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Jobless in Seattle: 60 couriers lose jobs as Amazon axes deliveries by bike

Working on internet giant contract had been described as a "physically impossible" task...

60 couriers are set to lose their jobs today after internet giant Amazon decided to scrap Prime Now one-hour deliveries by bike in Seattle, Washington state, the city where it is based.

Instead, goods will be delivered to shoppers exclusively via motor vehicles, although some have expressed scepticism that Amazon is finished with bike couriers altogether.

According to Geekwire, the riders concerned were told by email on Wednesday that they were surplus to requirements - just three days’notice.

All were supplied to Amazon by a variety of firms that employed the couriers, and in the comments to that article, strong suspicions are raised that having built an understanding of how the business operates, Amazon will now look to engage bike couriers directly.

One, who has been working on the Amazon contract for the past nine months, told thestranger.com: "We were all given a very short notice that Friday would be our last day.

"A lot of people, including myself, are thinking, 'Why are we going to stick around and bust our ass and put our lives on our line when they don't give a shit?' They just cut our jobs. A lot of us just walked out."

But she put no blame on the owner of Fleetfoot, the contractor she worked for, insisting: “Gary was the best boss I've ever had.

"He didn't tell us because he was trying to negotiate with Amazon and get them to change their mind... He was a good employer. It was Amazon that was horrible."

The courier added that she had not been given any severance pay, and at $12.50 an hour had already been struggling to make ends meet with her rent having just gone up.

She will now apply for food stamps and unemployment benefit, and added: "A lot of new employees got screwed too. It was not a pretty picture yesterday."

In autumn last year, Geekwire reported on the demands Amazon placed on couriers delivering products ordered through the Prime Now one-hour service.

One rider then said - also anonymously - that  Amazon’s requirements in terms of payload, delivery time and execution were “physically impossible” to meet.
 

Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.

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10 comments

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bauchlebastart | 7 years ago
1 like

For Amazon 3 days notice is pretty generous. Work for amazon in Scotland and you find out your out of a job when you turn up for work and your access card doesn't work.

Avatar
ooldbaker | 7 years ago
0 likes

The figures are from their audited  annual report . Page 39.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-reportsannual

They discuss the tax charge in the introduction. 

They pay very little tax in the UK but worldwide it is a totally different matter. Tax on the UK sale of amazon goods is taxed mainly in Luxemburg part going to the UK for "fulfillment". 

As I said above  60% is a bit of a freakish charge but still the usual rate of 30% is still far higher than the 20% we charge companies. This hardly gives them an advantage over local booksellers who pay much lower rate.

 

 

Avatar
brooksby replied to ooldbaker | 7 years ago
0 likes

ooldbaker wrote:

The figures are from their audited  annual report . Page 39.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-reportsannual

They discuss the tax charge in the introduction. 

They pay very little tax in the UK but worldwide it is a totally different matter. Tax on the UK sale of amazon goods is taxed mainly in Luxemburg part going to the UK for "fulfillment". 

As I said above  60% is a bit of a freakish charge but still the usual rate of 30% is still far higher than the 20% we charge companies. This hardly gives them an advantage over local booksellers who pay much lower rate.

Thats right - Amazon made £5 billion of sales in the UK, but because all of their UK sales are dealt with by their Luxembourg company then they only paid £11 million in corporation tax in the UK. So that's alright then.

(They used to import and export via Jersey and Guernsey for the same sort of reasons).

Avatar
ooldbaker replied to brooksby | 7 years ago
0 likes

brooksby wrote:

ooldbaker wrote:

The figures are from their audited  annual report . Page 39.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-reportsannual

They discuss the tax charge in the introduction. 

They pay very little tax in the UK but worldwide it is a totally different matter. Tax on the UK sale of amazon goods is taxed mainly in Luxemburg part going to the UK for "fulfillment". 

As I said above  60% is a bit of a freakish charge but still the usual rate of 30% is still far higher than the 20% we charge companies. This hardly gives them an advantage over local booksellers who pay much lower rate.

Thats right - Amazon made £5 billion of sales in the UK, but because all of their UK sales are dealt with by their Luxembourg company then they only paid £11 million in corporation tax in the UK. So that's alright then.

(They used to import and export via Jersey and Guernsey for the same sort of reasons).

This wasn't a story about Amazon UK but their US company which does pay very high taxes. Personally I think that a company with the sense to put their European base in a country with 1% tax rather than one with 20% tax to be able to give their customers a better deal is not all bad.

In the EU a Luxemburg company is just as entitled to sell it's books in the UK as one paying taxes here.

I am not defending Amazon particularly in the way they treat employees but as an accountant I get totally exasperated in the way the media and politicians treat tax avoidance by dismissing law abiding companies as tax dodgers when the politicians make the rules that they  follow and the media are amongst the worst tax dodgers themselves.

Avatar
kie7077 replied to ooldbaker | 7 years ago
1 like

ooldbaker wrote:

brooksby wrote:

ooldbaker wrote:

The figures are from their audited  annual report . Page 39.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-reportsannual

They discuss the tax charge in the introduction. 

They pay very little tax in the UK but worldwide it is a totally different matter. Tax on the UK sale of amazon goods is taxed mainly in Luxemburg part going to the UK for "fulfillment". 

As I said above  60% is a bit of a freakish charge but still the usual rate of 30% is still far higher than the 20% we charge companies. This hardly gives them an advantage over local booksellers who pay much lower rate.

Thats right - Amazon made £5 billion of sales in the UK, but because all of their UK sales are dealt with by their Luxembourg company then they only paid £11 million in corporation tax in the UK. So that's alright then.

(They used to import and export via Jersey and Guernsey for the same sort of reasons).

This wasn't a story about Amazon UK but their US company which does pay very high taxes. Personally I think that a company with the sense to put their European base in a country with 1% tax rather than one with 20% tax to be able to give their customers a better deal is not all bad.

In the EU a Luxemburg company is just as entitled to sell it's books in the UK as one paying taxes here.

I am not defending Amazon particularly in the way they treat employees but as an accountant I get totally exasperated in the way the media and politicians treat tax avoidance by dismissing law abiding companies as tax dodgers when the politicians make the rules that they  follow and the media are amongst the worst tax dodgers themselves.

Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's moral at all, the politicians pander to corporations too much which is why we have this tax avoidence mess. And I was reading just in the last couple of days that Amazon have also been avoiding US taxes

<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/18/revealed-project-gold...">Revealed: how Project Goldcrest helped Amazon avoid huge sums in tax | Technology | The Guardian</a>

 

Avatar
musicalmarc | 7 years ago
0 likes

are you sure about those figures?  Amazon sell about 4 billion in good in the UK alone each year so I find it hard to believe they only make about 1.5 billion in profit worldwide.  Even if they do they I suspect they are using money that they have saved from not paying local taxes to increase the dominance of their business at the expense of local retailers.

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handlebarcam | 7 years ago
0 likes

Anyone who knows anything about Amazon should not be surprised by this. We are talking about a company that calculated it was cheaper to keep ambulances on stand-by to take dehydrated warehouse workers away, than to install air conditioning or open the doors on hot days and risk theft. And, of course, they dodged taxes for years, encourage a culture of stress in head office staff, and handsomely paid a man to join them even though he had punched a co-worker because he couldn't get him a steak. Dumping a bunch of cycle couriers at three days notice is, to them, akin to Hannibal Lecter swatting a fly: of no moral moment whatsoever.

Avatar
Batchy | 7 years ago
1 like

That's Capitalism for ya !

Avatar
grumpyoldcyclist replied to Batchy | 7 years ago
0 likes

Batchy wrote:

That's Capitalism for ya !

 

Capitalism isn't all bad, this is much more like corporate greed. Not as if Amazon are short of money, we all know they don't pay taxes. Perhaps the CEO needs to top up his bonus?

Avatar
ooldbaker replied to grumpyoldcyclist | 7 years ago
1 like

grumpyoldcyclist wrote:

 

we all know they don't pay taxes. 

 

Do we?  

Worldwide Amazon paid $950M on profits of $1,568M in 2015 a rate of over 60%. a bit of a bad year, overall they tend to pay about 30% as most of their profits are made in the US with rates of well over 30% balanced by low rates overseas.

A lot of other multinationals do manage to make profits disappear but amazon selling physical items actually don't.

For the volume of sales that they make their profits are very small. We benefit from their low prices.

I can understand criticism of their labour policies but if you think they "don't pay taxes" then you have listened to too many politicians who do not understand the tax laws they make.

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