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that the company “uses a self-reinforcing set
of management, data, and psychological tools
to spur its tens of thousands of white-collar
employees to do more and more.”
Amazon emphatically disputed the
Times’s conclusions. Even as described by
its own executives, though, the company’s
workplace retains a survival-of-the-fittest ele-
ment. Galetti doesn’t maintain that every day
at Amazon is a walk in the, well, Spheres: “We
absolutely are proud that it’s hard work here.”
Fourteen years after leaving Amazon,
Mike Sha, who helped hatch Amazon Prime
and is now CEO of online-investing plat-
form SigFig, can still cheerfully rattle off
key Leadership Principles from memory. “It
was a hard place to work, in a positive way,”
he says. But are the company’s lofty tenets a
better fit for a well-paid product manager or
software engineer than for someone sorting
items in a warehouse for an hourly rate?
Consumer CEO Wilke doesn’t think so: “We
want everybody to invent, to be customer
obsessed, to be an owner.”
Still, when judging satisfaction among
Amazon’s hourly workers, “the key [metric] is
turnover,” argues ex-employee Burgett. “And
Amazon, to my knowledge, has never and
will never acknowledge what their turnover
rate is.” (Indeed, the company refused to pro-
vide such retention figures for this article.)
Amazon is clearly making some moves
to better the lot of its lowest-paid employees.
Galetti stresses that the company isn’t blind
to its own flaws, even if it takes issue with
some of its critics. “We don’t react and change
things based on negative stories,” she says,
but “on what we learn from our employees.... We go and seek the truth.”
Last October, the company announced
that it was instituting a $15 minimum wage
for hourly workers. Less than a month ear-
lier, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders had in-
troduced the Stop BEZOS Act, a proposed law
that would make large companies pay 100%
of the cost of federal assistance received by
their employees. (Officially, “Stop BEZOS”
stood for “Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing
Out Subsidies.”) Amazon disputed the fig-
ures Sanders quoted relating to its workers,
and maintains that its decision had nothing
to do with the proposed legislation.
“Any time any company is raising wages,
that’s a good thing,” says Dave Mertz, New
York director of the Retail, Wholesale, and
Department Store Union, who fought the
company’s effort to open an additional
headquarters in Queens, New York. How-
ever, he cautions, “you have to look at the
totality of what it is to actually be an em-
ployee of Amazon. It’s about conditions. It’s
about treating people with respect.”
The new $15 baseline will help the com-
pany recruit workers in a tight market, and
will likely compel other big employers of low-
wage workers to match that figure to stay
competitive. The company now advocates
for a change in federal law that would raise
the minimum wage to $15 from the current
$7.25: “We recognized that this was an area
that we wanted to lead in,” says Galetti.
Meanwhile, the company is also helping
its minimum-wage employees diversify
their skill set. Sixteen thousand hourly work-
ers have taken advantage of Career Choice, a
seven-year-old training program with class-
rooms right inside dozens of the company’s
fulfillment centers, as well as online courses.
It’s been a priority for Galetti. Amazon pays
95% of the cost of these vocational- and
technical-school-led courses in growing
fields such as healthcare and transporta-
tion, even if it means eventually losing the
employee to a career outside the company.
Another Galetti project could have even
more long-term impact. Last year, Amazon
established a nonprofit joint venture with
Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase to
investigate ways that the three companies—
and maybe, eventually, American business
as a whole—can offer better healthcare at
lower costs. Galetti is Amazon’s representa-
tive in this initiative, called Haven, which
hasn’t made much in the way of news yet
other than naming as its CEO the distin-
guished surgeon and writer Atul Gawande.
He describes Galetti as “wicked smart” and
lauds Amazon for its fresh approach to an
age-old challenge: “They understand the
importance of creating an independent orga-
nization that employees can trust is focused
solely on their health outcomes, experience,
and costs, without profit-making incentives
and restraints.”
If Amazon can improve healthcare in the
U.S., it can do anything. But Galetti is careful
not to let ambition give way to hubris. Her
favorite aphorism from the 14 Leadership
Principles is a pungently worded admon-
ishment to stay humble: “Leaders do not
believe their or their team’s body odor smells
of perfume.” Even after nearly six years, she
says, “I am not an expert on HR. I am not an
expert on Amazon.”
We wind up our conversation, and she
hands me my own take-home copy of the 14
principles. On the way to her office (which
is windowless, since Amazon believes
that views should be shared), she grabs an
Amazon-branded bag of plantain chips from
a stash of snacks. They’re particularly tasty,
she says. Somewhere on this campus is a
product manager responsible for that.
[email protected]fulfill orders. But as robotic transporters
steer mobile shelves full of products to her
station, she never stops plucking items for
packing: Post-it Notes, Vermont-themed
socks, a Barbie on a tractor.
I am being escorted around by an Amazon
PR manager, so it’s not surprising that the
workers I chat with are upbeat about their ex-
perience in the facility. However, grumbling is
evident in Voice of Associate (VOA), a series of
whiteboards along the main drag through the
warehouse. VOA allows employees to sound
off about anything that’s on their mind, in a
spot where coworkers will see it and manag-
ers can respond. On the day when I skim the
boards, the gripes do not involve existential
crises. One snarks about the incessant holi-
day music being piped over loudspeakers, for
example, while another laments the quality
of the building’s Wi-Fi. (There are also some
positive sentiments, including someone
praising the same holiday music.)
VOA complaints, Galetti says, can filter
from a fulfillment-center whiteboard back to
her in Seattle, as happened when a number
of workers expressed frustration with a new
third-party benefit provider. Alarmed, she
used Connections to survey Amazonians com-
pany-wide; a worrisome 40% of respondents
gave the provider a thumbs-down, leading HR
to clarify the wording of its benefit informa-
tion. “It was an immediate way to bridge what
we were assuming was happening and what
the front line was experiencing,” she says.
It doesn’t always feel so seamless in the
field. John Burgett, who worked in multiple
“tier one” capacities at an Amazon fulfill-
ment center in Indiana from 2014 to 2018
(though Amazon would not confirm this),
maintained an online log of the Connections
questions that popped up on his screen,
which he says ranged from dead serious
(“Is your manager mindful for cultural dif-
ferences?”) to hilariously fluffy (“Do you
know what makes Amazon so amazing?”).
He dismisses Connections and VOA as “the
illusion of some kind of interaction between
employee and employer... but I’ve found
that employees have very little agency there.”
Amazon has grappled for so long with its
reputation as an unpleasant place to work—
whether in a warehouse or at a desk—that one
might conclude that these issues are a result
of its unique culture rather than a violation
of it. A 1999 investigation by The Washington
Post—almost 14 years before it was acquired
by Jeff Bezos—depicted the Amazon environ-
ment as high-speed and high-stress, spurring
some employees to pursue an ill-fated union-
ization effort. Sixteen years later, The New York
Times published a 6,000-word story painting a
cutthroat portrait of life at Amazon, declaring