What is reasonable for an employer to ask of an employee?

Welp, we’ve got another attempted take down of Amazon in the news today. This time it comes from an undercover journalist in the UK that claims he was treated like a robot at a delivery fulfillment center in England. He also claimed that there were bottles of urine around because people were afraid to take bathroom breaks, and that he was docked a point towards termination for taking a sick day.

I’ll let Amazon do its own damage control, but I do want to explore the underlying issue this story raises. What are reasonable expectations when it comes to a work day?

First let’s take this from the employers side. When a worker shows up for a 10-hour work day, does that mean you should expect nine hours of work? I’m subtracting an hour for lunch and breaks. I mean nine solid hours of work? What’s a reasonable expectation of effort level? Nine hours a day at maximum effort is crazy; nobody could sustain that. But nine hours at 10 percent effort is also crazy. That worker is taking advantage of his employer.

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Now from the employee side. Some people view an entry level job — like an Amazon delivery center — as an exercise in how little effort can they expend and still keep the paycheck coming. I get it, it’s not the most exciting job in the world, and many people want to keep their effort level down to a minimum and still get paid.

So what’s fair? If someone surfs the internet for half the work day, but then goes at 90 percent effort level for the other half of the day, is that the same as another worker doing 50 percent effort all day? Should you fire the internet surfer? Maybe they get the exact same amount of work in. It’s a tough call.

I can totally get why a data-driven company like Amazon would want to invent a handheld device to keep track of how productive people are. They would get tons of data points on how many packages a person could do in a shift, and want to maximize efficiency. If someone can’t keep up, maybe it’s not the job for them. That makes sense to me, but it does miss an important point about human psychology.

Most white collar manager types forget what it’s like to work a manual labor job. And many white collar people have never worked a manual labor job in their entire life. They went from prep school to prestigious college, then right into the work force. They literally do not know what it’s like to chase packages around a warehouse for 40 hours a week.

Orwellian tactics like having to track every package for the efficiency database are not embraced by the people at the bottom of the food chain.

And that brings us back to my question: When you show up to work your 10 hour shift, what’s a reasonable expectation of effort and efficiency for that shift?

Now, where’s that bathroom again?

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