Castillo at JFK8 were told to take as much unpaid time off as they needed, then hit with mandatory overtime. Amid the pandemic, Amazon’s system burned through workers, resulted in inadvertent firings and stalled benefits, and impeded communication, casting a shadow over a business success story for the ages.Īmazon took steps unprecedented at the company to offer leniency, but then at times contradicted or ended them. In contrast to its precise, sophisticated processing of packages, Amazon’s model for managing people - heavily reliant on metrics, apps and chatbots - was uneven and strained even before the coronavirus arrived, with employees often having to act as their own caseworkers, interviews and records show. That success, speed and agility were possible because Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, had pioneered new ways of mass-managing people through technology, relying on a maze of systems that minimized human contact to grow unconstrained.īut the company was faltering in ways outsiders could not see, according to a New York Times examination of JFK8 over the last year.
Driven by a new sense of mission to serve customers afraid to shop in person, JFK8 helped Amazon smash shipping records, reach stratospheric sales and book the equivalent of the previous three years’ profits rolled into one.
With New York’s classic industries suffering mass collapse, the warehouse, called JFK8, absorbed hotel workers, actors, bartenders and dancers, paying nearly $18 an hour. Castillo’s workplace, the only Amazon fulfillment center in America’s largest city, was achieving the impossible during the pandemic. She wanted to ask the company: “Are your workers disposable? Can you just replace them?” “Haven’t they kept track of what happened to him?” she said. The return-to-work summons deepened her suspicion that Amazon didn’t fully register his situation. She managed to speak to several human resources workers, one of whom reinstated the payments, but after that, the dialogue mostly reverted to phone trees, auto-replies and voice mail messages on her husband’s phone asking if he was coming back. The company’s benefits were generous, but she had been left panicking as disability payments mysteriously halted. Emails and calls to Amazon’s automated systems often dead-ended. The responses were disjointed and confusing. Castillo, a polite, get-it-done physical therapist, had been alerting the company that her husband, who had been proud to work for the retail giant, was severely ill. Castillo with his wife, Ann, and their children.
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