El Supreme Court of the United States has admitted the case presented against Amazon for bad labor practices. We are before the highest court of American justice, which interferes in very few matters throughout the year. The workers denounced that the company forced to be searched at the exit of the warehouses losing an amount of time they don't get paid.
The conflict originated in one of the monumental warehouses where Amazon classifies and distributes its orders. Specifically, one that is located in the State of Nevada, in which the Seattle firm employed temporary workers through a contracted company called Integrity Staffing Solutions.
Workers were forced to get in a check-in queue to see if products or materials had been stolen that the company keeps in its warehouses. The wait lasted sometimes more than 30 minutes and the workers demanded that they be paid that time that they had not agreed in their contract.
Amazon is not the only company conducting checks on its employees. Apple was already on trial last summer because it subjected employees of some Apple Stores to two backpack inspections a day.
These practices and the subsequent lawsuits they generate are unusual in other sectors where there are organized unions that negotiate with companies. But in the technological world there is hardly any union membership and spontaneous workers' organizations have to go through the courts to enforce their rights.
Amazon hides itself in the fact that according to the Federal Law on Fair Labor Standards (FLSA) those usual waiting times in many types of work such as signing in, parking in the company parking lot, waiting to receive pay and the set of security procedures involved in entering the job have never been considered remunerative.
It is not the first time they have been reported
This legal process against the creators of Kindle Fire began in 2010, having gone through various levels in the American justice system until reaching the Supreme Court.
Jeff Bezos' company has already been related to bad labor practices on other occasions, the complaints of harsh conditions for thousands of workers in its warehouses in Germany being the one that attracted the most attention in our country.
Source: Reuters