How Amazon automatically tracks and fires warehouse workers for 'productivity', 25 April 2019

In a signed letter last year, an attorney representing Amazon said the company fired “hundreds” of employees at a single facility between August 2017 and September 2018 for failing to meet productivity quotas... The documents also show a deeply automated tracking and termination process. “Amazon’s system tracks the rates of each individual associate’s productivity,” according to the letter, “and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors.” (Amazon says supervisors are able to override the process.)... “One of the things that we hear consistently from workers is that they are treated like robots in effect because they’re monitored and supervised by these automated systems,” [Stacy] Mitchell... [co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance] says.

... Amazon says retraining is part of the process to get workers up to standards and that it only changes rates when more than 75 percent of workers at a facility are meeting goals... ”Approximately 300 employees turned over in Baltimore related to productivity in this timeframe,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “In general, the number of employee terminations have decreased over the last two years at this facility as well as across North America.”