A 63-year-old Amazon worker in Bristol was reportedly put on a final warning for productivity after a tracking device deemed his work too slow. The incident, which happened a few years ago, was recounted by Labour MP Darren Jones during a grilling of Amazon's European head of public policy Brian Palmer in front of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Select Committee.
During the hearing yesterday (Tuesday), MPs challenged him over Amazon's approach to workers' rights and his claim that the company surveils its goods and not its workers. The MP for Bristol North West was unsatisfied with Mr Palmer's responses and gave a specific example from his constituency to illustrate his point.
Mr Jones said: "He was 63, he was [working] with you just to fill his time before his pension. He came to see me in my surgery to tell me that he had...some kit that basically told him he wasn't packing things quickly enough and he'd had two strikes already.
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"So he went to see his productivity manager, and the productivity manager said, 'Why are you not packing things more quickly? The system is telling us you're not being productive enough'. And he said, 'I'm 63, I'm working as quickly as I can. It's pretty cold in here, I can't go any quicker'...That is surveilling the worker, isn't it? Not the goods?"
When Mr Palmer said he wasn't familiar with the specific instance, Mr Jones interjected: "I don't want you to comment on the individual case because that's a cop-out of an answer," before later challenging him again, "Do you not see there's a problem? There's an algorithm here tracking a human worker...you were going to sack him based on what the algorithm decided whether he was productive or not - that's an issue isn't it?
"The conversation he had with his productivity manager was 'well, the system told me you're not being productive enough', that's not a human in the loop - that's a human telling another human what the computer told him."
A clip of the questioning was tweeted by the Politics JOE UK account, but the full committee footage is available on the Parliament.tv archive. Mr Palmer admitted that Amazon does follow the productivity of workers in its warehouses and that what the Bristol employee had said, about the company's policy of terminating employees with three tracked performance strikes, was correct.
However, he added: "The number of performance-related folks that leave the company is a very small minority, that it not where we focus. If there are issues where someone is having performance-related issues, we want to understand why and how we can help them."
Mr Jones asked him to answer the question that "if someone has three productivity flags on the system, can they be fired at that point?" After a hesitation, Mr Palmer said the answer was yes. However, he added that conversations would take place with management and HR and more likely the employee would be invited to consider a different role in the company to better suit their skills.
Amazon's Bristol warehouse in Avonmouth is one of dozens of fulfilment centres (FC) that the company has across the UK. It’s home to around 1,500 workers who handle hundreds of thousands of items every day.
The questioning was part of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee's investigations into how artificial intelligence and technology is changing the workplace and what this means for the UK workforce. Mr Palmer was one of several representatives of employers, also including Zoom and techUK.
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