- 26 Nov 2023 23:29
#15296736
The warehouse distribution retail company Amazon apparently is implementing a secret policy where they only want to retain the fastest working percentile of their workers, and come up with excuses to fire the others, claiming they have "poor performance".
But they do not have poor performance. Amazon makes their warehouse employees work at a very fast pace and demands perfection. The company makes it policy to fire employees with ease for little reason, even if it might not be the employee's fault, because they know it is easy to just hire new workers. That seems to be their business model. They know there is a "pipeline" of workers, and many become exhausted and burnt out and are on their way out.
Amazon warehouses are notorious for having a super-fast inhumane pace of work, with managers under pressure to increase the speed of productivity.
In my opinion, there seems to be some big labor rights issues with this policy. Probably no doubt Amazon knows that.
I find this disgusting and "wrong". So to does the author of this article.
To make matters even more outrageous, apparently the warehouse company is bringing in foreign immigrants through work visas to work in these unskilled low-paying jobs. If the immigrant doesn't perform well enough, working at a super fast pace, they will get fired and as a result be likely to lose their residency permit, since it can be hard to find another company to sponsor them, and then they will have to leave the country.
This seems extremely exploitative.
some excerpts from the article:
A former HR staffer at Amazon put employees on a performance-improvement plan known as Pivot. Then the HR staffer, who said they developed PTSD from the work, was put on their own PIP.
I worked at Amazon in HR for several years. Not only did I administer Pivots, but it was eventually brought to my attention that I was going to be going through one.
And it was driven hard by the HR VPs to show the metrics -- daily, weekly -- to make sure we knew who was in the pipeline. Not to improve, but who's in the pipeline to get out. There wasn't a lot of interest in improving people.
You might be cutting some prime choice with the fat. And they were OK with that. They wanted that number. The managers who had to implement it and tell their people they were on Pivot -- I would say a majority of them hated it.
The first thing you had to do is work with a Pivot consultant. So that was somebody in HR, besides the manager's business partner. And you'd talk about if it's the right time, if it's the wrong time to Pivot someone.
I would say 80% of my time ended up focusing one way or another on Pivot. Either the Pivot appeal or the Pivot work that workers' managers had to do. And look, I'm not going to say you're going to ever find this somewhere, locked down in words. But the idea is, if you're putting somebody in Pivot, you make that so damn hard that they don't get out.
Almost always, unless there was some really unique set of situations where it came out during the appeal, the success rate of that was virtually none.
We had stack rank all of our employees. The way we broke it down, we called it top tier which was, you know, maybe 15-20% by the time it worked out. And then you had the middle. And then you have the bottom tier. The bottom tier was about 20-25%, maybe even up to 30%.
We were way over how many people were actually underperforming or detrimental to the business. Maybe around 1%, 1.5 to 2% were actually not performing well.
I was disgusted at what I was seeing with the Pivot process. This process alone has given me PTSD. It impacted me so much as a person that I had to get out of there.
When it was justified, it was easier to push someone out. If it's deserved, there's no problem. But when it wasn't deserved, you had people crying and begging and they couldn't understand.
You had visa-sponsored employees that once we Pivoted them and moved them out, they no longer were authorized to work in the United States. So they had to make immediate plans to get out of the country. And it's a long process to get sponsored by another group.
In the years I was there, I never ever ever had any performance issue given to me -- not even anything close to being serious. I had no worries because I asked for feedback all the time. I'm like, "What can I do? How can I do better?" I didn't ever want to be blindsided by Pivot myself. And what a lot of people did -- if they got the indication that they were going down that track -- is they would transfer jobs right away. Some people were successful. A lot of people weren't.
"I worked in Amazon HR and was 'disgusted at what I was seeing' with performance improvement plans. Then I got put on a PIP and knew I had to quit."
by Tim Paradis
Former Amazon HR Worker: Performance Improvement Process Gave Me PTSD (businessinsider.com) Nov 26, 2023
I thought I landed my dream job at Amazon. But after being put on an impossible performance plan, I quit even though I lost a $110,000 deposit on a house. Tim Paradis. Business Insider. October 8, 2023
Part of this sounds like a very bureaucratic and dysfunctional system.
Is this even fair to the labor force? For Amazon to demand unreasonable super-fast pace of work that is not even very realistic or sustainable for a very big segment of workers?
Does it seem okay for Amazon to be picky and choosy about which employees they want? These jobs are not even skilled or management positions, they are unskilled lower level warehouse positions. Many workers are normal people and don't have anything wrong with them. But Amazon wants to fire them because they know a percentage of the workers can work faster than the others.
It should be emphasized that it's not as if any of these workers are slow. If they were slow, they would have been quickly fired in the first week.
The hiring of immigrants through work visas is concerning, because not only are most of these immigrants desperate and willing to do anything not to be fired, putting up with the unreasonably fast work pace, but also brining in immigrants makes the rest of the country's workforce have to compete with that.
Look, I'm a free market supporter and for the most part believe companies should be allowed to have any policies they want, but something seems very wrong here.
Especially since Amazon is a very large gigantic company has almost completely taken over the mail-order retail sector, I think there are some monopoly pressures here. The company feels they're in a position to do whatever they want. It's not really as if there is another similar company most of these workers could leave to.
But they do not have poor performance. Amazon makes their warehouse employees work at a very fast pace and demands perfection. The company makes it policy to fire employees with ease for little reason, even if it might not be the employee's fault, because they know it is easy to just hire new workers. That seems to be their business model. They know there is a "pipeline" of workers, and many become exhausted and burnt out and are on their way out.
Amazon warehouses are notorious for having a super-fast inhumane pace of work, with managers under pressure to increase the speed of productivity.
In my opinion, there seems to be some big labor rights issues with this policy. Probably no doubt Amazon knows that.
I find this disgusting and "wrong". So to does the author of this article.
To make matters even more outrageous, apparently the warehouse company is bringing in foreign immigrants through work visas to work in these unskilled low-paying jobs. If the immigrant doesn't perform well enough, working at a super fast pace, they will get fired and as a result be likely to lose their residency permit, since it can be hard to find another company to sponsor them, and then they will have to leave the country.
This seems extremely exploitative.
some excerpts from the article:
A former HR staffer at Amazon put employees on a performance-improvement plan known as Pivot. Then the HR staffer, who said they developed PTSD from the work, was put on their own PIP.
I worked at Amazon in HR for several years. Not only did I administer Pivots, but it was eventually brought to my attention that I was going to be going through one.
And it was driven hard by the HR VPs to show the metrics -- daily, weekly -- to make sure we knew who was in the pipeline. Not to improve, but who's in the pipeline to get out. There wasn't a lot of interest in improving people.
You might be cutting some prime choice with the fat. And they were OK with that. They wanted that number. The managers who had to implement it and tell their people they were on Pivot -- I would say a majority of them hated it.
The first thing you had to do is work with a Pivot consultant. So that was somebody in HR, besides the manager's business partner. And you'd talk about if it's the right time, if it's the wrong time to Pivot someone.
I would say 80% of my time ended up focusing one way or another on Pivot. Either the Pivot appeal or the Pivot work that workers' managers had to do. And look, I'm not going to say you're going to ever find this somewhere, locked down in words. But the idea is, if you're putting somebody in Pivot, you make that so damn hard that they don't get out.
Almost always, unless there was some really unique set of situations where it came out during the appeal, the success rate of that was virtually none.
We had stack rank all of our employees. The way we broke it down, we called it top tier which was, you know, maybe 15-20% by the time it worked out. And then you had the middle. And then you have the bottom tier. The bottom tier was about 20-25%, maybe even up to 30%.
We were way over how many people were actually underperforming or detrimental to the business. Maybe around 1%, 1.5 to 2% were actually not performing well.
I was disgusted at what I was seeing with the Pivot process. This process alone has given me PTSD. It impacted me so much as a person that I had to get out of there.
When it was justified, it was easier to push someone out. If it's deserved, there's no problem. But when it wasn't deserved, you had people crying and begging and they couldn't understand.
You had visa-sponsored employees that once we Pivoted them and moved them out, they no longer were authorized to work in the United States. So they had to make immediate plans to get out of the country. And it's a long process to get sponsored by another group.
In the years I was there, I never ever ever had any performance issue given to me -- not even anything close to being serious. I had no worries because I asked for feedback all the time. I'm like, "What can I do? How can I do better?" I didn't ever want to be blindsided by Pivot myself. And what a lot of people did -- if they got the indication that they were going down that track -- is they would transfer jobs right away. Some people were successful. A lot of people weren't.
"I worked in Amazon HR and was 'disgusted at what I was seeing' with performance improvement plans. Then I got put on a PIP and knew I had to quit."
by Tim Paradis
Former Amazon HR Worker: Performance Improvement Process Gave Me PTSD (businessinsider.com) Nov 26, 2023
I thought I landed my dream job at Amazon. But after being put on an impossible performance plan, I quit even though I lost a $110,000 deposit on a house. Tim Paradis. Business Insider. October 8, 2023
Part of this sounds like a very bureaucratic and dysfunctional system.
Is this even fair to the labor force? For Amazon to demand unreasonable super-fast pace of work that is not even very realistic or sustainable for a very big segment of workers?
Does it seem okay for Amazon to be picky and choosy about which employees they want? These jobs are not even skilled or management positions, they are unskilled lower level warehouse positions. Many workers are normal people and don't have anything wrong with them. But Amazon wants to fire them because they know a percentage of the workers can work faster than the others.
It should be emphasized that it's not as if any of these workers are slow. If they were slow, they would have been quickly fired in the first week.
The hiring of immigrants through work visas is concerning, because not only are most of these immigrants desperate and willing to do anything not to be fired, putting up with the unreasonably fast work pace, but also brining in immigrants makes the rest of the country's workforce have to compete with that.
Look, I'm a free market supporter and for the most part believe companies should be allowed to have any policies they want, but something seems very wrong here.
Especially since Amazon is a very large gigantic company has almost completely taken over the mail-order retail sector, I think there are some monopoly pressures here. The company feels they're in a position to do whatever they want. It's not really as if there is another similar company most of these workers could leave to.
do not start on this maligning of these two very masculine men with proven masculinity and start mixing capitalism, and hormones and throwing out hormones that are not testosterone in the mix. 
- By Pants-of-dog