Sensors track each worker's productivity in real time.
Amazon opened its first fulfillment center in Seattle in 1997, two years after Jeff Bezos founded the company as an online bookstore.1 By 2024, the company operated more than 1,000 fulfillment and sortation centers across the globe, employing roughly 1.5 million people, making it the second-largest private employer in the United States after Walmart.2
Inside the warehouses, algorithmic management systems track each worker's rate of productivity in real time. Pickers, the employees who retrieve items from shelves, are expected to process hundreds of items per hour. Handheld scanners record every action and measure the elapsed time between each scan.3
Workers who fall below target rates receive automated warnings. Repeated underperformance can trigger termination without direct managerial intervention.
In many facilities, robots made by Amazon Robotics transport shelving units to stationary workers, reducing walking time but increasing the pace of repetitive motions.4
A 2021 report by the Strategic Organizing Center, a coalition of labor unions, found that Amazon's serious injury rate was nearly double the industry average for warehousing.5 Workers reported that the pace of the work left insufficient time for bathroom breaks and that peak-season shifts could stretch to twelve hours with mandatory overtime.
In April 2022, workers at the JFK8 fulfillment center on Staten Island, New York, voted to form the Amazon Labor Union, the first successful union election at any Amazon facility in the United States.6 The organizer, Chris Smalls, a former Amazon employee who had been fired after protesting pandemic working conditions, led the campaign without affiliation to any major national union. Amazon contested the election results.
The company's fulfillment centers represent one of the purest contemporary applications of scientific management, with digital sensors and algorithms performing the role that Taylor's stopwatch once played.