By now you have read (or at least heard about), the New York Times’ blistering takedown of life working at Amazon, your favorite online shopping destination for just about anything you’ll ever need, (and lots and lots of things you don’t). If you are interested in work, workplaces, culture, and performance, the piece is definitely worth a long read, and it just might make you pause for a moment before you order your next shipment of stuff from the giant retail machine.
Most interestingly, the Times’ piece largely focuses on working culture for Amazon’s white collar or professional workers, and not on the many, many thousands of Amazon employees and contractors that toil away in their massive distribution centers, often in extremely harsh conditions. Most Amazon customers already know how tough the warehouse workers have it at Amazon, and judging by Amazon’s continued revenue growth, we have shown that we really don’t care about people in the warehouses all that much. We just want our stuff faster.
Read the whole post over at Steve Boese’s HR Technology Journal (an FOT contributor blog).
Steve Boese is fondly known to many as the HR Technology blogger. By day, he is the Co-Chair of Human Resource Executive’s HR Technology Conference. He is also a former Director of Talent Management Strategy at Oracle and an HR Technology instructor. Steve can also be found hosting the HR Happy Hour Show and Podcast … you know, where a bunch of HR pros get together and call in to talk about HR stuff. Sounds like an SNL skit, we know. But when you have Dave Ulrich, the grandfather of HR as show guests, well, I guess you’re doing something right. Talk to Steve via email, LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.
