The Treatment of Amazon Warehouse Workers

The country's not about anything other than money. I mean, we just abandon every value other than profit maximization and the bottom line. That's what people need to understand about all this woke shit. Yes. It's really not about changing culture. Yeah, it's about money. I mean, that's- It's about power. You know, it's just like, it's funny. There's a big article in New York Times today about inside an Amazon warehouse, right? And Amazon was the first to say, Black Lives Matter and put that banner up on their page and everything and look, I support a lot of goals of that movement. But you read through this article and you find out, first of all, the way they treat their largely black and brown warehouse workers, I mean, it's despicable. They intentionally make sure they cannot move up the ladder. That's part of their business policy is if you're an hourly worker, you're not gonna get promoted and they try to force you out after three years because they think you're getting lazy. So this is the company that can, on the surface level say, Black Lives Matter because they think that's good for their profit maximization and their brand and their shareholder value. At the same time, what they're actually doing in real life, wildly different than that. So- And they specifically target black and brown people? Well, they target their warehouse workers who are, so the warehouse workers are 50 some percent black and brown. Management is 50 some, is overwhelmingly white and Asian. I thought the whole thing about Amazon was that you could move up the ladder. Nope. Walmart, who I'm also not a fan of, they actually promote from within. So most Walmart managers start out as hourly employees. So at least they have a track up. And again, I'm not a fan of Walmart, okay? Amazon intentionally, and this is what the New York Times revealed, they intentionally have a system because Bezos said he believes that these human beings are lazy and that after, you know, that they're gonna do the bare minimum. Who's quoted saying this? Bezos was quoted saying they're lazy? Or Jamie, if you can fold it. Yeah. I think there's a difference between lazy and having a shitty job. People need to understand that. Like, Zachary, in your abuse, you're treated like a robot in a cog day in and day out. You're fired, like, if you are a little bit slow on your task, you might get fired by a frickin' app. Like, that's how dehumanizing it is. Well, let's explain to people don't understand how it works over there. Does anybody wanna explain? Yeah, I mean, they work in the where, right. So they have phones that are on there. Everything's tracking your movements. Steps, bathroom breaks as well. So the warehouses are also very large. So let's say you technically have a 20-minute break. It might take you 10 minutes to actually walk to the break room and back so you actually have, what, like a two-minute break while you're in there. And the whole thing around Amazon and why everyone should care is because Amazon, under the pandemic, exploded. Their stock price went up from, I think, 1,000 or so to a couple, 3,000. Bezos, personally, his wealth increased by $70 billion. Amazon is now the second largest employer in the United States. And this is incredibly important because as more Amazon market adoption happens, they are basically going to become the employer of choice. Whatever your grocery store or whatever was in your small town, these are the rural working-class Americans. This is their only job. So when you have one company which has all of this overwhelming power over rural working Americans and even suburban Americans, because this is Amazon's strategy. Dayton, Ohio is a good example. Alec McGillis, he wrote a great book on Amazon, shout out to him, talked about how Dayton was like this Silicon Valley of America in the 1900s, this manufacturing, middle-class jobs. Now, Dayton's prized economic value comes from the fact that it's one day's drive from one-third of the US population. So it's a great place for cardboard. So everybody there is all just involved in creating cardboard and other Amazon infrastructure. So the Amazonification, so to speak, or whatever of America makes it so that, let's say 30 years ago, you grew up in your town, you may have to go to Walmart, HEB, I grew up here in Texas, Kroger as well, McDonald's, something like that. Now, it's basically like McDonald's, Dairy Queen, and Amazon. And when Amazon is the prime market employer, they are the sole determiner of market conditions, increasingly. So it's Walmart and Amazon, which are number two. And we're talking about millions of people who are now working at this company. So people are like, why do you guys talk so much about Amazon? Because I can see the trends. This company's not going anywhere. Look, props to them. I love Amazon, I order a lot of stuff on Amazon. But increasingly becoming aware of the price of what it takes to do overnight delivery to your house at 4 a.m. in the morning, or increasingly becoming aware of the fact that they are basically on this mission to drive price down as much as possible and squeeze as much out of their workforce. That is where it's troubling. What was the furniture thing that we just covered? This is crazy. And did you see their delivery drivers have so, are so, like, the demands are so intense, they're having to pee in bottles and shit in bags. And they admitted shit in bags? Oh, that's where I draw the line. I don't really care if a guy has to pee in a bottle, but if a gal has to pee in a dog bowl, I'm like, this seems wrong. And that's the thing is like, I would like to click the button that's like, I'll pay a little bit more if you can promise me no driver had to shit in a bag in order to get this to be tomorrow. We kind of glossed over this thing where you said that Jeff Bezos said that people are lazy. Here's what the New York Times says, Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, did not want hourly workers to stick around for long, viewing a large disgruntled workforce as a threat. This other executive recalled who worked at Amazon, but then left. Company data showed that most employers became less eager over time, he said, and Mr. Bezos believed people were inherently lazy. What he would say is that our nature as humans is to expend as little energy as possible to get what we want or need. That was embedded throughout the business from the ease of instant ordering to the pervasive use of data to get the most out of employees. So guaranteed wage increases stop after three years, and Amazon provided incentives for low-skilled employees to leave. So every year they would offer associates thousands of dollars to resign. They made sure that any position, they gave people sort of the illusion of promotions being available, but then there'd be one promotion available for hundreds of people, and they very seldom hire management from within their own ranks. It's like they view us, it's totally class stratified as basically the bottom line. And of course, lower classes in America are disproportionately black and brown. It's not like they're specifically targeting black and brown people, but you have one class of people that they see as worthy of doing the grunt work and shitting in the bag, and one class of people that they think of it as worthy of actually having the more intellectual jobs and running the place. It's a really abhorrent way of viewing human beings, essentially, and so this is part of the kind of, again, rot of America that I also think is reflected with the John Cena thing, et cetera. It's like you're certainly more of a capitalist than I am, but you can't have a country where the only frickin' value is money. It's just, you see the sickness of people who have all these addictions in, or last year was the worst year on record for overdose, that you see the suicide rates spike. I mean, you see people who just feel like they have no meaning and no purpose and no grounding and no community, and all the life being sucked out of these human beings in these communities, it's just disgusting. Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience for free, only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips, easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience. 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