"Revealed: Amazon touts high wages while ignoring issues in its warehouses", 7 August 2019 

Amazon won praise when it raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour in October 2018. Since then, the company has responded to criticism over its working conditions by claiming it is an industry leader in compensation, but a Guardian investigation has revealed many workers take issue with this messaging, as serious workplace issues remain that they say are still not being addressed. 

They include claims workers are being punished for injuries; the elimination of bonuses and stock options, which has lessened the impact of the wage rise; poor working conditions; higher productivity demands and the hiring of temporary workers who do not have the same benefits as Amazon staff...

An Amazon spokesperson told the Guardian in an email: “It’s more complicated than that and we’re not able to provide private medical information.” They added that their action had been in accordance with New Jersey state workers’ compensation laws.

Other workers have complaints about different aspects of Amazon’s working conditions.

“Amazon is leaning heavily on this compensation angle for a lot of their messaging, but they’re not addressing the core workplace issues workers are bringing up,” said William Stolz, a picker for two years at the Shakopee, Minnesota, Amazon fulfillment center who last month helped organize an employee walkout...

Stolz noted the Amazon minimum wage increase came with the elimination of monthly bonuses and stock options for employees. He also claimed that since the beginning of this year, his fulfillment center had exclusively hired temporary workers who don’t have the same job security and benefits as direct hires.

An Amazon spokesperson said 150 out of 1,500 workers at the Shakopee fulfillment center were currently temporary employees, and 100 temporary workers at the center had been hired into full-time roles this year. 

An Amazon spokesperson told the Guardian in an email...  “Simply put, people would not want to work for Amazon if our working conditions truly were as our critics portray them to be during this period of record low unemployment and plentiful job opportunities. But 250,000 people choose to work for Amazon in our fulfillment network.”