Amazon’s Biggest Exploitation is Giving its Workers More Time Off
“Voluntary Time Off” is their trojan horse to exploit workers, minimize wage costs and protect tax breaks
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Short break times. Punishment for using the bathroom. Worker surveillance. These are some of the poor working conditions in Amazon warehouses that have been documented in recent years. But, Amazon’s exploitative practices go beyond their blatantly poor treatment of workers. After working in an Amazon warehouse for three months, I’ve realized that one of Amazon’s most concerning exploitations is found in a seemingly friendly tactic: offering their employees unpaid time off.
Amazon offers most of their entry-level workers “Voluntary Time Off,” or “VTO,” in what at first glance seems like a rare act of kindness from upper management. VTO is an optional chance for a worker to cut their shift short and go home without getting paid. It also doesn’t dig into the time off Amazon has to allot each worker under many state laws.
My job at the warehouse was to load packages row-by-row into trailers. We were called “wall builders,” and there were a lot of us. It was one of the most common roles at the warehouse because of its simplicity and brutal monotony. So, we were offered VTO a lot because some days they determined the warehouse wasn’t busy enough where we all had to work.
In my first weeks at Amazon, I thought VTO was a kind gesture by managers who were showing their sympathetic, human side which is rare at the company. But after watching how and when they used VTO, it became clear that this “time off” opportunity is a much deeper scheme. Instead, VTO is a cheat code for Amazon to exploit workers that didn’t take the time off, minimize wage costs and protect tax breaks.
It’s a quietly genius stunt — clearly designed by smart economists — to defy normal labor principles and deceive local governments. They can shrink their labor force to directly match customer demand while still technically employing that labor. A smiley Amazon PR team can then easily woo state governments with the idea that they bring thousands of good-paying jobs to local communities, and in return pay almost $0 in taxes nationally. Who is actually hurt by these shortcuts? The…
