Documentaire de la BBC: Amazon's Truth Behind the Click
A BBC investigation into a UK-based Amazon warehouse has found conditions that a stress expert said could cause « mental and physical illness ».
Prof Michael Marmot was shown secret filming of night shifts involving up to 11 miles of walking – where an undercover worker was expected to collect orders every 33 seconds.
It comes as the company employs 15,000 extra staff to cater for Christmas.
Amazon said in a statement worker safety was its « number one priority ».
Undercover reporter Adam Littler, 23, got an agency job at Amazon’s Swansea warehouse. He took a hidden camera inside for BBC Panorama to record what happened on his shifts.
He was employed as a « picker », collecting orders from 800,000 sq ft of storage.
A handset told him what to collect and put on his trolley. It allotted him a set number of seconds to find each product and counted down. If he made a mistake the scanner beeped.
« We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we’re holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves », he said.
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