How Amazon became a pandemic giant – and why that could be a threat to us all

For the last year, Anna (not her real name) has been working as an Amazon "associate", in the kind of vast warehouse the company calls a fulfilment centre. For £10.50 an hour, she works four days a week, though, during busy periods, this sometimes goes up to five. Her shift begins at 7.15am and ends at 5.45pm. "When I get home," she says, "it's about 6.30. And I just go in, take a shower and go to bed. Anna is a picker in one of the company's most technologically advanced workplaces, in the south of England. This means she works in a metal enclosure in front of a screen that flashes up images of the products she has to put in the "totes" destined for the part of the warehouse where customer orders are made ready for posting out. Everything from DVDs to gardening equipment is brought to her by robot "drives": squat, droid-like devices that endlessly lift "pods" – tall fabric towers full of pockets that contain everything from DVDs to toys – and then speed them to the pickers. Everything has to happen quickly. According to the all-important metric by which a picker's performance is measured, Anna says she has to average 360 items an hour, or around 3,800 a day. In March, the Covid-19 lockdown meant that customer orders suddenly rocketed. Anna says that lots of her colleagues started putting in overtime, and new recruits arrived en masse. "They hired a lot of people," she says. "I thought there should have been fewer people in the warehouse, to have distancing." "They took out some of the tables because of 2-metre distancing, but it was impossible to find a free table or chair.