Why Amazon’s Golden Handcuffs Scare the Bejesus Out of Me
By now you’ve read, the New York Times’s devastating piece on Amazon’s corporate culture, right? The piece hit home on so many levels for me. For one, my family is thoroughly hooked on Amazon. Hardly a week goes by that we don’t get a delivery, whether diapers, a book, or you name it. And it’s all delivered with brutal efficiency by, apparently, brutal people.
The other reason the piece hit home with me is that it didn’t feel distant. The allegedly abused white collar employees could be me. Had the piece been about Bangladeshi garment workers, California strawberry pickers or, even, Amazon’s equally overworked warehouse workers (who are mentioned in the piece, but not its focus), I would’ve read the piece in an entirely different way.
So, should I cancel my Amazon Prime account in order to punish the company for its practice of “purposeful Darwinism”? I’m torn.
On the one hand, what’s described is awful, but then again there are companies with far more egregious labor practices than Amazon’s practice of paying employees a lot and demanding a lot of them. (A highly paid tech worker had to work late night and weekends!? The horror.) Most of the employees profiled in the piece — the warehouse workers being a major potential exception — don’t suffer from a lack of career options. Microsoft and many other Seattle employers are ready to scoop them up, even if they are wary of hiring “Amholes” who’ve been trained to yell at their coworkers in order to get the “best” of them. So, if these employees can — and do — leave whenever they want to, then what’s the problem here? Or to my dilemma: is this *my* problem?
Could I simply leave this problem to the labor markets to sort out? If Amazon can no longer get and retain good employees, then Amazon will change. And that’s what I suspect will happen, especially in light of the attention the piece has received. At least I hope that’s what happens. I mean if I were a job prospect — especially a female one — why would I want to join Amazon?
Oh right, the money. And the chance to work on moon shot projects.
OK, so maybe I take the gig and stick with it long enough for my options to vest, but then leave for someplace where my coworkers don’t make me cry and I’m not expected to work 80+ hours a week. But where would that be?
That’s what’s so scary. What if abusing and overworking your employees becomes the norm? (Indeed, it already is at many law firms, consultancies and investment banks.) Sure, employees will churn after two years, but as long as there is always a steady stream of new applicants, so what? Lots of blue collar and farm jobs already operate this way, so why not white collar work, too?
I’d like to think that it’s too expensive for a company made up of “knowledge workers” like me to have a high turnover rate, but what if I’m wrong? What if Amazon is right? That even though employees like me will depart after two years, taking our “knowledge” with us, that that’s OK, because the cost of training a new (presumably younger and lower paid) employee is still less than it was to pay me and the switching cost of losing me?
No one is going to force me to work for Amazon if I don’t want to, but if Amazon’s “little known experiment” proves out — if as Times columnist Joe Nocera put it, Amazon proves that humans are fungible — then we white collar workers might all be over-worked Amazon-style, only without Amazon’s pay and perks.
So, am I going to stop ordering from Amazon? No. Amazon’s workers can demand better treatment or quit if it’s so intolerable. Do I hope some of them do? You bet.
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