David Niekerk helped design the company’s warehouse systems based on the founder’s beliefs.
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June
17, 2021
2 min read
A new report in The New York Times revealed that, in the words of a former Amazon vice president, the firm tracks all the movements of its warehouse workers because ” Jeff Bezos believes that people are inherently lazy.”
David Niekerk told the newspaper that he helped design the company’s warehouse management system based on the founder’s belief that workers should be prevented from becoming lazy.
According to Niekerk, Bezos believed that the desire of workers to perform well diminishes over time and moves toward “mediocrity.”
“What he would say is that our nature as humans is to expend as little energy as possible to get what we want or need,” Niekerk told the Times .
The former vice president noted that short-term employees do not have many opportunities for advancement and the firm does not guarantee salary increases after the first three years of employment so that, according to the report, workers do not feel too comfortable. Niekerk even pointed out that the company could lay off employees for a single low-productivity day.
The Washington Post published an analysis in early June, a report from the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which found that Amazon warehouse workers were almost twice as likely to suffer serious injuries as workers at other chains of retail.
As reported by C NBC , in April Bezos declared that Amazon is working “to do a better job for our employees” and that it would invest more than $ 300 million in 2021 to improve its warehouses.