Amazon, Walmart Called Out for ‘Excessive’ Warehouse Surveillance
Amazon and Walmart are under fire from a nonprofit organization for what it calls “excessive” workplace surveillance in their warehouses that ultimately erodes worker rights.
Activist group Oxfam released a report Wednesday saying that 72 percent of Amazon warehouse workers and 67 percent of Walmart warehouse workers reported how fast they work in detail always or most of the time.
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That surveillance brings an added burden for some—42 percent of Walmart workers responded that they feel a sense of pressure to work faster always or most of the time, with 41 percent of Amazon workers reporting the same. And more individual employees—56 percent of Walmart staff and 45 percent of Amazon workers—feel keeping up with the pace is hard.
The combo of the surveillance and expectations of pace can have negative impacts—for example, 54 percent of Amazon and 57 percent of Walmart respondents said their production rate makes it difficult for them to use the bathroom at least some of the time.
To compile the 52-page report, Oxfam used data from two surveys from the Center for Urban Economic Development (CUED), a research organization at the University of Illinois Chicago. The surveys included responses from 1,484 Amazon workers and 444 Walmart workers.
Oxfam supplemented the quantitative CUED results with its own qualitative interviews with several unidentified warehouse workers for both retail giants.
CUED’s report on Amazon initially broke in October 2023, which the e-commerce giant slammed at the time as “not a ‘study’” but “a survey done on social media, by groups with an ulterior motive.” The report tied the concerns regarding surveillance to another hot-button issue surrounding Amazon warehouses: worker safety and injuries.
At the time, Amazon had maintained that the data it submits to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) shows that warehouse injury rates “have improved significantly and we’re slightly above the average in some areas and slightly below the average in others.”
The company recently revealed improvements in certain metrics it reports to OSHA, saying its 2023 recordable incident rate (RIR) improved 30 percent over the past four years and 8 percent year over year. Additionally, lost time incident rate (LTIR)—which includes any work-related injury that requires someone to take time away from work—improved 60 percent over the past four years and 16 percent from 2022 totals.
Maureen Lynch Vogel, an Amazon spokesperson, told Sourcing Journal that the tech titan has “strong disagreements” with the characterizations and conclusions in Oxfam’s report, noting that many were “based on flawed methodology and hyperbolic anecdotes.”
“In reality, Amazon has made notable safety gains and enriched the communities in which we operate, providing safe, good paying jobs with health benefits and educational opportunities,” Vogel said. “Traditionally, researchers work to disprove pre-existing beliefs and biases, but the organizations involved in this paper did the opposite—they started with biases and sought to prove them—which is disappointing. We’re not perfect, but we’re making measurable progress and our employees’ health, safety and well-being will always be our top priority.”
Amazon staff also wrote a blog post Wednesday, arguing that Oxfam misunderstands what the technology in Amazon warehouses does.
“Our facilities house hundreds of thousands of products that will be shipped to customers around the world, and the technology in our facilities helps guide the flow of goods through the sites,” according to Amazon. “This is similar to technology used throughout the industry. We do not use the camera technology in our warehouses to monitor employees.”
Unlike the Amazon survey, CUED’s report on Walmart had not been publicly released prior to Wednesday’s Oxfam report.
Sourcing Journal reached out to Walmart for comment.
The report suggests that Amazon and Walmart seem to prioritize surveillance more than their peers. Sixty percent of Amazon workers and 58 percent of Walmart workers reported that monitoring and surveillance were higher than at previous jobs.
And despite this focus on surveillance, it appears employees don’t why the monitoring that takes place, or how much it potentially breaches privacy. Seventy percent of Amazon workers and 69 percent of Walmart workers were unable to confirm that the company they work for takes adequate steps to explain how their data is being used.
Oxfam noted in the report that while both companies have identified their human rights risks, the “efforts to address these risks have proven insufficient.”
The nonprofit also called on the federal government to enforce policies that can better protect warehouse workers, such as passing the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and the Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act, or establishing national standards similar to legislation such as New York’s Warehouse Worker Protection Act.
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