The new economy does not necessarily mean new social relations, as
Amazon.com demonstrates. One can be a cyber slave to a digital god. When
purchasing items online, remember that there is someone like you at the
other keyboard.
kelly
The Washington Post
At Amazon.com, Service Workers Without a Smile
By Mark Leibovich
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 22, 1999; Page A01
SEATTLE-Second of two articles
This was Richard Howard's last indignity as an Amazon.com customer
service representative. A man on the phone was seeking Civil War era
fiction from the Internet bookseller and Howard, who has a master's in
literature, suggested Gore Vidal's "Lincoln." Their conversation
lasted three or four minutes.
A few days later, Howard was admonished by his supervisor, who had
listened in on the call. The gist: Watch the schmoozing. "People want
intimacy in their book-shopping experience, so that's what I was
giving them," said Howard, who left Amazon shortly after the
conversation early last year. "But my bosses saw this like it was a
fast-food buying experience, in and out."
Amazon officials say they don't discourage friendly book advice from
their customer service representatives. Still, like the Internet
commerce movement it helped forge, Amazon.com is a notion built on
speed. It is the sexiest embodiment of instant browsing and
push-button satisfaction, the conveniences that have made the online
realm so seductive to customers, retailers and investors. Amazon.com
Inc. has been hailed in trade publications for its generally quick
attention to customer needs. And if homey tips from service
representatives get lost in the process, that's a compromise digital
shoppers seem willing to make.
Amazon employees and managers talk frequently about "working at Amazon
time." "If it's hard for you to go fast, it can be hard for you here,"
said Jane Slade, until recently Amazon's customer service director.
"If you like things comfortable, it can be a difficult place to be."
While Amazon might be a trailblazer, its customer service centers are
home to time-worn industrial tensions: between gung-ho managers and
disaffected employees; speedy machines and mortal paces; even union
and anti-union interests, a high-tech industry rarity. Add to that
some classic contemporary animosities--between stock-option
millionaires and low-wage co-workers--and Amazon's customer call
centers offer a rich anthropology for the New Economy workplace.
Computing innovations such as the Internet have been credited with
raising levels of productivity, to a point where previous notions of
how fast the U.S. economy can grow are being discarded. The
innovations also have inspired an ethic known as "uptime," a term
borrowed from the early days of computers that has come to mean a
working tempo with minimal interruption and maximum efficiency.
But a nagging reality underpins the late-century giddiness: This
promise of speed still rests heavily with rote-work employees--the men
and women who spend their days and nights boxing books at Amazon's
distribution centers, and those who answer e-mail when a customer
forgets a password.
On-the-Job Realities
While technology has helped eliminate the tedium in many fields, most
of the jobs created in the New Economy are low paying, low skilled and
monotonous. "The attention paid to 28-year-old tech tycoons has
created the illusion that they're ubiquitous," said David Smith, the
director of policy for the AFL-CIO.
In fact, he said, while big premiums have been paid to very
high-skilled workers, they make up for a small part of the overall
labor demand. A much larger chunk is composed of front-line "service"
positions, such as cashiers and call center employees, one of the
fastest-growing job categories in the country. Service jobs in
technology industries jumped 47 percent during the last five years,
according to the congressional Joint Economic Committee, more than
double the growth in total service sector jobs.
Amazon will not say precisely how many employees it has--"over 5,000,"
spokesman Bill Curry said. Of that number, "over 500" are in the
customer service division, most as what the company calls "customer
care" representatives. An estimated 2,000 people work in the
Seattle-based company's seven distribution centers in seven states.
Most customer service workers are in their twenties, unmarried and
unmortgaged. An unknown proportion have been at the company long
enough to receive significant equity compensation to supplement their
wages, nearly all of which are $10 to $13 a hour. The majority are
college graduates, but even so, most of their jobs exist solidly in
the bottom part of what some economists have dubbed the
"hourglass-shaped" New Economy.
The top of the hourglass comprises the celebrated Internet magnates,
splashed weekly on magazine covers, and typified by Amazon founder
Jeff Bezos, who owns more than $4 billion in Amazon stock. The middle
level, meanwhile, has thinned steadily in the last two decades. The
lower level includes the group that a front-line Amazonian calls "us
digital peons," the troubleshooters who answer e-mail from customers.
Few, if any, retailers have attracted as many customers as fast as
Amazon.com--more that 13 million since the company was started in
1995. It makes for a blizzard of service queries, usually by e-mail.
So it's out of necessity--or desperation--that Amazon's customer
service managers push their employees hard.
Customer service representatives are expected to maintain a high rate
of productivity, and output is watched closely, several employees
said. A stellar Amazon representative can respond to 12 e-mails in an
hour; lagging productivity--fewer than 7.5 e-mails an hour for an
extended period--can result in probation or termination.
"They basically measured my self-worth in how many e-mails I could
answer," said Manuel Miranda, 26, a former Amazon customer service
representative. Miranda was let go in August, he said, in part because
he didn't answer enough customer e-mail. Company spokesman Curry said
Amazon would not comment on personnel matters.
Customer service employees work in a patchwork of cubicles scattered
over three downtown Seattle buildings. The quarters have an old
industrial feel, with gritty exteriors that belie the company's sleek
online identity. Not many outsiders get a glimpse of the world in
here, and Amazon is strenuously secretive about all company
information, often citing "competitive concerns."
Three-Tier Wage System
New customer service representatives are hired mostly through a
temporary employment agency. Beginning representatives (Tier 1) start
at $10 an hour, which becomes $11 if they make it through a four-week
training period, employees said. Amazon would not confirm the pay
figures, but the customer service vice president, Bill Price, said
about 20 percent don't make it through the four-week training program.
The company would not disclose its annual turnover rate, though some
call centers typically lose 50 percent to 70 percent of their
employees a year.
Amazon's experienced representatives (Tier 2 and Tier 3) earn $12 and
$13 an hour, with raises of up to $1 every year. The wages include
medical and dental benefits. In addition, a group of 400 to 800
"full-time seasonal employees" are hired to work the holiday season,
earning $10 an hour with no benefits or options to buy stock.
When hired for permanent full-time positions, representatives also
receive options to buy up to 250 shares of Amazon.com stock, employees
said. Employees can cash out, or "vest," 20 percent of these shares
for each of their first two years at the company, and sell the rest
over the next three years. After two years, employees become eligible
for additional stock options, though many employees say these awards
are quite rare. The eligibility requirement will drop to one year in
early 2000, Price said.
In June, a small window was opened to a secretive Amazon world. A
group of Amazon employees posted a questionnaire about working
conditions in customer service on a World Wide Web site sponsored by
the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (WashTech), a
grass-roots group affiliated with the Communications Workers of
America. While a good portion of the 90 employees who answered the
survey said they enjoyed working at Amazon, 54 percent of Tier 2
employees said the number of overtime hours they have been required to
work affects "their health and well-being in a negative way."
Fifty-eight percent said their skills and talents were
"underutilized," and 62 percent said they "do not feel that their
hourly wage, without overtime, is suitable for their position."
Veteran representatives and supervisors tend to be most evangelical
about Amazon, in no small part because they have accumulated more
stock than newer hires, with several stock splits in the past two
years. But they say compensation is just a small part of why they like
working at Amazon. In interviews with longer-serving customer service
employees, this enthusiasm sounds driven by genuine belief in the
company ideal, albeit genuine belief monitored by Curry.
"I've woken up in the middle of the night thinking, 'Oh my God, I just
solved that customer's problem,' " said representative Kelly Shinn,
25, who has been at Amazon for 16 months. She has 13 piercings and
earrings in her left ear and answers 300 e-mails a week. On one
September day, Shinn was interviewing for a promotion to become a
"lead" customer service representative. "I wasn't given a position
before because my productivity was low," said Shinn, who eventually
got the promotion.
E-Mail: Quality Vs. Volume
Supervisors push "productivity" and "efficiency" in meetings, memos
and evaluations. Their common enemy is the "queues," or backlogs of
unopened e-mail and waiting telephone calls.
The company is far more concerned with quality than volume, Price
said, adding that individual representatives are not held to specific
quotas of output. "They take however long they need to take to satisfy
the customer," he said. Representatives are evaluated foremost on
"quality monitoring," how helpful they are judged to be in customer
interactions. Productivity is low on the list of how representatives
are assessed, he said.
But several present and former Amazon representatives dispute this.
"It was all output," Miranda said. "They talked some about quality,
but the number of e-mail you could answer was a lot more important."
"We're supposed to care deeply about customers, provided we can care
deeply about them at an incredible rate of speed," said a customer
representative for 18 months, who requested anonymity.
Customer service managers push the staff to answer every e-mail in the
queues within 12 hours to 24 hours. That goal has been a major problem
in recent months, especially since the company launched auctions and
other high-volume retail features, which have brought more customers,
more confusion and more service calls.
On Labor Day weekend, for example, the queue swelled to 11,000
outstanding e-mail messages. "Our work flow is in a severe state
requiring swift and immediate action," customer service manager Rob
Gannon wrote in a Sept. 7 e-mail memo to representatives.
Gannon imposed "push day" guidelines for Wednesday and Thursday of
that week. That meant the company would "sacrifice service level on
the phones" and redirect troops to the e-mail. "Goal: to have all
queues below 100 messages by Friday at 5:00 p.m," Gannon wrote in the
memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. "You own
this goal. I own this goal. We all will share in the consequences of
failing to meet this goal."
While this approach should hearten Amazon customers who are awaiting
return e-mail, the management methods can grate on staff members.
"It's like Communist China under Mao," a service representative said.
"You're constantly being pushed to help the collective. If you fail to
do this, you're going against your family. But if this is a family,
then it belongs on Jerry Springer."
The service representative, in his mid-twenties, was discussing life
at Amazon with three fellow workers in a Seattle restaurant on a
September night. They agreed to be interviewed on the condition they
not be identified, fearing reprisals from the company. Before the
meeting, they scoured the restaurant for Amazon officials.
'Golden Handcuffs'
Why do they still work at Amazon if they're so unhappy? Two words:
stock options. They are holding out for another few months to vest
another 20 percent. "Options are like golden handcuffs," one of the
three said. Still, he buys his books at Barnes and Noble in a quiet
protest, he said, of "my sweatshop work conditions."
This infuriates him most: the tendency of his bosses to e-mail workers
"great news" memos, which ultimately translate into more work. Last
holiday season, for example, Amazon's customer service managers
announced in a memo that they were instituting a holiday bonus program
so "everyone will feel energized to work as efficiently as possible."
Representatives who achieved a particularly high level of productivity
could choose between a $50 taxable cash bonus or four paid hours of
time off. The incentive levels varied by level of experience. The more
experienced Tier 2 employees, for example, would receive a bonus if
they worked at least 50 hours in a given week while answering an
average of 10 e-mails an hour and "maintaining a consistently high
level of quality."
But after the holiday season, the memo said, workers were expected to
maintain higher levels of productivity than before to be eligible for
overtime. "Whereas the bonuses are limited to the holiday season," the
memo said, "these productivity expectations will continue into next
year." In other words, employees would receive small bonuses for
working exceedingly hard during the holidays, and then were expected
to keep working at that level without any additional compensation
afterward.
Price said that approach was a mistake. "I wouldn't do that again, and
I wouldn't do it it now," he said. Price, who joined the company in
June, said the customer service center will be better prepared to
handle this year's holiday rush. For example, he said, the company
recently introduced a new feature that will allow customers to look up
their passwords online, sparing the representatives.
Either way, Price has a difficult job, which one employee compares to
being the principal of a high-school. There are cliques of
cheerleaders and high achievers, with productivity the currency of
social standing. (Until recently, Amazon even asked job candidates to
provide SAT scores.)
Then there are the slackers, well represented in Seattle, home to the
cynical grunge culture. They are not easily inspired. "This is clearly
a tough group and we try not to overdue the cheerleading stuff," said
Slade, who was one of the company's first customer service
representatives.
But management directives can have distinctly camp counselor-like
tones. They declare "fun" productivity races between representatives
in competing buildings. In a Sept. 3 memo from supervisor Mark Schaler
(Subject: "YOU CAN SLEEP WHEN YOU'RE DEAD"), representatives were
invited to a "midnight madness lock-a-thon," in which they would come
in late at night and see who could answer the most e-mail. The winner
got $100. Last month the company offered $150 to any Tier 2
representative who could answer 275 e-mails in a designated 48-hour
period--an extraordinary rate of output, even for experienced
representatives.
When the staff met its "service level goals" for May, a "Hi Team!"
memo declared a "build you own sundae" celebration. During last years'
holiday season, the office held a "Pajama Day."
And last week, a memo to all service staff read: "Your company needs
you. . . . Have a look at the current mailcount here. It ain't
pretty." Supervisors then called a "Queue Bashing Extravaganza" for
tomorrow night. The event will include "obscene amounts of smoothies,
trail mix, pretzels, carrot sticks, award winning coffee and other
yummy things."
By the way, the memo noted later, "This counts as part of your
mandatory OT for this week and for next week."
Mario Sanchez, a 27-year-old customer service representative, divides
his fellow employees into two groups--those who believe in Amazon's
higher mission and those who don't. Sanchez, who has been at Amazon
for 2 1/2 years, is in the former group. Sanchez sees "advancing the
firm to the next level" as a crusade. "I see it as my duty to work
hard to convey efficiency to my team," he said. "This is my
livelihood."
Sanchez won't say how much Amazon stock he has amassed, only that he
is "comfortable" and not working "simply to pay bills." He won't
apologize for prosperity. "Hey, I took a big risk by taking a job here
before the IPO," said Sanchez, who had been working in the accounts
receivable department at a hotel in Anchorage. "No one knew who Amazon
was."
Union-Organizing Effort
For much of the past year, Amazon.com has endured a rare struggle in
the high-tech sector: a union-organizing campaign. The campaign is
being led by a cluster of Amazon employees in conjunction with
WashTech. Last December, WashTech published "Holiday in Amazonia," a
damning report that detailed bleak working conditions at Amazon's
customer service centers. Employees complained of overcrowding, with
up to four people sharing cubicles. They also complained about low
wages, which made regular overtime necessary, and "a top-down
management style."
"The rocketing growth at Amazon.com has left some employees . . .
looking for the pod bay door," the report concluded.
Then came the working conditions survey six months later. It included
an e-mail address for people seeking information about organizing
efforts at Amazon. This brought several queries of interest along with
several intimidating and profane responses from within Amazon.
"I was near tears when I saw some of these things," said Gretchen
Wilson, 24, a WashTech official who has met with a dozen customer
service employees on several occasions this year. "They would say
stuff like, 'We're going to find you and get you and stop you.' This
was a classic, by the book anti-union campaign right out of the
1930s."
WashTech was undeterred and organizing efforts at Amazon will proceed,
Wilson said. She said her aim is not to incite major changes at the
company; she simply wants Amazon's front-line employees to have a
greater say in setting policies. She emphasizes that WashTech is
working in a support role and most of the organizing efforts are
taking place from within Amazon.
"I'm concerned about WashTech," said Slade, now the director of
strategic initiatives at Amazon's customer service department. "I
think it would kill the culture here." Slade, who refers to herself as
"Amazon born and raised," describes this culture as a "true
meritocracy," where people who work hard are rewarded. "Productivity
is part of our culture," she said. A union presence, she fears, would
render Amazon's customer service atmosphere slow and plodding. "We're
a very fast-paced, turn-on-a-dime place for self-motivated people,"
she said.
Richard Howard, for one, was not wired for Amazon time. He said his
tenure at the company left him disillusioned by "the false dream of
the high-tech economy." Howard, 43, was asked to leave after his
four-week training period for "performance issues." He then wrote
about his experience in a first-person article, "How I Escaped From
Amazon.Cult.," for the alternative Seattle Weekly.
People often speak of the Internet's influence in revolutionizing how
business is transacted, Howard said.
"But we basically did drone work and had people breathing down our
necks all the time," he said. "How revolutionary is that? The only
difference is that a lot of the supervisors had pierced ears and wore
leather."
Howard now works for Microsoft Corp., where he edits technical
documents as a contract worker.
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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