Amazon Flex is not just a delivery platform, but it’s giving people work opportunities they won’t get with their regular jobs.
This platform is a delivery service where Amazon hires ordinary people to drive their own cars and deliver packages for Amazon. The drivers are independent contractors who set their own hours and work when it suits them.
So, you get the picture. With Amazon Flex, you deliver packages to customers, but at your own time, or whenever you’re free. The schedule well, could be stated, is flexible.
However, a recent report from the union-backed workers’ rights non-profit National Employment Law Project, controversially titled “Delivering Precarity: How Amazon Flex Harms Workers and What to Do About It,” says otherwise – that the schedule drivers get is not flexible as it is supposed to be. Here’s more.
Jeers to Amazon
“Through Flex and its public policy work, Amazon is eroding labor standards in the broader last-mile delivery sector and beyond,” the report stated.
The proponents of the report, the National Employment Law Project, pointed out that for over five decades, they’ve “led the fight for a good-jobs economy.”
“Our work has sparked improved power and increased income for workers and their families across the country. Over the last decade, our victories have impacted the lives of an estimated 100 million workers and their families,” their site bragged.
The senior researcher behind the report, Maya Pinto, interviewed eight Amazon Flex drivers in New Jersey who were in protest at the time of the interview. Those drivers told her they sometimes encountered trouble working as much as they wanted and on the schedules they preferred.
Two of the Flex drivers the researcher asked stated Amazon’s app would, at times, prevent them from signing up for more than five hours of work per day. So, that’s less hours and less work.
Plus, the drivers even get locked out of the app or deactivated after working the shifts they want.
“The app lockouts are really preventing Flex drivers from being free to choose when they want to work,” Pinto told Ridesharing Forum.
Smear campaign?
A spokesperson for Amazon, Amber Plunkett, told this team, that they haven’t reviewed the report, as of press time, bu seeing its title and all, they said it appears to be “another attempt by NELP to intentionally leave out important context in order to fit their own narrative.”
Amazon added that worker research and advocacy efforts are critical of their initiatives. So, they are denying the claims of the report.
“The fact is, for nearly a decade, Amazon Flex has empowered delivery partners across the country to deliver Amazon packages on their own schedules with competitive earnings,” the spokesperson further noted.
Additionally, Amazon emphasized the shifts it offers to Flex drivers vary between weeks, and also due to changes in seasonal demand.
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