Guest Post by Niamh McIntyre and Rosie Bradbury
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.
Inside a vast Amazon warehouse in Beaumont, California, squat blue robots carrying eight-foot yellow shelving units perform a jerky, mechanized 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 artificial intelligence (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.”
