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Published November 21 2022

By Niamh McIntyre , Rosie Bradbury

This story was published in partnership with:

The Verge. Read the story.Find out how to use the Bureau’s work

Inside a vast Amazon warehouse in Beaumont, California, squat blue robots carrying eight-foot yellow shelving units perform a jerky, mechanised dance around each other as they make their way to human workers.

Amari* works 42 hours a week there as a stower, placing products on the shelves robots bring to him. “Cameras are trained on your station at all times,” he said. “It’s kind of demeaning to have someone watching over your shoulder at every second.”

But it’s not just Amari’s managers who are watching. An AI camera system also monitors the stowers’ movements – and if it fails, a video is sent to someone thousands of miles away whose input helps to improve Amazon's machine learning tools.

The videos are reviewed by workers like Viraj in Bengaluru, India. “It is very hectic work,” he said. “We shouldn't blink our eyes while reviewing a video, because our accuracy will go less. We have to be on screen at least eight hours – which is kind of painful.”

Amari and Viraj may work in different countries doing different jobs. But both perform mind-numbingly repetitive tasks whose output is strictly monitored, all of it serving to fine-tune the very system used by Amazon to closely monitor its own workers – and create the seamless experience enjoyed by its customers.

Reviewers like Viraj get through up to 8,000 videos a day, with their output ranked against that of their colleagues. The relentless pace of their work can take a serious physical toll. They are paid as little as £212 a month.

Video reviewers interviewed by the Bureau reported physical problems including headaches, eye pain and even deterioration in their eyesight. They said they were made to hit punishing targets, with tracking software logging any periods of inactivity outside of designated break times. While one expert recommended that people doing video annotation should take screen breaks every half an hour, some said their targets did not allow for this.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism interviewed 33 current and former Amazon employees, including 21 video reviewers, to shed light on a little-known outpost of Amazon’s sprawling global operations.

Amazon spokesman Steve Kelly disputed a number of the allegations in this story, saying the Bureau and Verge had “selected a handful of anecdotes to paint a misleading picture, and we do not believe they represent the vast majority of our team”.

Anson Chan

'We're not able to even blink our eyes'

Amazon has developed an extensive range of applications that use computer vision – a branch of machine learning in which computers process large numbers of images and learn to recognise patterns.

The cameras trained on Amari’s station use computer vision to automatically register the location of products in its inventory and flag errors he makes. This technology has also been deployed inside Amazon Go stores and to monitor compliance with social distancing guidelines by warehouse workers.

Amazon says the system’s algorithm is 95% accurate; the remainder of cases require manual checks. That means that every day millions of images and videos are sent to workers based in India and Costa Rica, who decide whether a product was successfully stowed and indicate where on the shelving unit it is located.

Video reviewers said their primary role was stock management – but they can also record errors made by their colleagues overseas: two former workers said reviewers could raise “stow etiquette” issues if they saw stowers breaking Amazon’s rules on camera.

Most crucially, though, their non-stop manual work helps to improve the computer vision system, which learns from their responses and becomes more and more accurate. But the people teaching Amazon’s computers to see said their own eyes have been damaged by the work.

“We will not be able to even blink our eyes as we need to keep a watch on the videos,” said Prisha, a former video reviewer based in Hyderabad, India. “That impacted my health a lot. It makes the eyes really dry because you constantly stare at that screen.”

The videos are anywhere between two seconds and two minutes, and reviewers said they can watch thousands in a day. Shifts are usually eight to nine hours long, though they can be increased to 11 hours during busy periods, such as in the run-up to Christmas or Black Friday. Reviewers get around one and a half hours’ break time, with any periods of inactivity outside of that instantly logged by tracking software.

Indian interviewees said they earned 25,000 rupees (£265) per month on average, while the Costa Rican average was 514,000 colones (£716).

 

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Constant observation

The humans behind Amazon’s all-seeing computer vision are themselves tightly monitored while they work.

Mateo, a former reviewer in Costa Rica, usually spent his shifts checking that workers in US warehouses were observing Covid-19 protocols. But on one occasion, he saw something unsettling in his feed.

It was an Amazon break room, with chairs set out, very similar to the one in his own building. It gave him an uncanny sense of being observed. “Probably someone else, somewhere else, was watching me at the moment I was watching them,” he said.

Managers keep track of reviewers’ performance with real-time analytics and they must maintain a high accuracy rate, between 95 and 99.5%. Nitara, who took a job with Amazon in Bengaluru after university, failed to pass her probation period due to missing her accuracy targets. “We were not allowed to make mistakes,” she said. “For me that was quite difficult to handle. I'm human, I'm not a robot.”

While they decide how to categorise a video, a timer on their screen counts how long they take. If they linger too long, their “takt” time – the average time to get through a video – will increase and they may be subject to retraining, disciplinary processes or even face losing their job.

“You can't move or do anything,” said Prisha. “If you even give a little gap, your takt will increase and you may land up at the bottom.”

A document passed to the Bureau by a former reviewer in India shows the takt ranking system for 25 employees, with the bottom four names highlighted in red. The top performer has a takt time of 5.7 seconds; the bottom-ranked person 13 seconds.

Jiyan, another former reviewer based in India, said that while the targets were manageable, the work was still “stressful”. What bothered him most, though, was the monotony. “It's a very boring job,” he said. “The entire day, for seven and a half hours, you're doing the same thing over and over again. There is nothing new.”

In Amazon’s peak period of October to December, reviewers said their work increased significantly, with less time between videos, and one said bathroom breaks were more difficult to take. Another India-based worker said he couldn’t take time off over the Hindu festival of Diwali.

Amazon said that workers in India had the option to take Diwali off, and the company’s spokesperson Kelly said workers in India and Costa Rica were “encouraged by the software they use to take short breaks throughout their shifts”.