Amazon workers in US say they struggle to afford food and rent: Study

SEATTLE – Five years after Amazon.com raised wages to US$15 (S$20) an hour, half of warehouse workers surveyed by researchers say they struggle to afford enough food or a place to live.

The national study, published on May 15 by the University of Illinois Chicago’s Centre for Urban Economic Development, asked US employees about their economic well-being, including whether they skipped meals, went hungry or were worried about being able to make rent or mortgage payments.

Fifty-three per cent of respondents reported that they had experienced one or more forms of food insecurity in the prior three months, and 48 per cent experienced one or more forms of housing insecurity.

Workers who said they took unpaid time off after getting hurt on the job were more likely to report trouble paying their bills, the researchers found.

“It’s not necessarily that Amazon’s an outlier,” said Dr Sanjay Pinto, who co-authored the study with Dr Beth Gutelius. Still, “they’re certainly not taking the lead in creating family-sustaining jobs”.

In a statement, Amazon spokesman Steve Kelly called the researchers’ methodology “deeply flawed” and said the company had tried to raise its concerns with the study’s authors but never heard back.

“It’s a survey that ignores best practices for surveying, has limited verification safeguards to confirm respondents are Amazon employees and doesn’t prevent multiple responses from the same person,” he said.

Mr Kelly added that Amazon has increased average pay to US$20.50 an hour and provides a range of benefits, including healthcare, dental, retirement savings and pre-paid tuition.

Amazon has long been criticised for its treatment of employees, especially those who pack and ship boxes in its warehouses. Much of the criticism has focused on injuries that have exceeded the rate of logistics industry peers. Amazon has pledged to make its warehouses safer, in part by automating aspects of the job that require repetitive motions.

Dr Pinto and Dr Gutelius examined injuries among Amazon’s ranks in a report published in October before turning their focus to workers’ economic circumstances.

The company is the second-largest private-sector employer in the US, behind Walmart. Amazon accounts for about 29 per cent of the US warehousing industry workforce, the researchers estimate. As such, the company plays a leading role in setting pay and working conditions of a sector transformed by e-commerce.

The 98-question online survey sought out Amazon employees through social media advertising, targeting warehouses and neighbourhoods that host company facilities. The researchers also sprinkled in quality checks to weed out responses from people who appeared to be giving inauthentic responses.

A total of 1,484 workers in 42 states gave enough information to be included in the results. For the portions dealing with economic security, the sample size varied between 1,306 and 1,472 respondents. The margin of error was plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

The work was funded by the Ford Foundation, Oxfam America and the pro-labour non-profit National Employment Law Project.

A third of survey respondents reported using government-funded programmes – primarily food stamps or Medicaid – in the last three months.

That echoes a 2020 analysis by the US Government Accountability Office, which found Amazon was among the biggest employers of people receiving food assistance in nine states that reported the data.

Amazon’s median US employee was paid US$45,613 in 2023, up from US$41,762 the year before, the company said in a filing in April. The company says employees in warehousing and transportation are paid more than US$20.50 an hour, on average.

The survey, which was conducted between April and August 2023, excluded managers and skews a bit lower: Most respondents reported wages from US$16 to US$20 an hour.

Some 65 per cent of workers who go to Amazon earned more than they were making at their previous employer, the survey shows. And the same percentage of workers report receiving a raise while working at the company.

Moving up the ranks in Amazon’s assembly-line-like warehouses is a tougher proposition: Just 13 per cent of workers reported receiving a promotion during their time at the company, survey data showed.

“The story of Amazon is a sad story of the declining expectations of American workers of their employer,” said Dr Gutelius, a long-time researcher of logistics and warehouse work. BLOOMBERG