![]() Weise took masked walks with Paul Stroup, a data scientist who had tried to steer Amazon through the crisis but left thinking Amazon could do better by its workers. They spoke with human resources staff and corporate leaders, who described Amazon’s glitchy, strained systems and the business challenge of maintaining staff during a public health emergency. Knowing that their requests to interview Amazon’s most senior executives were long shots, the reporters had to find creative ways of understanding the culture inside JFK8. “Amazon was a lifeline for them, until it wasn’t,” Ms. Ashford found that new hires were grateful for the pay but left after a few weeks. Kantor spent many hours on the phone and at the bus stop outside JFK8, including on Prime Day, asking workers about their experiences. To help tackle the huge project, Grace Ashford, a researcher on the Investigations desk, joined the team. Weise contacted corporate employees, many of whom never responded. They set out to chronicle Amazon’s core relationship with its humongous, growing work force - who got hired and fired, and the rules, systems and assumptions that governed everything in between.īut JFK8 was vast - about 5,000 employees in a space the size of 15 football fields - and managers and human resources workers were reluctant to talk. The Times reporters, focusing on JFK8, had a different goal: to understand the connection between the company’s employment model and its astonishing success. Other media outlets had examined working conditions, injury rates and numerous other aspects of Amazon warehouses. Santos had worked at JFK8 on Staten Island, a compelling setting for a potential investigation: the only Amazon fulfillment center in the nation’s largest city, operating under maximum pandemic pressure to deliver to homebound customers. Those questions led to a recent Times investigative report on the company that revealed systemic problems in its model for managing workers, such as unbridled turnover, minimal human contact, an error-plagued leave system, delayed benefits and mistaken firings. ![]() Santos’s story raised fairness questions, and a business one: Why would Amazon, voracious for workers, fire a good employee? during one bad day filled with mishaps she said were beyond her control. Kantor met with Dayana Santos, an employee who had been repeatedly praised by her bosses but fired for too much T.O.T. She wanted to look more closely at “time off task,” or T.O.T., Amazon’s practice of monitoring workers by the second and disciplining them for too many unexcused pauses. In August, she got a call from Jodi Kantor, a Times reporter in Brooklyn who was talking to workers from a variety of industries who were struggling with strict rules about time and attendance during the pandemic. Why?Įxecutives had an “almost palpable fear of running out of workers,” she said later. Yet, in spite of solid wages and generous benefits, it was quickly cycling through employees. Approaching the million-worker mark, Amazon was on track to becoming the largest private employer in the United States. Last summer, amid a hiring spree at Amazon so gigantic it left historians struggling for comparisons, Karen Weise, a Times reporter who covers the company from Seattle, brought up a puzzling question to her editors. ![]() Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together. ![]()
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