Black Friday: Under-fire Amazon opens its doors to show how its 'fulfilment centres' work

With the help of jovial guide Martin, The National sees how Amazon's workers fare in its warehouses

A general view of Amazon's Fulfilment Centre is pictured in Peterborough, central England. AFP

Workers prepare customer orders for dispatch as they work around goods stored inside an Amazon.co.uk fulfillment centre in Peterborough. AFP

Workers prepare customer orders for dispatch as they work inside an Amazon.co.uk fulfillment centre in Peterborough. AFP

Workers prepare customer orders for dispatch as they work around goods stored inside an Amazon.co.uk fulfillment centre in Peterborough. AFP

Workers prepare customer orders for dispatch as they work around goods stored inside an Amazon.co.uk fulfillment centre in Peterborough. AFP

Workers prepare customer orders for dispatch as they work around goods stored inside an Amazon.co.uk fulfillment centre in Peterborough. AFP

Workers prepare customer orders for dispatch as they work around goods stored inside an Amazon.co.uk fulfillment centre in Peterborough. AFP

On the edge of a quiet industrial estate outside the city of Peterborough, one of the focal points of Amazon’s British operation is in the middle of its busiest week of the year.

A drab and grey building with no windows, the Amazon fulfilment centre has been open nearly 10 years and employs 1,200 people.

The Peterborough warehouse, or EUK5, also employs temporary agency workers and uses another 1,500 staff at busy times of year, such as Christmas and Black Friday. It can hold millions of items at a time, which it ships out across the UK and sometimes to mainland Europe.

Despite being one of the city’s major employers, Amazon has faced much criticism over working conditions and the Peterborough warehouse has not been immune to it. A year ago the GMB Union held the “Amazon Workers Are Not Robots” demonstration outside the warehouse, after 52 ambulances were called to the premises in the three years up to June 2018. Along with the Peterborough warehouse, protests were held at Amazon fulfilment centres in Rugeley, Swansea, Milton Keynes and Warrington.

As a response to the negative media backlash, Amazon provided tours of its warehouses over the past few months. But at the end of October, the online retailer was accused of “wasting millions” on a major advertising campaign calling for customers to visit its warehouses. Critics say that Amazon spent more time and money repairing its public image than investing in the well-being of its workers.

Amazon has come under fire from politicians and trade unions over the treatment of its workers. AP

Despite EUK5’s sombre exterior, it is bright and spacious inside, spanning 51,000 square metres – enough to accommodate eight football pitches. As you walk through the building, you see sprawling conveyor belts several metres above your head, which are used to transfer goods in and out of the warehouse at high speed.

People on the tour are welcomed inside with a hot drink from the staff canteen before going over the health and safety briefing with the tour guide. There is strict policy against taking any photos, recording or even taking your phone out during the tour. On today’s one, there are 12 people of varying ages and backgrounds – including workers from other factories, business owners, pensioners and even a warehouse night shift worker who wanted to show her two young children her workplace.

Jovial tour guide Martin is an order picker when he’s not showing visitors around the warehouse. After being made redundant from his previous job, he joined Amazon and has been here for seven years now – and he says he prefers it to any other picking job he has worked in.

As he takes us into the warehouse, the atmosphere is less serious and more upbeat than expected, with a Moulin Rouge posters and motivational Anchor-man memes on the wall, with house music playing out the speakers. All sorts of objects are on the shelves, everything from Dove soap and cat food, to malt whisky and Jenson Button memoirs.

The sorting and delivery process

The tour shows the journey from the inbound process when the items arrive at the warehouse, as well as outbound process, which starts when the customer clicks the ‘buy’ button. Half the items on the shelf in the warehouse comes from third party sellers, Martin says, rather than Amazon itself.

After items come in on lorries and on conveyor belts, they are placed in different sections in the store. But as we head upstairs, where many of the products are kept before they are sorted and distributed, they appear to be randomly placed and disorderly.

But this doesn’t matter because after orders are placed, pickers use hi-tech scanners to find the items in the store, tracking down their ‘live location’ and additional details about how they should be packed. If an order involves a few items in different parts of the warehouse, to save time, several pickers will work on the one order before it is compiled by ‘sortation’ team. Once they’ve retrieved and scanned the items, they take them to the sorting and packing areas to get boxed up and shipped out.

When we arrive at the packing area, Martin takes a willing volunteer to try and pack up a box and put in on the conveyor belt, shortly before it a “slammer” machine slaps a label and barcode on the package before it gets sent off to the local distributors.

Amazon's 'fulfilment centre' warehouse in Peterborough, England, is open for guided tours. Getty Images

As Amazon has several robotics centres around the UK, it was surprising that the equipment in the warehouse wasn’t more modern and futuristic. “I thought it would be much more automated,” says one man who was on the tour, who works at a traditional print factory. “I’ve been on another warehouse tour of a paper printer, and almost all of it was run by robots and there were only about 40 people working there. It seemed much more efficient.”

Swaggie points and Christmas overtime

The top floor of the warehouse overlooks the employee entertainment area, fitted with “chill out chairs”, table tennis tables and a mysterious corporate game called ‘The Cube’. When playing the game, employees roll an oversized dice on a giant Monopoly-like board, where they can land on different spots where different rewards are offered, including having a free lunch in the canteen, having your manager cover your shift for an hour or collecting “swaggie points” – points you accrue that gives you access to free Amazon items later down the line. Experts have claimed that gamifying the work place can make difficult tasks seem less tedious and improve workers’ mental health.

Responding to some of the negative reports about working conditions for warehouse workers, Martin says that it has been 250 days since the last time the fulfilment centre had a “a major incident”.

He even says that people in the warehouse “love working long hours”.

“People are really gutted if they don’t get overtime over Christmas. You get pay and half of to do 40 hours or more and double pay if you do 60 hours or more. Not many companies round here do that.”

Workers on day shift get paid £9.50 per hour, while evening workers get £11.25 an hour.

Despite reports indicating that Amazon sometimes makes its employees work long hours, Martin says that employees work 10 hour shifts and that they can work overtime if they choose to. He showed us a small HR pod and a row of computers in middle of the centre if employees want to speak to someone about problems at work.

Negative feedback to positive feedback?

Anna from Leicester, who owns a homeware and design business, went on the tour with her partner to get insight into the courier process. She is looking to ship one of her products and is considering whether to use Amazon, but first she wanted to learn more about how it distributes its products.

She thinks that conditions are improving for workers at the company’s warehouses and that the public tours have probably helped that.

“I think Amazon wants to learn from the bad things because you can only improve things from the negative feedback. That feedback eventually has a positive impact,” she says.

Martin agrees, saying that since he joined seven years ago, the process has become much more efficient and workers can do more without tiring themselves out.

“When I first came here as a picker, we walked many more miles in the warehouse than what we do now because things are loads more efficient. Because people have listened and actually implementing those things as well,” he says.

“Not to just our people upstairs, but people on the shop floor have actually put forward some common sense ideas that have been implemented, which is beneficial for all of us.”

As we come to the end of the 75 minute tour, there is a moment where visitors can get a photo taken of themselves in front of the packing area and they all get given a reusable water bottle. Although it is clear from visiting the Peterborough fulfilment centre that working conditions are better here than often, a staged photo in a warehouse and a gift don’t quite tell the whole story.