CEO Who Took $1M Pay Cut Pens A Viral Thread On How Amazon Exploits Its Workers, And It’s Beyond Alarming

You’ve probably heard Dan Price’s name before. The guy is the entrepreneur and CEO of Gravity Payments, well known for seeing his own employees as equals. In 2015, he left everyone virtually speechless by taking a bold move to cut his $1M pay to give all his employees $70K minimum salary. Since then, his company tripled and became a one-of-a-kind case study at Harvard Business School.

Today, Dan is back to shed light on Amazon, the super-rich exploiter company with a net worth of $1.7 trillion that has been shamelessly utilizing the most vulnerable members of its workforce. In his Twitter thread that lists all the ways in which Amazon exploits its workers, Dan gives a bit of context, stating “Amazon full-time warehouse employees make $31,200 a year. Jeff Bezos makes that every 12 seconds.”

“Cost to give warehouse workers 2 weeks paid sick leave + pay bumps so they don’t qualify for food stamps = 0.9% of Bezos’ fortune,” Dan writes before proceeding to name 40 ways in which the company does the exact opposite.

From the company’s warehouses having injury rates 2.5x the warehouse national average to the fact that workers’ quotas are so punishing that they have to pee in bottles, it’s hard to wrap one’s head around how on earth it all got to this point.

Dan Price, the CEO who famously cut his $1M pay to give all his employees $70K salary, penned this viral thread on how Amazon treats its workers

Image credits: danpriceseattle

Image credits: DanPriceSeattle

The reports from Amazon workers that they were forced to skip bathroom breaks and pee in bottles go back as far as 2018. Today, similar types of reports from the workers themselves have been surfing back into the spotlight again.

The Intercept has acquired formal policy documents and emails that referenced instances of peeing and defecating in bottles and bags. The magazine also spoke to Amazon workers who were granted anonymity, who confirmed that “the practice was so widespread due to pressure to meet quotas.”

Image credits: DanPriceSeattle

The Intercept has published one document from January, marked “Amazon Confidential,” which details various infractions by Amazon employees, including “public urination” and “public defecation,” which was provided by an Amazon employee in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Image credits: DanPriceSeattle

Meanwhile, a former delivery driver for one of Amazon’s delivery contractors, Halie Marie Brown from Manteca, California, explained that these instances happen “because we are literally implicitly forced to do so, otherwise we will end up losing our jobs for too many ‘undelivered packages.’”

Image credits: DanPriceSeattle

Another delivery employee told The Intercept that the workers are given “30 minutes of paid breaks, but you will not finish your work if you take it, no matter how fast you are.”

Image credits: DanPriceSeattle

But the managers would not ease the pressure, even keeping in mind that so many workers are forced to skip bathroom breaks. “In fact, over the course of my time there, our package and stop counts actually increased substantially,” the same worker confessed.

Image credits: DanPriceSeattle

The coronavirus pandemic has caused Amazon’s package orders to literally boom. According to The Intercept, the workers are now monitored and micromanaged by a specially designed surveillance arsenal. This adds up to the already enormous pressure, since the productivity quotas are being increased to humanly impossible heights.

Image credits: DanPriceSeattle

Meanwhile, Amazon firmly denies all the allegations that workers defecate in containers to meet the daily quotas. On Wednesday, the company tweeted at Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan: “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us,” it said.