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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning everyone. Coming up on today's show, we will follow the Biden, Putin summit taking place at this hour with Fred Kaplan, who writes the war stories column for Slate. Many of you know his great reporting. He follows US, Russia relations closely. We'll also look at the most interesting New York City primary races taking place in Manhattan. We'll look at how Eric Adams and Maya Wiley are competing for the votes of Black New Yorkers in particular, with their competing visions on crime and policing. That's all coming up. We start today with revelations from The New York Times about Amazon.

We all know that throughout the pandemic, Amazon has achieved quote, "Record growth and spectacular profits," as the article says, "With people so dependent on deliveries while staying at home, obviously." The story puts their success in a different light. Remember, a few months ago, when we were following the attempts at unionizing in one remote Amazon Fulfillment Center in Bessemer Alabama. Well, if you miss that news, the union lost the vote around 1,800 to 700 workers, so no union. While most of us moved on from that news cycle, three journalists have been digging deeper.

Their new piece called The Amazon Customers Don't See, gives us all an even closer look into the giant corporation by honing in on New York City's only Amazon Fulfillment Center, in the middle of the COVID pandemic. What they learned may also give us a look into the future as more companies push toward automation. With us now are, New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor, Prize-winning investigative reporter, and best-selling author, and Grace Ashford, researcher, and reporter with the investigations unit of The Times. Thank you both for being here. Hi Jodi. Hi Grace.

Jodi Kantor: Good morning.

Grace Ashford: Good to be here. Happy to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Let me start with you Jodi, for those who don't know what is JFK8. Why was that specific Amazon Fulfillment Center of interest to you for this story?

Jodi Kantor: That is exactly the right question. Brian, I've lived in New York, my whole life. I'm from Staten Island. I had barely known what JFK8 is. In fact, it is the only Amazon Fulfillment Center in New York City. It is the company's critical pipeline to the city. It was built in 2018 with a specific goal of conquering the New York market. Last year, as we were shut at home, and many of us were relying on Amazon, many of our packages came through JFK8. One of the origin points of the story was we said to ourselves, "What really happened inside this warehouse during the pandemic? How did they pull this off?"

Brian Lehrer: Before we even start to answer those questions, Amazon is on track to become the largest private employer in the United States, and New York City is New York City. Why did it have only this one fulfillment center for the largest city in the nation during the pandemic?

Jodi Kantor: Amazon has other facility-- Oh, go ahead, Grace.

Grace Ashford: No, please take it, Jodi. [chuckles]

Jodi Kantor: Basically, Amazon wants to build as close to cities as possible because it makes quick delivery much easier. Amazon has other facilities in New York City. The kind of huge facility that JFK8 is, this is the size of 15 football fields is very hard to build a New York. It's also, what makes it such a powerful employer because there are about 5,000 people who work at JFK8. JFK8 is important to the life of the city, not only as a place that gets us packages, but as a place that provides jobs.

Brian Lehrer: All right. A lot of this article or, at least, some major pieces of it are about turnover. According to the article, even before the pandemic, previously unreported data shows Amazon lost about 3% of its hourly associates each week, meaning the turnover among its workforce was roughly 150% a year. That rate almost double that of the retail and logistics industries has made some executives worry about running out of workers across America, unquote from the article. Well, Grace, can you tell us about how a company loses 150% of its workers a year? [chuckles]

Grace Ashford: Yes, it's a really interesting number, and one that's kind of hard to wrap your head around. For us, I think in our reporting process, a foundational figure that we were just trying to make sense of. Amazon is this incredible employer that offers really well-paying jobs and good benefits as many of the people in our story took advantage of. Why are people leaving? One way to think about it is that actually to put that kind of 3% number in context, it's the equivalent of if they were to be replacing their entire hourly workforce once every eight months. As Jodi said, a facility with 5,000 people, it's just a huge number of people.

Brian Lehrer: You put this in the context Jodi, of what you call Amazon's march to mediocrity, really?

Jodi Kantor: Okay. I'd say one of the big takeaways from this story is that the problems, and we found many problems with Amazon as an employer, they have a common philosophical stem. They go back to Jeff Bezos's ideas about what kind of workforce he wanted. Some brave Amazon high-level veterans’ kind of corporate types in Seattle, who helped create the system and run it, went on the record with our colleague, Karen Weiss, about their concerns about what's happening. It goes something like this. They say that Bezos's original idea, the theory that the whole company is built around is the idea that people are inherently lazy, that they want to expend as little energy as possible.

That Bezos didn't want a long-standing workforce, really long tenure because he felt he would get less and less out of people over time. By the way, this applied to his thinking about customers too. This is part of why he wants to make it really easy for you to get things delivered at home. He built this system that essentially encourages high turnover and discourages promotion. It's a provocative counter to the conventional idea that a long-serving, experienced employee is the best employee. What happens at Amazon is that people come and go really quickly. They pride themselves on seasonal employment. It's very hard to be a warehouse worker for more than a few years.

Things like raises or automatic raises disappear. They even, believe it or not, give people thousands of dollars to leave. You walk through an Amazon Fulfillment Center and just see training for courses to launch a different career in the lobby or the training room, believe it or not. Also, promotion is very, very limited. This is important because Amazon is, as you know, so successful that it is almost hard to find the words for how successful it is. Yet, people who work there as hourly workers often can't find a path upwards. It's possible, but not easy for somebody who comes in at $18 an hour at JFK8 to grow and flourish for years at higher and higher levels at the company.

One of the people we wrote about was frustrated he couldn't get promoted. We found out that at a certain point, he was one of 382 people who applied for a job. Macro, if you go back to Bezos, in your initial question, the concern here is that the astonishing success that Amazon has had is mostly accruing to people like Bezos. It is not, aside from having good wages in solid benefits, which is a real thing, the incredible success of the company is not fully accruing to the workforce that actually powers the company, which, by the way, is mostly Black and Latino workers.

Brian Lehrer: Well, let's get some of the individual stories, maybe the most heartbreaking Grace is what happened to longtime Amazon employee, Alberto Castillo. Can you tell us about his Amazon story and the disturbing return-to-work summons that his wife got?

Grace Ashford: Sure. Yes. Alberto is a great example. He was very proud to work at Amazon and was very close with many of his colleagues. He got sick, like a lot of New Yorkers did in March, with COVID and took some time off. His condition deteriorated. He ended up being hospitalized and intubated and was not responsive from that point forward. His wife Ann, who in our story, and who Jodi can also speak to a little bit more what an incredible person she is, was really doing her best to make the best out of a really difficult situation. She was trying to take care of her kids and also trying to manage all of his information, his benefits, which were, of course, in his phone and his system

Trying really desperately to let Amazon know what had happened, and trying to make sure she had access to all of the benefits that would help take care of him and her family. She contact several times, but also describe these ways in which phone calls would lead to auto-replies, which would eventually just lead to dead end. Then, at one point in the fall, she actually got a notice, saying that she was expected back at work, which was obviously very, very difficult for her given his condition at that time. Just how many times she'd reached out to let Amazon know what his condition was.

Brain Lehrer: Now, listeners, we can take some phone calls from some of you. Anybody listening, whoever worked at JFK8, 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or anyone else who's ever worked for Amazon or has a question for our guests from The New York Times. Maybe you saw the big article. Folks, if you haven't seen it yet, go to their site. This is one of those articles that is so big, that there's a second article listing five big takeaways from the main article. That's how deeply they dove at The New York Times into the only Amazon Fulfillment Center in New York City.

Call in with your questions or your stories for Jodi Kantor and Grace Ashford from The New York Times, 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or tweet @BrianLehrer. By the way, Jodi, what is a fulfillment center exactly? Some of our listeners may be wondering. [clears throat] You talked about the physical footprint of it, maybe give that stat again. Also, throughout the whole chain of developing products and shipping products, what happens at a local fulfillment center like JFK8?

Jodi Kantor: We actually got to tour JFK8 as part of our reporting. Maybe in one little minute, I can take listeners inside. A fulfillment center is a warehouse, but it's Amazon's term for it. It's a very sophisticated warehouse. This is the thing that allows those packages to get to your door so quickly. It's not just run by people; it's also powered by robots. The people are responding to the robots and the robots are responding to people. It's like this intricate dance. It's part of why Amazon monitors workers. We haven't talked about this yet, Brian, but when you're an Amazon picker or stower working to make these packages come out, every single second of your work is monitored.

It's like an attendance system within an attendance system that notes every time you're idle. This place is moving really fast. The conveyor belt sound like the rush of a subway train. You may know your manager, you may not know your manager, but you're managed in part by algorithm. It's vast. It can be fairly anonymous, especially during a time of social distancing. There's this feeling that people just come and go. Grace and I could feel the 150% attrition standing at the JFK8 bus stop. You'd meet people who had started three weeks ago, and then two days later they were gone.

Brain Lehrer: What does this tell us beyond Amazon or are we really looking at Amazon as this unique behemoth of a place but I think not. What does this tell us Grace about the future of automation and the American workplace in general?

Grace Ashford: Well, I think that notion that Amazon set the standard as this workplace of the future was one that came up a lot during our reporting both externally and also internally. I think there is a real sense among Amazon employees that they have this power, and specifically, Paul Stroup, who was in our story, really felt that responsibility. He spoke to the fact that he felt like were Amazon to really use its logistical brilliance and data might to innovate for the hourly workforce, it could have reverberations, not just among Amazon million employees, but also across the industry and into the future, to set the standard. The question is will that happen and how will that happen?

Amazon, we were told many times during the reporting, achieve the impossible and does it all the time. We all saw that during the pandemic truly the challenges they were facing with regards to keeping warehouses safe, managing this vast and churning workforce, and responding to skyrocketing orders. It really proved that they have immense potential. It really can do pretty incredible things.

Brain Lehrer: You want to tell us another worker story, Jodi? I'm looking at the Diana Santos story. I'm looking at the Derek Palmer story. You want to pick one of those or another one and give us another example of an individual worker? How this plays out for them?

Jodi Kantor: Sure, so Diana Santos was a really good Amazon worker. She actually liked to the metrics that monitor people because she said, "Jodi, I am all about hustle." She wanted to do really well. She had a lot of praise from her managers when she worked at Amazon. She started in 2019. In December of 2019, so this is pre-pandemic, Diana has one really bad day at work. Brian, her description of this is just so reminiscent [chuckles] of days we've all had. She misses the bus the first time because the bus is late or too crowded. From there, it just snowballs. One thing goes wrong after another, and she has trouble with her time off task that day.

She says it wasn't all her fault. She says, "Look, there was stuff that was broken. I sat around waiting for assignments. There were real impediments to me doing my work that day." She didn't even think that anything was wrong during the workday because to her, she was just having a frustrating workday. At the end of the day, she is escorted out of Amazon and fired. It was humiliating for her because she had taken such pride in her work. I think like a lot of hourly Amazon workers, she wanted to work there in part because when you go to work at Amazon, you feel like you're part of the most successful thing ever. Being told that she had failed there was very hard for her.

She files for unemployment because she doesn't feel she's really been fired for anything. Amazon goes to great lengths to contest her unemployment benefits. They file all of this paperwork to get, I don't know, this very small amount of money back from Diana Santos. It looks like she's going to have to repay the money, which is going to be a real financial problem for her. Lo and behold, she fights Amazon in the little administrative court that deals with unemployment benefits and she wins. The judge says, "How could you be fired with no warning for one bad day?" A couple of really interesting things have come from that.

First of all, those documents that Amazon filed in this little teeny tiny unemployment benefits case became part of the genesis of our story. We were able to see their internal documents for this time off task policy. Workers generally don't know exactly what the rules are. Those became a guiding light for us. Then, in the last couple of weeks, we have gone to Amazon for a lot of responses on this story. We wanted to hear your side. We want it to be fair.

We brought them Diana Santos's story, I think four times. Like "Can you respond to this? What do you make of this? Was this a mistake? Should she have been fired?" They never really responded to her specific case. What they did is they changed their time off task policy so that you now cannot be fired for one bad day. It's more of a rolling average, which does seem more fair. It could really root out problems.

Brain Lehrer: That's a big win. That's a structural win through Diana Santos's story.

Jodi Kantor: The Company denies that they are doing it specifically in response to Diana. They see that they had been working on this for a while. Not only the timing, but the facts of specifically how they changed the policy and not being fired for one bad day, seem like they correspond perfectly to the facts of Diana's story.

Brain Lehrer: If you're just joining us, we're talking to Jodi Kantor and Grace Ashford from The New York Times about their deep dive into Amazon's only New York City Fulfillment Center JFK8 on Staten Island. Kelly in Bushwick, you're on WNYC. Hi, Kelly.

Kelly: Hi, Brian. Can you hear me?

Brain Lehrer: I can hear you just fine. I see you've worked for what is now a subsidiary of Amazon for a long time.

Kelly: Yes. I've been working at Whole Foods for over 10 years and just as a team member. I'm not a supervisor or anything. It has gotten so bad. I can't believe you guys are talking about this. I just took a walk and I was thinking about it. Last week we had a team member appreciation week and it was embarrassing. After spending a year of working with no hazard pay in Whole Foods, surrounded by people, I got COVID. It wasn't when it counted because it was in April, too early. All of our benefits, all of our little things are slowly being taken away.

You were talking about turnover earlier. The reason why no one talks about it in our store is because no one knows what it used to be like besides me. I don't understand how people are not losing their minds especially, really that we've worked an entire year, every single day. I took the subway every single day, did not get $1 added on to my hourly for a whole year. Now, the pandemic is over, no one will ever talk about it. I'm just really happy that you guys are talking about it.

Brian Lehrer: Hey, Kelly, I know that the pandemic is, obviously, a unique situation. It's so had to compare these days to anything else. If you work there for 10 years, it means you worked there from before they were acquired by Amazon through after. Did something change when Amazon owned Whole Foods?

Kelly: Yes. I also used to be a sign artist. I used to paint the signs and stuff for Whole Foods. They fired, got rid of the whole marketing team. It's really cold. I also lost a really good friend, my roommate of seven years last year, last May. I didn't have PTO. Our pay time off hours have changed significantly. I didn't have enough to take off a week to grieve for my friend. I called and I called and I couldn't reach anyone.

It was a dead-end like you said. I finally spoke to one person who said, "You know what, our policy literally changed a week ago. We're so sorry." She literally said, "Amazon took over." I go, "I know I can feel how cold it is now." All I was asking for was $400 so I could get back on my feet for rent. Could not get that, they would not give me $400.

Jodi Kantor: The store does not have a bereavement leave policy? You don't get something like three days if somebody close to you dies?

Kelly: No. It's because a friend doesn't count. It has to be a relative. It has to be blood. I was stunned. I cried on the phone with this woman who said, "I've also worked for Whole Foods for 15 years now." What they have set up now, they didn't have when her house burned down and lost everything. I'm not trying to hear your story. I'm just asking for help. I cannot reach anyone. It's so hard to reach someone for any question because you just reach dead ends. They rely on turnover. I'm telling you it's so true.

Brian Lehrer: It's a heartbreaking story Kelly, but it's also so instructive. I'm glad you shared it with us and please, call again. Grace, anything more to say about the particulars of Kelly's story pertaining to her or the larger implications?

Grace Ashford: No. I just was listening and finding it very interesting. [chuckles] I'm sorry Kelly that you had to go through that. At JFK8, there was a brief period of hazard pay that was offered. Pardon me, it was not hazard pay. [chuckles] There was a brief time when they were offering I believe $2 more an hour during the peak pandemic when they really, really needed people, but that was taken away. I know that there were some strong feelings at JFK8 about that as well at the time. Thank you for calling in.

Brian Lehrer: I think a lot of companies have that specific policy that bereavement days have to be for certain immediate family members. Maybe that should have been suspended for every company during the pandemic when we were all losing friends as well as family members and that you could apply that more liberally. I don't know how widespread that limitation is to immediate family or close blood relatives for bereavement days but it's heartbreaking to hear that story. Jodi, you want to tell us another individual story maybe Derrick Palmer?

Jodi Kantor: Yes. Here is part of why Derrick Palmer is so interesting. Do you remember in the news last March, there was a big to-do about JFK8. For some people, that's the only reason they've heard about JFK8. There were two workers fired after a protest about pandemic working conditions at JFK8. It was briefly in the news. The person who's best known for being fired is named Chris Smalls. He became a symbol of essential workers being very scared of going to work in the pandemic. There's been a lot of back and forth, about whether his firing was retaliation or not. He feels very clearly it is. Amazon say it isn't.

Part of our story is to go into the backstory of who these protestors really were? What did they care about? What was really behind this controversy? The person we focus on even more than Chris Smalls is his best friend, Derrick Palmer. Chris and Derrick were both five-year Amazon veterans. They're both Black. They both knew the company from the lowest ranks. They started in New Jersey warehouses, were brought to JFK8 when it opened. Derrick Palmer was a very good performer. He's a strong guy. He would amaze me with his tales of going to the gym after a 10-hour shift. He had very good numbers as they say at Amazon.

He did very well on the productivity software that shows how fast you're working and yet he felt like he couldn't move up. He felt like he couldn't get anywhere at the company. He was, as I said before, so many people there are excited to be at this place that's associated with its success, but then they feel like they can't really partake in it. He found it impossible to get promoted. He felt like he was managed by algorithm. There is a special sensitivity that we've seen all over the country not just at JFK8, that Black workers have to do treatment at Amazon.

This was also true in the Bessemer warehouse, Brian, you were talking about at the top of our discussion. This feeling that Black workers are really doing the work that makes Amazon successful, that they are excessively monitored, the Bezosian presumption that workers are lazy. The sense that they've stuck in place and that they can't move up. It adds up to a lot of frustration. Derrick is the one I-- Go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead, finish. No, finish the thought.

Jodi Kantor: Derrick is the guy I was talking about when I said that he had applied for a promotion and what we found out later, Amazon actually told us, is that he was one out of 382 people who applied for this promotion.

Brian Lehrer: Is that an argument in the company's defense a little bit if you're talking about how hard it is to move up. If it's a company with so many hundreds of thousands of employees, then there is a pyramid only a certain percentage get to then be promoted to the next level, right?

Jodi Kantor: How steep is that pyramid at different companies, Brian?

Brian Lehrer: You tell me.

Jodi Kantor: At Walmart, for example, also a heavily criticized employer, by the way. Amazon pay is better on the whole than Walmart. At Walmart, 75% of their managers are people who started at lower levels on the floor and that is not true at Amazon. For people like Chris Smalls and Derrick Palmer, there is a real feeling to how much they can move up. There is some possibility. It's not impossible but it's very, very, very difficult.

If you want to get to the next stage at Amazon, really learn about the business, learn to manage a warehouse, those people, Amazon basically hires what they call wicked-smart kids right out of college to do those jobs, which have much more upward mobility. That population is heavily white and Asian.

Brian Lehrer: Kristin in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi Kristin.

Kristin: Hi, how are you. Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for calling. You work for Amazon directly or a company that work with Amazon?

Kristin: I believe a majority of Amazon employees are not actually hired through Amazon. They hire temporary agencies on nine-month contracts in order to avoid having to pay most of their employees any benefits for full-time work. I was hired on a nine-month contract to work in operations and basically create systems for them for their photo studio in Waynesburg. Most of us were artists and locals in the area, very highly skilled, and then, after a period of a couple of months once everything was rolling, they hired people for $6 less than us to perform the same positions. Then they kind of pit us against each other.

We had competitions to who could perform the fastest and then kind of dangled carrot to us to, "Maybe we'll hire you if you perform these tasks." Ultimately, a month later, they came to all of us who were making higher wage and said, "It's 20 minutes until lunch. You get your stuff and don't stay." Then it was just a loss of words like, "Where do you go from there?" We had been working and really hopeful that they would bring us on, but we knew, ultimately that we would only have that nine-month. Then a forced year of leave from the company in order for them to regain status as a new employee that doesn't have to get those benefits.

Brian Lehrer: Kristin, another heartbreaking and infuriating story. Grace, is that one that you heard before that kind of relationship?

Grace Ashford: No, I'm very interested to hear more about Kristin's experience. You were terminated before the end of your nine-month contract or at the end of the nine-month contract?

Kristin: No, we only made it to about three and a half, four months of the contracts before they fired us and replaced with cheaper hourly workers. None of us were hired through the company; we were all hired through temporary agencies. They've all [unintelligible 00:31:42] in their Seattle facility. That's why the city had changed their regulations for temporary workers because it's creating such a mass homelessness. People are basically turned and burned every nine months.

Grace Ashford: What exactly kind of work were you doing for them?

Kristin: I was a photo assistant, but basically it's just operations for the warehouse.

Brian Lehrer: Kristin, thank you for sharing that story. As we run out of time, Jodi, what could come of this deep dive into JFK8? Does it take the wider non-Amazon employee public getting outraged to put pressure on the company to make improvements or what do you hope will come of this?

Jodi Kantor: Honestly, as journalists, what we hope is that people will read the story. Our job is to put the information out there. It's been fascinating in the last day to feel people in these paragraphs and hear people beginning to talk about it. I think there's been a question for a while now, Brian, of who exactly Amazon is accountable to? Probably one of the most interesting findings, and I don't know if your listeners or politicians would find this satisfying, the company is saying it wants to change. Bezos, in a very startling way, is saying he wants to change. He's on his last couple of weeks as CEO of Amazon. As you know he's about to blast into space literally.

Yet he made this intriguing declaration recently that he, all of a sudden, wants to become earth's greatest employer. That leaves us as we publish this story with a lot of questions. What does that mean? How does he define it? How do his successors define it? Also, how willing are they really to toy with a system that has made them so unbelievably successful? Now, it's not clear whether the problems we found are impediments to Amazon's greater success, or whether they're actually the reason why the place is so brilliantly successful. That is what we are waiting to watch and report on.

Brian Lehrer: Jodi Kantor and Grace Ashford from The New York Times, their article is called The Amazon Customers Don't See. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Jodi Kantor: Thank you, Brian.

Grace Ashford: Thank you.

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