Last week, Amazon made changes to its internal online personnel directory, deleting hundreds of thousands of entry-level warehouse employee profiles from a tool that allows any company employee to see the full names and photos of other employees.
What may seem like a common company decision has sparked speculation among Amazon corporate employees on internal listservs and warehouse workers on platforms like Reddit that Amazon made the move to discourage potential union organization in its warehouses. Thousands of Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama are currently voting on whether to form a union in the first major US union election in the company’s history. An Amazon spokesman said the impetus for the change was to focus on improving a different application that warehouse employees use most often, and she declined to comment on the union’s speculation.
The employee directory in question is known as the Amazon Phone Tool, which allows employees at all levels to do things like search for other employees anywhere in the company, see where they work, and view the hierarchy of managers down to Jeff Bezos. The tool also allows employees to create or accumulate virtual prizes and icons for everything from the peak of the holiday shopping season to taking a test on the company’s leadership principles. Previously, all entry-level warehouse employees – known as Level 1 associates in Amazon jargon – had profiles in this directory and appeared in search results. But last week, Amazon removed them.
Amazon spokeswoman Brittany Parmley dismissed the notion that the change is part of a larger scheme and said the change is linked to the strengthening of the smartphone app that novice employees already use on a daily basis. The app shows workers the name of their manager and the manager’s manager, but does not provide any other information about employees in their warehouse or elsewhere in the company. The spokesman said the company is in the process of adding some of the virtual advantages to this application, such as the icons and awards that come with a Phone Tool profile.
“We are simply setting up the right tools for the right tasks,” she said in a statement. “Our frontline employees now have the app from A to Z to support their specific needs and it is optimized for a mobile experience with payment information, schedules, team structures, company information and more.”
Frontline employees at Amazon can access the A to Z app from their own devices. On the other hand, for Phone Tool, employees must be logged into Amazon’s internal computer network from a company laptop, which Amazon does not provide to Level 1 members, or from a warehouse break room, where the company’s computers are set up. Now, even if a Tier 1 associate accesses this tool, they will still not be able to see their Tier 1 colleagues.
Some current employees and former employees of Amazon deposits and corporations are not believing Amazon’s reasoning. Several who spoke with Recode said the phone tool is one of the only ways for an Amazon employee to search the names of all employees who work at a given Amazon warehouse.
“It’s the easiest way to get a full name and photo of members,” a former Amazon warehouse manager told Recode. The former manager requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.
These current and former employees speculated that Amazon wants to prevent workers from passing this information on to strangers, whether they are union representatives or reporters. With the names and photos of all workers, internal or external union organizers could make it easier to contact workers outside of work to try to get support for union membership.
“This [feels like] a way to reduce and limit the amount of information employees can get about other employees, ”said the former warehouse manager.
Others told Recode that it is just another sign that, in their view, Amazon sees the hundreds of thousands of employees who choose, pack and ship products as disposable compared to their white-collar workers. There is the obvious pay gap and differences in working conditions between company employees and frontline employees, and deleting them from a main employee directory seems to be another reminder of this corporate class structure.
“This treats them even more like disposables and less than,” a current Amazon white-collar worker told Recode.
Parmley, the Amazon spokesman, declined to comment on speculation that the change in the phone’s tool is linked to the union organization.
At the very least, however, this episode highlights an accumulation of mistrust of several years between segments of Amazon’s workforce and the tech giant’s management team on issues ranging from climate activism to warehouse working conditions.