Like almost everyone without a job in Rugeley, a mostly white working-class town of about 22,000, Chris Martin started scouring the internet for application details as soon as he heard Amazon was coming. Local politicians rushed out jubilant press releases. “It’s absolutely fantastic news for Rugeley,” the release from Aidan Burley, the area’s member of parliament, said. “People are crying out to get back into work.”
Rugeley had never fully recovered from the mine’s closure in 1990, and the local economy was further depleted by Britain’s deep recession of 2008-09. Chris Martin moved there in 2007 to be with his partner. “She led me a merry story, saying, ‘Oh you should walk into a job,’ but there’s no jobs down here,” he said ruefully. The 54 year-old found a night job filling shelves in the Morrison’s supermarket for a while, but it didn’t last. It didn’t help that he was a relative newcomer in this close-knit community, where job opportunities often spread by word of mouth. “Nearly everybody knows everybody else. If you come from outside it’s like walking into a bar in a western,” he said. “Everyone stares.”
So Martin was thrilled when he passed the Amazon recruitment process, which includes drug and alcohol tests, and was given a job on the night shift. A global employment agency called Randstad, which had handled the recruitment process for Amazon, was also to arrange his shifts, manage him on the warehouse floor and pay him his near-minimum wage. After three months, if he had performed well, he could apply to be an Amazon employee, though there was no guarantee he would succeed. Randstad calls this sort of system “Inhouse Services” and describes it as a “flexible work solution designed exclusively for each client to optimise the work force and drive cost effectiveness”. One of the benefits for clients, it says on its website, is the “removal of the administrative burden of recruiting and managing large numbers of staff”.
There was an electric atmosphere in the big blue warehouse that autumn as the operation geared up for the first time. “At the start it was buzzing,” said a member of the Amazon management team at the site, who did not want to be named. “Brothers, sisters, neighbours, everyone was just so pleased to have jobs. Everything was new.”
Workers in Amazon’s warehouses – or “associates in Amazon’s fulfilment centres” as the company would put it – are divided into four main groups. There are the people on the “receive lines” and the “pack lines”: they either unpack, check and scan every product arriving from around the world, or they pack up customers’ orders at the other end of the process.
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