Amazon warehouse evacuated urgently! A strike wave is coming

Yesterday, an emergency accident occurred at an Amazon warehouse in Pennsylvania, and the entire warehouse has been evacuated urgently!

Around yesterday afternoon, an unknown noise suddenly occurred in the warehouse, and the warehouse workers were surprised to find that the main structure on the top of the warehouse was severely bent, and the deformation was still getting worse! Amazon immediately evacuated all the staff on site , and firefighters conducted a comprehensive inspection of the integrity of the warehouse. The staff on site were arranged to go home, and all temporary employees were paid the day's wages.

After the firefighters' initial inspection, no major safety risks were found in the main structure of the warehouse, but out of caution the warehouse will remain blocked and handed over to the Amazon security team for further investigation.

However, the news did not mention which warehouse this was. I searched the location and map, compared it with the photos in the news, and finally determined that the warehouse number was TEN1 , located in Berks County, Pennsylvania. (Sellers who need a complete list of warehouses can add me zyqmda)

This is a new warehouse that was put into use just last September to cope with the surge in shopping and delivery demand during the epidemic. We mentioned before that the upper limit of warehouse processing capacity has been reduced due to the implementation of epidemic prevention measures. If Amazon wants to solve the problem of delivery and warehousing difficulties, it must open more warehouses. TEN1 is one of the warehouses used for emergency response in this situation. It took less than half a year from project establishment to production.

Many warehouse employees speculated that the bending of the top structure was caused by too much snow on the roof, but from the above photos we can easily see that the snow was not too thick. It can only be said that in order to solve Amazon's delivery capacity problem, the warehouses that were rushed into production did not look very stable. There is no news of TEN1's recovery yet, but Amazon said that it would draw on transportation capacity for deployment and it would not affect TEN1's delivery.

In addition to those who have goods in TEN1 and need to pay attention to the order delivery status recently, in fact, everyone should pay attention to the warehouses where their goods are stored, especially the new numbers that have never been seen before. Because Amazon has rushed to build warehouses far more than just TEN1. Since June last year, such rushed warehouses have been put into use one after another . Among them, problems like TEN1 are inevitable. Once there is a potential accident, it must be evacuated + blocked. It may take two or three days at the least, or one or two weeks at the worst, to return to normal.

Not only that, Amazon has recently made a very excessive move that is fermenting across the United States, which may lead to an impact that is more serious than the epidemic!

According to foreign media reports, at the end of last month, employees of Amazon's Chicago warehouse DCH1 received an infuriating notice. Amazon said that DCH1 will be closed in the next few months. All employees currently working at DCH1 have only two options: either be transferred to other warehouses in Chicago to work only in the early morning shift, or resign.

This early morning shift is nicknamed the "graveyard shift" by Amazon workers, while managers call it the "megacycle." This shift runs from 1:20 a.m. to 11:50 a.m. every day. Employees are exhausted after each shift, and many employees say they feel like they are dying , hence the name "graveyard shift."

This shift mechanism was first implemented in August last year. At that time, only a small number of distribution stations implemented this shift, and there were no employees switching from short-term shifts, so it did not cause much response.

Originally, DCH1 employees, like employees in other warehouses, could freely choose different shifts, such as the overnight shift ending at 4:45 a.m., the five-hour morning shift and the four-hour morning shift, etc. However, when these DCH1 workers arrived at the new warehouse, they were forced to accept the "graveyard shift" starting at 1 a.m. , otherwise they would face unemployment.

What’s even more frightening is that this model is being rapidly promoted, replacing the previous short-term early morning shift with a ten-hour graveyard shift. According to a foreign media investigation, more than half of the employees in Amazon’s last-mile delivery network have recently been forced to transition to this model.

A large number of Amazon employees have had their daily lives affected as a result. Some employees who need to take care of the elderly and children have no time to rearrange their work, and their working hours have been extended to 10 hours (previously shifts were usually 4, 6, and 8 hours). So after this shift schedule was promoted on a large scale in January, front-line employees from all over the country were furious. They signed a petition to improve workers' treatment, and protest marches began.

In addition, DCH1 employees had held strikes and demonstrations many times during the outbreak, and successfully made Amazon make concessions, provide paid leave, improve treatment, and strengthen DCH1's epidemic prevention work. This year, it was suddenly reported that DCH1 would be completely closed and employees would be forced to accept "graveyard shifts". It is hard to say that this practice does not have the elements of revenge .

Therefore, the workers' demonstrations are very radical, not only to stop Amazon from further promoting the "graveyard shift", but also to seek justice for the DCH1 employees. So this matter will only get worse in the United States, and it happens that we are about to have the Spring Festival holiday, so both the news and the response speed will be much slower.