Amazon worker Gerald Bryson had hand-counted thousands of items in his warehouse’s inventory over three days when his manager showed him a “Supportive Feedback Document.”
Bryson had made 22 errors, the 2018 write-up said, including tallying 19 products in a storage bin that in fact had 20. If Bryson erred like this six times within a year, the notice stated, he would be fired from the Staten Island warehouse, one of Amazon.com Inc’s (AMZN.O) largest in the United States. Internal Amazon documents, previously unreported, reveal how routinely the company measured workers’ performance in minute detail and admonished those who fell even slightly short of expectations – sometimes before their shift ended. In a single year ending April 2020, the company issued more than 13,000 so-called “disciplines” in Bryson’s warehouse alone, one lawyer for Amazon said in court papers. The facility had about 5,300 employees around that time.
