(Bloomberg) — Five years after Amazon.com Inc. raised wages to $15 an hour, half of its warehouse workers are struggling to get enough food and a place to stay, researchers say. It has said.
The national survey, released Wednesday by the University of Illinois Chicago Center for Urban Economic Development, surveyed U.S. workers about whether they had skipped a meal, went hungry, or worried about being able to pay their rent or mortgage. Questions were asked about their level of economic well-being.
Fifty-three percent of respondents said they had experienced one or more instances of food insecurity and 48% had experienced one or more instances of housing insecurity in the past three months. Researchers found that workers who said they took unpaid leave after being injured on the job were more likely to report having trouble paying their bills.
“Amazon is not necessarily an outlier,” said Sanjay Pinto, co-author of the study with Beth Gutelius. Still, “they certainly haven't taken the initiative to create jobs that support their families.”
Amazon has long been criticized for the way it treats its employees, especially those in its warehouses packing and shipping boxes. Much of the criticism centers on the fact that the number of injuries exceeds that of its logistics industry peer. Amazon has promised to make its warehouses safer by automating some tasks that require repetitive movements. Pinto and Gutelius examined injuries to Amazon's workers in a report released in October before turning their focus to the employees' financial situation.
The Seattle-based company is the second largest private sector employer in the United States after Walmart. Amazon accounts for about 29% of the U.S. warehouse industry workforce, researchers estimate. The company therefore plays a leading role in setting pay and working conditions in sectors transformed by e-commerce.
The 98-question online survey sought out Amazon employees through social media ads and targeted neighborhoods with warehouses and company facilities. The researchers also sprinkled in quality checks to weed out answers from people who appeared to be giving inauthentic answers.
A total of 1,484 workers in 42 states provided sufficient information to be included in the results. For the part dealing with economic security, the sample size varied between his 1,306 and her 1,472 respondents. The margin of error was plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. The study received funding from the Ford Foundation, Oxfam America, and the National Employment Law Project, a labor advocacy nonprofit.
One-third of survey respondents reported using government-funded programs, primarily food stamps and Medicaid, in the past three months. This is consistent with a 2020 analysis by the U.S. Government Accountability Office that found Amazon to be one of the largest employers of people receiving food assistance in the nine states that reported the data.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment after publishing the findings early Wednesday. In response to the release of the first part of the investigation, a company spokesperson dismissed the report as not an “investigation'' but “an investigation conducted on social media by a group with ulterior motives.''
Amazon's U.S. employees will earn a median salary of $45,613 in 2023, up from $41,762 a year earlier, the company said in a filing last month. The company says its warehouse and transportation workers earn an average hourly wage of more than $20.50. The survey was conducted between April and August 2023, excluded managers, and was slightly less biased, with most respondents reporting an hourly wage of $16 to $20.
Research shows that about 65% of workers who join Amazon earn more than their previous employer. And the same percentage of workers report receiving a raise while working for their company. Getting promoted on an assembly line, such as in an Amazon warehouse, is a more difficult proposition. According to survey data, only 13% of employees reported receiving a promotion during their tenure.
Respondents who joined Amazon from other companies were most likely to have previously worked in food preparation, service, sales, or manufacturing.
“The story of Amazon is a sad story of American workers' declining expectations of their employers,” said study co-author Gutelius, a longtime researcher in logistics and warehousing.
–With assistance from Spencer Soper.
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