An interesting article has surfaced on the BBC news website today regarding the online retail giant we all know and loathe love, Amazon!
The article itself is a forerunner to a TV program showing tonight on BBC1 called Inside Amazon – An Inside Out Special at 7.30pm
Amazon, it appears, are being naughty when it comes to their deliveries, in the article, found Here, it says that the delivery drivers are effectively forced to work for less than minimum wage and longer hours than is legal for a driver allowed by law.
The drivers are expected to pay rental charges on the provided vans and are provided the basic third party only insurance with an excess that you would expect to have with an Aston Martin DBS and deliver a set number of parcels in a day. A BBC reporter went undercover as an Amazon Logistics Driver, these are the people who deliver your orders when you buy with Prime and guarantee next day delivery or Sunday deliveries, and over the course of a 2 week stint uncovered some alarming and frankly disturbing things.
He had drivers telling him that to maintain the delivery schedule they have no time for toilet breaks and had to poop in bags or pee in a bottle. A supervisor told him to not worry about wearing a seatbelt as the Police won’t stop a delivery driver and other drivers admit to breaking the speed limits to make the delivery schedules as the times allowed do not allow for traffic jams or even red lights.
As if that is not bad enough, to be an amazon driver, they require you to be officially classed as self employed which is their way of circumvent the minimum wage laws and employment right laws that entitle you to things like Holiday Pay and Statutory Sick Pay. It becomes a little clearer how they manage to keep their prices so low.
We use Amazon as a sales platform and in a few cases, compete with them directly on goods for sale, it is a matter of pride that we remain independent and we do not use Amazon to deliver our goods, we use Both Royal Mail and UK Mail whom we know do not exploit their drivers in the same way Amazon does.