Syracuse, N.Y. — A thousand people could be going to work next year in a gigantic distribution center proposed in the Syracuse suburb of Clay.

What will it be like to work there?

That’s hard to say for sure, but if the facility is for Amazon — as experts say it must be — it is possible to get a good idea what it would be like to work in the nearly 4 million-square-foot facility.

Critics of Amazon, including some former employees, question the quality of the jobs. They paint a picture of a high-stress workplace where workers are constantly monitored and required to meet demanding production quotas that leave little time even for bathroom breaks.

A woman who worked at Amazon’s fulfillment center on Staten Island for a month (until she quit) told the New York Post recently that the place was a “cult-like” sweatshop.

“At Amazon, you were surrounded by bots, and they were treated better than the humans,” she said.

On the other hand, it’s a full-time job. The pay at Amazon warehouses exceeds that of many low-wage occupations and comes with a full range of benefits.

The jobs can provide gainful employment for people who lack the college degrees or technical skills sought by many employers and who have not really benefited from the nation’s strong economy.

“Amazon is proud to provide a safe, quality work environment in which associates are the heart and soul of our operations,” company spokesperson Rachael Lighty told Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard in a statement.

“We believe so strongly in the environment provided for fulfillment center employees, including our safety culture, that we offer public tours where anyone can come see for themselves one of our sites and its working conditions firsthand.”

For all the criticism around the country, Amazon has a ready defense: People want its jobs.

The company continues to automate the operation of its warehouses. The Clay center — which would be the company’s biggest facility anywhere — and the Central New York workforce’s response to it will be the ultimate test of that progress.

Pickers, packers and points

Most jobs at Amazon warehouses are those of pickers and packers. Pickers pull merchandise off storage shelves and place them in bins, then put the bins on conveyor belts to be taken to the packers. The packers package up the products, slap a label on them and put them on another conveyor belt to be taken to a waiting truck.

Emily Guendelsberger, a journalist, took a pre-Christmas job at Amazon in 2015 after the newspaper she worked for in Philadelphia closed. She lasted a month. But before she quit, it gave her enough experience to write one of the few first-hand accounts of what it’s like to work in an Amazon warehouse.

At first, she said, she got a certain pleasure from all the running around she was doing as a “picker” at the 25-acre Amazon fulfillment center (Amazon’s name for its warehouses) outside Louisville, Kentucky.

A GPS-enabled, hand-held scanner would tell her what items to pull off the shelves, where to find them and then begin a countdown of the time she was allowed to complete the task. She would place the items in a yellow bin, known as a “tote,” that she would push around with her.

When a bin was two-thirds full, she would push it to the nearest conveyor belt and “send it gliding off to parts unknown, then start a new one,” Guendelsberger wrote in her 2019 book, “On The Clock.”

“All day, I’m charmed that my scanner thanks me every time I drop a yellow tote off at the conveyor belt,” she said. “Watching it sail off into the distance gives me a weird feeling of satisfaction, like I really am helping customers fulfill their dreams.”

As the days wore on, though, her feelings changed. A step counter she attached to her shoelaces showed she was walking up to 15 miles a day at the gigantic warehouse. Guendelsberger described a “stabbing pain” in her swollen feet that “spread up through my legs and hips.”

“Every time the scanner has me squat down to get something from a low drawer, it’s a little harder to force myself back up to standing.”

Amazon employs a point system to decide who keeps a job. Workers are given points for, say, being late to work without an approved exception, failing to show up for work or leaving work before the shift ends, or coming back from a break even a minute late.

“You have six points: if you’re at six points, your assignment with Amazon will end,” a trainer told Guendelsberger, according to her book. “Try to keep your points low – that way you will have flexibility in case of an emergency.”

Amazon responded by saying Guendelsberger only worked about 11 days and her book was not an accurate portrayal of working conditions.

“We are proud of our safe workplaces and her allegations are demeaning to our passionate employees,” the company told the New York Post.

High stress

Other critics say Amazon sets unreasonably high production quotas for its warehouse workers, creating constant stress.

Amazon keeps track of how long it takes pickers to pull items from shelves and put them on a bin. Workers who fail to meet the rates set by the company to pull items risk losing their jobs. That puts a lot of mental and physical pressure on workers, who must worry about taking too much time on breaks, such as trips to the bathroom, Guendelsberger said.

The warehouse work was so stressful, she said, that Amazon installed vending machines with free over-the-counter pain medications, like ibuprofen, for employees to cut down on the lines of workers outside the facility’s AMCARE (nurse’s) office.

“They have very demanding production lines and a lack of breaks,” said Patricia Campos-Medina, extension associate and co-director of the Union Leadership Institute at Cornell University. “There’s a lot of monitoring.”

Lighty, the Amazon spokesperson, said employee performance is measured and evaluated over a long period “as we know that a variety of things could impact the ability to meet expectations in any given day or hour.”

“We support people who are not performing to the levels expected with dedicated coaching to help them improve,” she said.

She said employees are required to take breaks throughout their shift.

“Amazon associates work four days on, three days off, 10-hour shifts with scheduled breaks throughout the day — either two 30-minute breaks or one 30-minute break and two 15-minute breaks,” she said. “However, employees may take short breaks, which include breaks to use the bathroom, grab a drink, or speak with managers, at any time throughout the day — all of which are paid.”

She said there are multiple bathrooms on each floor of its fulfillment centers, as well as multiple break rooms or break areas with seating, vending machines, refrigerators, microwaves and entertainment or leisure activities such as TVs and games such as basketball or foosball tables.

“Simply put, people would not want to work for Amazon if our working conditions truly were as our critics portray them to be in this period of record low unemployment and plentiful job opportunities,” Lighty said. “But 300,000-plus people choose to work for Amazon in hourly roles. In fact, the No. 1 recruiting arm for Amazon is our associates.”

What about here?

It is unlikely that the conditions described at other Amazon facilities would be the same as those at the distribution center in Clay, should it be operated by Amazon.

Rendering shows a proposed five-story, nearly 3.8-million-square-foot distribution center off Morgan Road in Clay, New York. Langan EngineeringLangan Engineering

Trammell Crow told town officials the Clay facility will be highly automated, with a complex system of conveyors bringing products in and out of the building, and up and down its five floors.

Amazon has been investing heavily to automate as much of its warehouse operations as possible, with robots increasingly handling tasks once done by people.

Video from inside an Amazon fulfillment center that opened on Staten Island last year shows robots, not humans, doing most of the running around.

Are they safe?

The New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, a union-backed workers’ rights group, said in a recent report that it found from interviewing 145 employees at Amazon’s Staten Island center that workers experience “harmful working conditions and a workplace culture that prioritizes line speeds over human safety.”

Amazon called the organization’s report “false” and “misleading” and said it was based on interviews with less than 3% of the center’s 4,500 employees.

Reveal, from The Center for Investigative Reporting, reported in November that Amazon’s obsession with speed has turned its warehouses into “injury mills.”

It said internal injury records from 23 of the company’s 110 fulfillment centers nationwide showed that the rate of serious injuries for those facilities was more than double the national average for the warehousing industry: 9.6 serious injuries per 100 full-time workers in 2018, compared with an industry average that year of 4.

Amazon told the news site that Amazon’s injury rates are high because it is more aggressive than many other companies about recording worker injuries and cautious about allowing injured workers to return to work before they are ready.

Lighty said the company provided more than a million hours of safety training to employees and invested more than $55 million on safety improvement projects across the U.S. in 2018 and invested more than $61 million in safety projects in 2019.

“Operational meetings, new hire orientation, process training, and new process development begin with safety and have safety metrics and audits integrated within each program,” she said.

Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon, who has supported Trammell Crow’s plans to build in Clay, declined through a spokesman to talk about the working conditions at the facility because no tenant has been announced yet.

“It would literally be pure speculation at this point,” said the county executive spokesman, Justin Sayles.

He added that, whoever the tenant turns out to be, it will be required to abide by New York’s “robust” labor laws.

No unions

Amazon’s 750,000 U.S. workers are not unionized. Campos-Medina, the Cornell labor expert, said Amazon is good at convincing workers they are better off without a union.

“They’re very anti-union,” she said. “It’s part philosophical: ‘We are family. Amazon takes care of you. You do well, we do well.’”

Zachary Lerner, director of labor organizing for New York Communities for Change, said high employee turnover makes it difficult to get Amazon workers to join a union.

“We’ve seen tons of workers who only last a few weeks,” Lerner said.

The community organization, though not a labor union, has been working with employees at Amazon’s Staten Island facility to demand better working conditions.

Members of Workers United, an SEIU (Service Employees International Union) affiliate, hold a rally outside the Amazon fulfillment center in Robbinsville, New Jersey, on Dec. 18, 2018, calling for safer and better working conditions.Michael Mancuso | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Unions have not given up trying to organize Amazon workers. Three big ones — the Teamsters, the United Food & Commercial Workers Union, and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union – are talking to Amazon workers, according to media reports.

A handful of Amazon workers went on strike on Prime Day in July at a fulfillment center in Shakopee, Minnesota. It was the first strike by U.S. workers during the company’s annual sales events that started five years ago, and one of several protests in the U.S. in the past year, CNBC reported.

Ann Marie Taliercio, president of the Central New York Area Labor Federation, said the alliance will seek to represent the workers who build the Clay distribution center and those who work there after it is built.

“We’re all hoping we have a friendly face on the other side of the table, whoever the company is,” Taliercio said.

What’s the pay?

Under political and economic pressure to raise the pay for its employees, Amazon in late 2018 announced it would pay its U.S. workers a minimum of $15 an hour, which is more than what many low-wage occupations pay.

That’s close to the wage that Trammell Crow said most workers at the Clay distribution center will be paid. Of the 1,000 jobs at the facility, 900 will be paid at a rate of $30,000 a year for full-time workers, according to the company. That comes to $14.40 an hour. (The remaining 100 workers will make from $33,000 to $60,000 a year.)

The current minimum wage in Upstate New York rose to $11.80 at the end of 2019 and is scheduled to go to $12.50 at the end of 2020 and eventually to $15. So, the pay at the Clay distribution center will, at least initially, exceed minimum wage.

On top of the $15 minimum wage, Lighty said Amazon offers full-time employees comprehensive benefits including full medical, vision and dental insurance, as well as a 401(k) retirement plan with a 50% company match “starting on Day One.”

In addition, she said the company offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and has pledged to invest more than $700 million to provide “upskilling training” for 100,000 U.S. employees for in-demand jobs, even outside the company.

“Programs will help Amazonians from all backgrounds access training to move into highly skilled roles across the company’s corporate offices, tech hubs, fulfillment centers, retail stores and transportation network, or pursue career paths outside of Amazon,” she said.

How about vacation time?

Employees earn paid time off and receive six company paid holidays a year.

The number of vacation days are accrued on a per pay-period basis and depend on whether a worker is part time or full time. Full-time workers, for example, accrue a week’s vacation after one year and two weeks after two years of working for Amazon. After six years, they get three weeks of vacation.

Amazon says it grants paid sick time based on local, city and state ordinances.

How do I apply?

Interested in working for Amazon? The jobs page on the company’s website is a good place to start. It lets you search for available jobs by location and then apply online.

There are no jobs listed for the Syracuse area now. If Amazon leases the Clay facility as many expect, jobs at the center will likely begin to show up on the company’s website a few months before the facility opens.

Construction of the enormous facility is expected to start this spring and be completed in the fall of 2021.

Rick Moriarty covers business news and consumer issues. Have a question or news tip? Contact him anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 315-470-3148

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