Jeff Bezos leaves Amazon with 200 million Prime subscribers. Aside from things the company plans to do to address its perception as a difficult workplace, this is one of the key tasks from its final letter to shareholders before Andy Jassy takes over as CEO of Amazon later this year. The last time the company shared a milestone for subscribers was in early 2020 when it announced during its 2019 revenue quarter that it had 150 million Prime members.
To put the recent pace into perspective, it took Amazon 13 years to attract its first 100 million customers to the service. Between 2018 and 2019, it added another 50 million subscribers. A little over a year later it is now 200 million. And while the coronavirus pandemic has largely benefited Amazon’s retail business, it’s just as likely to eventually reach the same milestone.
In a significant part of the letter, it appears that Bezos reflected on the recent failed attempt by employees at the BHM1 fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama. “Comfort your chairman with the result of the recent trade union vote in Bessemer? No, he does not,” writes Bezos. “I think we need to do better work for our employees. Although the voting results were skewed and our direct relationship with employees is strong, it is clear to me that we need a better vision for how we create value for employees -” a vision for their success. ‘
Dustin Chambers / Reuters
The letter alludes to the company’s ‘time-off-task’ policy, which is one of the main grievances that employees in Bessemer wanted to address through union. Amazon carefully keeps every second of its frontline workers away from their primary duty. The system set up by Amazon will automatically send them messages if it is too long. According to some Amazon employees, this is a system that does not allow them to go to the bathroom when needed.
Bezos defends the policy. “Employees can take informal breaks during their shifts to stretch, get water, use the toilet or talk to a manager, without affecting their performance,” he writes in the letter. “We do not set unreasonable performance targets. We set achievable performance targets taking into account tenure and actual performance data.”
As for workers who can not consistently meet the expectations of the company, he says Amazon offers coaching to them, with 82 percent of them ‘positive’. Bezos claims that the company fires less than 2.6 percent of its employees because they did not perform their job adequately. He says the number was even lower in 2020 due to the operational impact the pandemic had on the business.
He also touches on another seemingly constant issue at the company’s warehouses: injuries in the workplace. The difference here is that Bezos sets out the steps the company is taking to address the issue. He says about 40 percent of the work-related injuries found at Amazon are related to muscle and skeletal disorders. These are injuries like strains that occur when someone repeats the same movement over and over again. This is a problem, especially in the more automated facilities of the company. Bezos says Amazon is developing new algorithmically generated staff schedules that will automatically allow employees to switch between jobs using different muscle groups. He says Amazon will be implementing the technology year-round. In 2021, the company will also invest $ 300 million in workplace safety projects.