Amazon workers defend warehouse working conditions

Amazon employees have hit back at the negative coverage of working conditions in the online giant’s warehouses.

Contrary to reports, the retailer’s pickers and packers “leave [their] shift stress-free”, “make a living wage” and are allowed breaks to go to the toilet, they insist.

The robust defences come courtesy of around 16 Twitter accounts belonging to “FC ambassadors”, a cadre of Amazon employees who supposedly represent the hundreds of thousands of workers employed in the company’s “fulfillment centres”.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Working conditions at the firm’s 140 fulfillment centres around the world, which includes 16 in the UK, have come under intense scrutiny in recent years.

Earlier this year, journalist James Bloodworth published a book detailing his experiences working undercover at a UK Amazon warehouse, which he compared to a prison.

Bloodworth’s descriptions of poor treatment, invasive security checks and relentless targets, which force workers to give up breaks – and even visits to the toilet – have been echoed by past and current employees.

The FC ambassadors paint a very different picture of life inside Amazon’s warehouses.

The unflaggingly upbeat tweets “pepper emojis into conversations about the generosity of their benefits packages and job satisfaction”, reports the Seattle Times.

Not everyone is convinced, however.

Tech blog TechCrunch, whose sister site Gizmodo has previously reported on poor working conditions at Amazon warehouses, describes the apparently overjoyed employees as an “unnerving, Stepford-like presence”.

Meanwhile The Guardian says that the profiles are “remarkably uniform in look and tone” and tweet almost entirely in response to negative comments posted on Twitter, suggesting more than a little corporate direction is at play.

Amazon assured the TechCrunch reporter Devin Coldewey that all FC ambassadors were real employees who have experience working in their fulfillment centres, but it’s unclear whether social media advocacy is currently their full-time role.

One FC ambassador, “Sean”, emphatically denied that his online defence of his employer was anything less than genuine.

“There doesn’t have to be an angle to love what we do and share it with the public,” he said.

Unsurprisingly, parody accounts have already sprung up satirising Amazon’s latest tactic to gain positive PR: