![]() ![]() However, it is very hard to fully participate in the success of the company, beyond the good wages and good benefits, because it’s very hard to move up. Hourly workers get really excited to join Amazon because they feel like they’re going to be part of something very successful. If you look at the way they pay, they just don’t expect to keep people for very long. So turnover is almost built into the system. He was afraid of a stagnant workforce - what he would call a “march to mediocrity.” He envisioned Amazon as like the Marine Corps: You would come for two years, it would be really hard, and then you would move on. And one of them, a man named David Niekerk, who was an early, very influential Amazon HR person, explained that Bezos really wanted turnover. Karen interviewed people who helped build and oversee this system over the years. Jodi Kantor: Part of what was so interesting about kind of going on this journey of reporting and trying to answer that question is that it turns out that some of it relates back to Jeff Bezos’ ideas, and that some of this turnover is actually by design. “Amazon’s needs are so voracious right now and the attrition is so high that, as it is now, they need about 5% of the entire American workforce to apply each year.” Karen Weise, technology reporter for The New York Times Is Amazon’s high turnover sustainable?īrancaccio: Why could this possibly be the case when every single other business I ever talk to is trying to lower overhead by retaining employees? You don’t do an interview, you take an online assessment and you show up for work, basically - besides a drug test and some basic forms. And the hiring is completely automated, essentially. And so it creates these incredible pressures and demands to constantly be scooping up new people and putting them through the system. Weise: Exactly, it’s the equivalent of having to replace the entire workforce every eight months. And this is much higher than the warehousing and retail industry is broadly.īrancaccio: More people leave Amazon warehouses in a year than if you add up all the employees that are employed at Amazon warehouses? It’s actually so high that Amazon tracks it weekly. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.ĭavid Brancaccio: Among warehouse workers at Amazon, attrition for workers is how high? Kantor and Weise spoke with Brancaccio about whether Amazon’s uber-high attrition rate is sustainable - and the story of one family caught in the middle of the company’s human resources errors. ![]() The packing area at JFK8, Amazon’s warehouse in Staten Island. “So if they are so good with packages, how can they treat people so differently?” When’s the last time you got a mistaken item in an Amazon package? These people are logistical geniuses,” Kantor said. Weise and Kantor unearthed a web of confusing and confused, often technology-laden human resources systems that monitored worker productivity constantly but repeatedly made major errors, at times mistakenly terminating employees without cause and, at least once, mistakenly failing to terminate someone (who remains at the company today). He was afraid of a stagnant workforce - what he would call a ‘march to mediocrity,’ ” Kantor said. Part of what was so interesting, Kantor told “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio, was that Amazon has long seen high turnover as a good thing - and has deliberately encouraged it through various internal policies. “In conversations with current and former executives and leaders in Seattle, there is a palpable fear that Amazon will not have enough workers to be able to serve the customer demands that it foresees,” Weise said. “There’s an open question now - because the turnover is so high, and Amazon’s needs for growth and employment is so large - about whether or not it’s sustainable,” said New York Times technology reporter Karen Weise, who reported the story along with Jodi Kantor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at the Times. Amazon is currently the second-largest private employer in the U.S., and it could become the largest in a few years. But a new investigation by the New York Times raises significant questions about the company’s management of warehouse workers and discovers an unusually high rate of turnover among its hourly associates - around 150% a year, even before the pandemic, which means the company was losing around 3% of its warehouse workers each week ( nearly double the rate of similar businesses). ![]()
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