A company I interact with regularly is Amazon. Amazon’s a multinational e-commerce technology company that provides a streaming service and e-commerce platform that sells various products through the internet and physical stores. The company is the number one most visited and used e-commerce platform for its availability and reliability when buying and selling products on the platform. Available in over 100 countries, Amazon has provided customers with safe and reliable transactions ever since the start of e-commerce culture. Amongst many other top multinational companies, Amazon is known to undermine and disregard its corporate social responsibility and transparency, which causes the company to receive backlash from critics and customers. To this day, Amazon is under scrutiny for its noncompliance to environmental sustainability, employee rights, community outreach programs, etc. In this essay, I will dig into Amazon’s issues regarding its ethics and social responsibility.
Over the years, Amazon is widely believed to have invested considerable amounts of money and time into its Corporate Social Responsibility programs. However, recent reports during the COVID-19 crisis states otherwise. Adverse reports regarding the environmental working conditions at Amazon warehouses have increased during the pandemic. Amazon lowered its prioritization towards employee safety and stuck to its goal, and focused on customer satisfaction. While on the surface, this does seem beneficial, amazon employees get fired regularly for “demanding adequate protection for warehouse workers during the pandemic.” However, after receiving backlash from critics and the general public, Amazon implemented roughly 150 process changes to protect its warehouse employees by increasing their COVID-19 testing and offering more significant compensation to its frontline employees. With these changes towards the working conditions, Amazon has still been under scrutiny for disregarding many other aspects of their social and ethical responsibilities.
Ethically, Amazon still does not care nor try to change their goals for the safety of the employees as they keep working on tight schedules and long hours. Amazon’s goal has always been to satisfy the customers and sacrifice anything to keep customers satisfied and loyal to their business. The CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, has always acknowledged these problems regarding the tight schedules and ethical working conditions but disregards any other process changes (besides the COVID-19 testing and financial compensation) and decides to “unveil robotic plans to keep the employees working.” Unlike other big companies, Amazon has never been transparent with the public regarding working conditions which is the sole reason for their high customer loyalty to the business. Part of the reason the company has kept this goal was due to the high demand working standards. An article by The Verge states that “workers lacked the permission for bathroom breaks and were forced to pee in bottles while simultaneously
working to meet their daily demands.” Furthermore, many of Amazon’s employees quit the company weekly as they are not compensated for their hard work and dedication to keep up with the high demands. From this, Amazon has not changed a single aspect of their company so long as it takes in revenue and keeps up with its high customer loyalty and satisfaction.
“We are humans, not robots!” protested a group of Amazon warehouse employees in Minnesota. Throughout the years, Amazon has lacked the corporate social responsibility to treat their workers as regular employees. With the advancement of technology, instead of employing its technological capabilities in the workforce by doing the physical work. It is used to dehumanize the work demands of employees and create a more exhausting work environment. Amazon’s technology has employed a work pace with an almost robotic-like structure forcing workers to complete tasks efficiently and on time. All work in the Amazon warehouses is monitored, controlled, and timed. If tasks were not completed on time, workers were given 18 minutes of overtime to complete their tasks. If the tasks were not completed even with the extra time, the employees would be getting less pay by the end of the month. In an interview with Time magazine, an Amazon warehouse employee stated, “After I completed a task, the scan gun not only immediately gave me a new one but also started counting down the second I had left to do it. This shows how Amazon treats their employees like robots and dehumanizes the work environment even after “trying” to employ a safer working environment.
With all that being said, I have several recommendations for Amazon to create a safe, ethical, and socially responsible environment for the business. First, Amazon should change its goals and priorities to make sure that it keeps its customer loyalty while creating a safe and ethical environment for its workers. Over the years, Amazon has already built a significant reputation for being a fast, efficient, and reliable e-commerce platform to buy and sell products. Even if there is a slight change in working conditions, customers will be loyal to the company. For me, since I’m a regular customer of Amazon, I wouldn’t necessarily care if packages took slightly longer to arrive at my doorstep since I know the package will arrive safely. Suppose amazon slightly sacrificed delivery times with safer working conditions. It will benefit both the customers and the workers as the business will keep up with its corporate social responsibility, and workers will also stay in the company. Second, Amazon should use its technological capabilities to enforce a more accessible working environment for its employees. As I stated before, Amazon uses its technology to monitor and time their employees – which dehumanizes the working environment as they are paced for each task. Instead, I suggest Amazon use their technology to do more physical work, and the employees can control this technology for the same efficiency they had if humans did all the work. Not only will the working efficiency be the same, if not more, it will also reduce the physical stress the employees will need to go through while working long hours in the warehouses. Lastly, Amazon should treat their employees to more breaks and a better community with less restrictive work. Amazon does not treat its warehouse employees like a community, leading to an unhappy working environment. Treating workers like this is highly unethical as they are restricted from socialization and are forced to keep up with the pace. This workplace practice is somewhat common and leads to painful conditions which lead to an unhappy lifestyle. I suggest that Amazon treat the workers fairly and enforce a community amongst all the workers, so they can work without being repressed by the workload.
Nevertheless, with all these arguments stated, Amazon is not a perfect company. Although it is in the top 10 globally, it still receives criticism daily for its inability to keep up with corporate social responsibility and unethical practices. With the criticism and suggestions stated previously, I believe that Amazon could be a mere perfect company with high customer loyalty while also treating its employees like humans and creating a happier working environment. Even though I am still an avid user of Amazon’s e-commerce platform, company secrets like these often stir me away from regularly using their platform again.
Sources:
https://www.thomasnet.com/articles/other/amazon-csr-sustainability/
https://time.com/5629233/amazon-warehouse-employee-treatment-robots/
