Big-box country: On the warehouse floor

As thousands of Amazon workers nationwide walked out on Thursday, Dec. 19, the Everything Store’s million-square-foot Montgomery, N.Y., warehouse was operating as usual. Employees at SWF1 worked 10-hour shifts picking, packing and shipping bulky and oversized items on one of the busiest days of the holiday season. But there are murmurs of discontent among the workers there, too.

“The pay is really lacking,” said Niklas Moran, 39, who has worked as a stower at the warehouse since 2022 and is a leader of the fledgling union SWF1 United, which is unofficial and unrecognized by Amazon. He likes his coworkers, and on good days, the job is straightforward. He’d like to stay – but he also needs to think about his future, one in which he’s not working until he’s 80, then ending up in a nursing home on Medicaid, he said.

Moran’s take-home pay took a hit last year because he broke his finger on the warehouse floor, crushing it between cages in the process of moving five cages across the warehouse. As a result of the injury, he was put on light duty and ineligible for overtime, and made just $38,000 that year. Moran, who studied computer science and politics at UC Santa Cruz, lives with two housemates in Beacon, N.Y., and carpools to work.

This year he might make a little more than $40,000 with his hourly pay of $22.60 plus overtime, he said.

According to MIT’s living wage calculator, a single, childless adult working full-time in Orange County, NY needs to make $24.77 an hour to support themselves. Two adults – both working – with one child would each need to make $25.28 to meet minimum standards of living in their community.

Amazon is actually one of the better-paying of the nation’s largest employers, according to a 2022 Brookings Institute study that showed Amazon’s average wage surpassed the living wage floor. That benchmark was met by less than a quarter of the 22 major companies surveyed. Amazon raised hourly pay by $1.50 for frontline employees in September, said company spokesperson Steve Kelly, and with benefits including health care, dental and 401(K) company match, the total compensation package now works out to more than $29 an hour. The only requirements to work there are to be 18 years old and pass a criminal background check.

“We’re proud to be part of the Hudson Valley region community and work hard to be a good neighbor in the places where we operate,” Kelly said. “This includes making sure that local officials and members of the community understand the value we bring: good jobs at best-in-class, safe facilities with competitive pay and benefits, including health care from the first day, up to 20 weeks paid parental leave, and prepaid college tuition.”

‘I have coworkers who are homeless’

Amazon warehouses are predominantly located in wealthy counties, where the workers’ pay lags behind the cost of living.

“I have coworkers who are homeless, coworkers without cars. We have a carpooling network we set up where we pick people up,” said Moran.

One mother-daughter pair who both work at SWF1 are living in a hotel right now, with no car, he said.

Others are working 80-hour weeks holding down two jobs, in one case going from their Amazon shift over to work another 40-hour week at the Medline warehouse down the road.

Coworkers have moved further away from their jobs in search of lower rents – to Sullivan County, N.Y., or Pennsylvania, said Moran.

Colleagues who get a carpool ride to work at the Amazon warehouse generally chip in $5 to the driver, but Moran waives that fee for prospective union members. Moran declined to say how many workers were part of SWF1 United. On Dec. 19, Moran was in Queens, marching in solidarity with the striking workers of Amazon warehouse DBK4.

“Listen, you can’t live off a warehouse salary,” said Dan Maldonado, president of Teamsters Local 445. “Not even have kids, just live with your girlfriend and afford to rent an apartment. A lot of people working in warehouses are in their 30s, 40s, and they’re still living with roommates.”

A recent survey of Amazon hourly workers in 42 states found that more than half had experienced food insecurity in the previous three months; a third were on publicly funded assistance like SNAP; and more than half of those who had worked at Amazon for at least three years had been injured on the job.

Meanwhile, Amazon itself is exempt from paying property taxes on its Montgomery warehouse for five years, per the $20.5 million incentive package granted by the Montgomery Industrial Development Agency in 2020.

‘Transitional’ jobs, no degree required

Entry-level jobs tend to be “poo-pooed in the region,” said Maureen Halahan, president and CEO of the Orange County Partnership, whose mission is to build the local economy by attracting and expanding businesses. But there are people out there who need them. “These jobs kind of meet people where they are,” she said, like “young families that are handing off babies in the parking lot” as the parents trade shifts.

“It’s become sort of the talk of the area that, you know, your kids get out of high school, they’re not quite sure where they should go. Before they blow a ton of money on four-year schools, they can actually work, earn and get college paid for, you know, like they can complete SUNY Orange for free,” said Halahan.

Amazon’s Career Choice program covers up to $5,250 in employees’ tuition expenses per year, helping workers earn degrees or certifications to transition to in-demand careers. About 10 percent of eligible workers at the Montgomery warehouse are enrolled in the program, said Kelly. (Moran believes the tuition program, along with a cap on hourly salaries after three years, is a way for Amazon to nudge out workers who’ve been there awhile, because the company philosophy is that “everyone gets lazy,” he said.)

The saturation of mega-warehouses in Montgomery has had the effect of driving up wages, said State Assemblyman Brian Maher. Maher was supervisor of Montgomery when the three million-square-foot warehouses went up, beginning with Amazon in 2021. “When you have so many warehouses close together you have a competition for employees, and that is a very, very good thing for the employee,” said Maher.

Mega-warehouses are massive employers, bringing in many hundreds of workers, some of whom commute across state lines. Medline employs 770 people between the warehouse and company-owned truck fleet, at a starting hourly wage of $23. Amazon originally expected to employ 1,100 at its Montgomery warehouse, according to town planning documents, and currently has about 800 permanent employees, with more during busy times like now.

“The average warehouse job used to be $15 an hour and in some places it’s still pretty low, but in the town of Montgomery – because you have Amazon, because you have Medline, because you have McKesson and UNFI, you have employees making more of an hourly wage,” said Maher. “It also forces them to provide incentives like tuition assistance, cash incentives, dining bonuses. It really has allowed people to get a job, get their education, some of it potentially even funded by these warehouses, and then move onto other careers. So it’s become almost transitional work to allow people to get the baseline of education they need to go into a field they would like.”

The different shifts make warehouse jobs an option for people who need a second job, points out Suzanne Hadden, Montgomery Planning Board secretary. “Not all people graduating high school are college material. I mean it’s something.”

A dangerous job

The public is becoming more aware of warehouse working conditions, but most shoppers still don’t grasp the true cost of same- or next-day delivery, said Moran. “I still don’t think they really understand just how many people are required, and what that means for the workers at Amazon to get their package to them in that amount of time.”

Warehouse workers injuries in New York State have tripled between 2017 and 2023, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the current rate, one of every nine workers gets injured per year.

Amazon uses an elaborate scanner-based tracking system to monitor employee productivity, Moran explained. The bottom three percent of performers get written up. If they don’t get their numbers up, they’re fired after a year, he said. That can be a particularly stressful mandate for his elderly and disabled coworkers, said Moran.

Back and shoulder injuries are more common than his smashed finger, said Moran. One former coworker was temporarily homeless after getting injured at the warehouse when a box fell on his neck as he was unloading a trailer, said Moran.

At the United Natural Foods International warehouse, also in Montgomery, there have been 11 severe injuries since 2015 reported to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. All but one involved pallet jack accidents, resulting over the years in a broken foot, an ankle and three broken legs.

‘Who’s going to take these jobs?’

The influx of massive employers into a single town like Montgomery, while it may bump competitors’ wages initially, is in the grander scheme throwing “the employment structure completely out of whack,” said State Senator James Skoufis. “These mega-warehouses can’t find people to work at them, and that’s because we are so past the point of saturation. That’s why you see some of these warehouses offering enormous signing bonuses, amazing incentives.”

“We don’t have housing, we don’t have condos, we don’t have apartments for all these people to move in,” said Don Berger, founder of Residents Protecting Montgomery, which formed in 2019 in opposition to the influx of mega-warehouses to the town.

Montgomery is now home to four pharmaceutical warehouses, he points out. “If we keep building these warehouses, who’s going to take the jobs? I want everybody to work, but they keep building these warehouses. We’re running out of people.” Help wanted signs are all over the place, said Berger, and new warehouses in town are standing empty, “because they can’t get enough people.”

Warehouse workers are seen as a “recyclable workforce,” said Teamsters Local 445 president Maldonado, lured from one warehouse to another by an additional 50 cents an hour, but without substantial benefits like guaranteed raises that would provide long-term stability.

Typical warehouse turnover rate is 46 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is about four times the turnover rate across all industries. Medline, which was named on Forbes’ 2024 list of best large employers, has a turnover rate of 31 percent – much better than the industry at large, noted Tom Fallon, director of operations at Medline’s Montgomery distribution center.

A wide career ladder

Warehouses bring in a variety of jobs – managers, drivers, technicians – and a wide ladder upward, said Fallon. He pointed out his number two in command, who had just walked by us on the warehouse floor. Alan Melanson, a Valley Central High School graduate, has been working for Medline 15 years. “He started out as a temp and he’s moved all the way up to senior operations manager. Succession planning is very, very big.”

“A lot of the people who have Tom’s job started entry-level. I’ve run into that a lot,” added Clint Sabin, senior manager of public affairs, who was visiting Montgomery from company headquarters in Chicago.

Fallon, 56, of Monroe, worked at Nestle and UPS before joining Medline eight years ago. Fallon grew up in Monroe and graduated from Monroe-Woodbury High School. “To be able to work this type of job in Orange County is very rewarding,” he said. “It’s a big plus not having to commute to the city.”

Contrary to the assumption that robots will replace humans, they actually increase the need for workers, said Fallon. To keep pace with the robots’ superhuman velocity, “We need additional pickers and packers to keep up. We also need more maintenance employees to service and maintain the machinery and systems in the facility,” he said. To keep the robots up and functioning, Medline puts new technicians through a robust, cutting edge training program, he said.

But many worry it’s only a matter of time until the technology gets smart enough to take over jobs humans are now doing. “At some point in the not too distant future, a lot of these jobs are going to be automated,” Skoufis believes. “And so supporters won’t even have that to point to once we get to that threshold.”

Better working conditions

Amazon has consistently taken a strong stance against unionization and does not recognize SWF1 United as a union. Still, since submitting its first petition in August 2023 for better pay and working conditions, the workers’ collective has won some demands at the Montgomery warehouse, said Moran, like translating workplace communications into Spanish.

Next on the negotiating table: the two 15-minute breaks allowed workers per 10-hour shift, which currently do not include time to walk to and from the break room.

“It’s a big warehouse. We didn’t think it was too much to ask to be like, okay, the 15 minutes is of rest time, not transit time,” said Moran.

Rest is a critical antidote to the wear and tear on the body that’s a major driver of worker turnover, he said. “A lot of people work really, really hard, and they nickel and dime us on 15-minute breaks.”