Amazon, Walmart workers worry about surveillance tech in warehouses

Nearly half of warehouse workers who participated in a recent survey of Amazon and Walmart employees said they feel like they’re being watched at work.

Most employees said they didn’t know how the company used that information — and roughly 40% said that the monitoring contributed to pressure to move faster, even if that meant increasing the risk of injury. 

“Both companies have succeeded by pioneering new methods of getting cheap goods to the American consumer — with unparalleled convenience and speed. Their outsized economic power, however, has a high cost,” read the report, released Wednesday by activist group and nonprofit Oxfam.

Oxfam is a shareholder of Amazon and Walmart and often submits resolutions for other shareholders to vote on related to worker safety and human rights. 

The report released Wednesday used data from two surveys from the Center for Urban Economic Development, a research organization at the University of Illinois Chicago, as well as interviews with employees. Those surveys included responses from 1,484 Amazon workers and 444 Walmart workers. 

While Walmart declined to comment on the report, Amazon disputed the findings and the methodology. In a letter to Oxfam, Amazon said the authors misunderstood how the company uses technology, pushing back on the idea that security cameras, scanners and employee badges were used to keep track of employees’ movements. Instead, Amazon said, it uses that technology to focus on worker safety and to secure its inventory. 

“While we respect Oxfam and its mission, we have strong disagreements with the characterizations and conclusions made throughout this paper — many based on flawed methodology and hyperbolic anecdotes,” Amazon spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel said. “We’re not perfect, but we’re making measurable progress and our employees’ health, safety and well-being will always be our top priority.”

It’s less clear what surveillance looks like at Walmart, the report said, though it pointed to increased use of robotics and artificial intelligence systems in its distribution centers.

While the report showed Amazon and Walmart workers had the highest rates of concern about technology that monitored worker activity and the pressure to keep up with the pace of co-workers, it also illustrated that was a concern across the industry. 

The authors compared the results from Amazon and Walmart workers to another survey of the warehousing industry overall from the Worker Empowerment Research Network, a group of labor market researchers from several universities.

Across those three surveys, 72% of Amazon workers said the company used technology to measure how fast they were moving always or most of the time. Sixty-seven percent of Walmart workers reported the same, while 58% of workers in the warehousing industry said the same. 

Similarly, 77% of Amazon workers said that technology could tell if workers were actively engaged all the time, while 62% of Walmart workers and 47% of warehouse workers overall said the same.

Amazon and Walmart are among the largest warehouse employers and dominate the e-commerce industry: As of 2022, Amazon accounted for roughly 38% of the e-commerce market while Walmart ranked second with 6%. 

At those companies, women and people of color are most likely to feel the negative effects of surveillance tactics, the report found. Women who worked at Walmart were more likely than men to report not being able to take breaks, feeling pressure to work faster and anxiety about keeping up with the company’s expected rate of production.

At Amazon, Black workers were more likely than white or Latino colleagues to feel the monitoring was used as a way to control or discipline workers. Black women were the most likely group to say they felt they were being watched at work. 

The “psychological effects” of surveillance and monitoring are “felt most viscerally and negatively” by Black, Latino and immigrant workers who face surveillance, monitoring and over-policing outside of the workplace, the authors wrote. 

“The modern corporate obsession with speed comes at a cost to workers,” the authors continued, “particularly to women and BIPOC populations.”

Meanwhile, a majority of workers surveyed said their employers prioritized safety, according to the report. Sixty-four percent of Amazon workers said safety was a high priority, while 66% of Walmart workers reported the same. 

On Wednesday, a handful of protesters from Oxfam and two Amazon warehouse workers gathered outside Amazon’s Seattle headquarters to draw attention to conditions inside the company’s warehouses. The group handed out “executive care packages” to mimic what warehouse workers might experience. Inside the box, there was a wearable fitness tracker and a pill bottle to represent pain medication.

“As front-line Amazon workers, we are tracked from the very moment we enter that warehouse,” said Italo Medelius, a worker from Amazon’s North Carolina facility and a member of the organizing group Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment. “They know every step you take.”

Medelius and the Rev. Ryan Brown, another Amazon employee and leader of the organizing group in North Carolina, said they came to Seattle to talk with corporate workers about the other side of the company. At their facility, the workers said, Amazon has ramped up surveillance tactics. 

Medelius said the company uses cameras to keep eyes on the “green mile,” a mile-long stretch that runs through the warehouse that workers must use to access the bathrooms and other break rooms. Brown said he’s seen increased enforcement of the requirement to badge in and out of a workstation after breaks. Because the facility is so large, workers rarely make it back in the allotted amount of time, Brown said. 

“A lot of our corporate colleagues don’t know the work we do,” Medelius said, adding that he walks an average of 20 miles per shift as he moves pallets from the warehouse to the trucks. “I don’t think folks are aware of what it takes to deliver packages within 24 hours.”