Regular readers of this blog will be aware that over the last few years I have been working for the Internet retailer Amazon.com. I say "work" but I use the term loosely its far more accurate to say I have had the piss taken out of me by Amazon and the various agencies who have employed me. It looks as though my time at Amazon has finally come to an end and my overwhelming feelings are relief and disappointment that four years of my professional life have been wasted.
I started at Amazon in October 2010, my career had gone into a few dead ends and I was anxious to kick start it and a world wide company like Amazon looked as good a place as any. A day examining the company and career section of its website showed it had openings in areas I was experienced in and they were doing things I'd like to do. My aim was to get in the door and start applying for jobs of which I had experience to work myself back up the career ladder.
I applied for a job at Amazons Fulfilment Centre in Swansea via an agency called Quest Recruitment. I did the required drugs and aptitude test and a week later they called back offering me the position of a picker. My job would be to collect items that customers had ordered via the website. Each team had an area manager (strangely mine was a temp) and some team leaders, there were also site reps on site to represent you on behalf of the agencies. I informed the area manager and site reps that I would like to be kept aware of any job opportunities on site as I was hoping to use this job as a stepping stone. Every week the site rep would come around with each persons score and give you a form with your stats on. Mine were quite good, often between 100% and 110% dipping down as low as 85% sometimes when there wasn't much work or I was injured. For those of you who can't remember winter 2010 was quite a cold one and at one point in South Wales public transport went down and I had to walk to work, during which I slipped and fell down the footbridge going over the roundabout just before Briton Ferry bridge and did my knee in. I was still able to complete my shift and fulfil my contracted hours.
One day I was going along doing a batch of orders in the pick tower and a chap walks up and stops me. He says he's an operations manager and my area manager has just informed in that my poor scores were bringing his teams scores down and that I should pull my finger out if I didn't want to be sacked at the end of the day. I informed him that my scores were over target for this and the previous few weeks and he walked off. I had a word with my site rep and said if my area manager was going to senior management telling them I had poor scores I wanted him reported to HR. (I couldn't go to HR as HR "do not handle temps") Then the following week I was called back to the pick desk with 10 other people for the area manager to give us a "pep talk." He gave everyone their score except me and us we had to improve, I asked for my score and he said 97%. Out of everyone else in that group the highest score anyone else had was 46%. I then asked why I was included in this group and his reply was "you all started at the same time and as a group are low scoring trouble makers." I immediately told the site rep to sort this guy out.
Anyway around this time the Christmas period ended and we moved into January, also the work started to dry up and lay offs happened. In the first week of January everyone else in that "pep talk" group was laid off and we were regularly sent home after 15 minutes of work (shifts rotated weekly between starting at 6AM or 2PM). On the 17th of January I was called down to the pick desk, the area manager told me when I arrived that I was being taken on as a permanent associate and congratulated me. I was well chuffed, I thought to myself "that's stage one dealt with lets get onto stage two and hopefully get my career back on track". A few hours later I had another message on my gun, with half an hour on the shift to go I was called back to the pick desk. The area manager had gone and all that was there was a team lead and cart runner. The team lead took my gun off me and said I was to wait in the drop zone for everyone else, I asked the cart runner what was happening and he said "your going to see HR." I thought, blimey that's quick, I'm going to be signing the forms and transferred from Quest to Amazon before the end of the shift. Myself and a few others then went up to a room in HR where we met some others from other departments. A HR officer then walked in and informed us we were being laid off as the early months of they year were traditionally quiet and the Christmas peak rush was over.
Needless to say I was pissed off, I informed them I had been told three hours previously I was being made permanent. The HR officer said I must have misunderstood what my area manager had told me, I informed her that I had been using the English language since moving on from baby talk and demanded to make an official complaint about my area manager and for him to be sacked. She said she couldn't do anything and that I should handle this via my Agency, now at this point I should say every other agency bar mine was present and as we were being made to clear our lockers and leave I had no way of getting to the agency desk on the Fulfilment Centre floor. The next day visited the Quest Recruitment Swansea branch, they said they couldn't do anything about my area manager as technically I wasn't an active associate on the Amazon contract anymore, however I did opt to put my name on the rehire list for when things started getting busy on the site.
If you'll indulge me ladies and gentle readers I'm now going to fiddle with the narrative. I would come back later in the year and the area manager not only was still there but had now been made permanent. I was told I couldn't make a formal complaint as six months had gone by. However the area manager (one Andrew Evans) wouldn't last long, it turned out his agency and Amazon hadn't performed a thorough background search on him and out of the blue Amazon would get a call from a newspaper asking about this:
http://www.southwales-eveningpost.co.uk/Dodgy-family-firms-preyed-customers/story-16819547-detail/story.html
It turns out that Andrew Evans had neglected to inform his employer that he had been done for fraud. Now I'm often one to give people the benefit of the doubt but I have to ask how a vindictive sicko who had tried to con vulnerable pensioners out of their savings can be put into a supervisory position without a background check being performed. Needless to say many complaints from temps had been made against him but they were all fobbed off. However when finding out about the above court case he was thrown out so fast his feet never touched the ground.
Well that's the story of my first stint with Amazon, I'll cover the rest of my time there at a later date.
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