Amazon drivers say they’re pushed to the limit

Drivers have sued for lack of overtime pay

Los Angeles Times

There are few things more important to Amazon.com than delivery. A large part of the reason the retailer is valued at $360 billion is that it has managed to get customers the things they want, cheaper and faster than its competitors.

Some day, the company promises, drones will deposit boxes at people's doorsteps. But for now, the job of handling the holiday delivery crunch is left to an army of people such as Angel Echeverria.

Echeverria drives for LMS Transportation, a local courier in Inglewood, Calif., that delivers packages for Amazon. He starts each day with about 260 boxes, which he has to drop off at perhaps 200 addresses across up to 80 miles in southern California.

Factoring in the time needed to load and gas up his white van, Echeverria has to hit one home every two minutes, on average. Failing to deliver even one package is not an option, he said.

'If you bring anything back, they basically want to cut your throat off,” said Echeverria, who makes $15 an hour.

For all the control it exercises, Amazon doesn't count Echeverria and many other people who speed around major cities in vans filled with Amazon boxes as its employees.

In an echo of complaints by Uber drivers and other contract workers, delivery drivers in interviews and in court documents say Amazon is working them past a reasonable point, and often avoids paying them overtime or giving legally required meal breaks.

An Amazon spokeswoman said the company's code of conduct for contract delivery companies requires them to provide 'appropriate work hours and overtime pay.”

But in the past two years, drivers in four states have sued the company for allegedly misclassifying them as independent contractors. Those drivers have said they don't get overtime pay and can earn less than the minimum wage because they spend so much on gas every week.

In 2015, drivers for Pasadena-based courier Scoobeez who delivered packages for Amazon sued both companies for denying them overtime and effectively paying them less than the minimum wage after drivers subtracted gas, tolls and maintenance from their paychecks.

Drivers in Arizona settled in October with Amazon, which did not admit fault. Cases against the company in California, Illinois and Washington are in progress.

Labor experts say the cases against Amazon are unusual among contract-work complaints for the level of control the company is claimed to have over the people who deliver its goods.

'With Uber, the individual worker decides on their own when they want to work, how long they want to work, and how they want to provide service to the customer,” said Seth Harris, former deputy secretary of the U.S. Labor Department.

'This is not that. Amazon has a product in its fulfillment center or its warehouse that has to get to a particular person by a particular time, and they are dictating all of that.”

Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Cheeseman said the delivery companies with which it contracts make their own decisions about when to fire employees. But she added that Amazon expects the contract companies to provide a certain level of service.

Those expectations mount during the holidays. On its busiest day, the Monday after Thanksgiving - Cyber Monday - Amazon was expecting to receive more than 54 million orders.

To get the flood of holiday goods to their purchasers, Amazon relies on every delivery option available. That includes FedEx, UPS and the U.S. Postal Service, which in 2013 agreed to deliver packages on Sunday for the company.

But three years ago Amazon began relying more on local couriers, said Rob Howard, the CEO of Grand Junction, a Web platform that connects those companies to Amazon and other e-commerce retailers.

Amazon 'realized that the local couriers could do more than UPS and FedEx. In many cases they are less expensive, because they are non-unionized, the drivers are independent contractors,” Howard said.

Several drivers and industry officials said in interviews that Amazon keeps records on the performance of every one of its drivers, and pressures contractors to fire the ones who can't keep up.

Meticulously tracking drivers, hour by hour, is part of Amazon's broader obsession with speed, which has allowed it to turn weeklong delivery times into days, and now hours.

But maintaining a tight grip on drivers may become legally risky for the company, said labor experts and lawyers.

In 2015, the company started a service called Amazon Flex, which allows the company to contract directly with independent drivers and save the 30 percent of delivery costs that local couriers normally pocket, Howard said.

Amazon's Cheeseman said the company allows Flex contract drivers to 'create their own schedule” and 'deliver when they want acting as their own boss.”

A group of Flex drivers sued Amazon in a federal court in Washington in October, seeking class-action status. The drivers argued that Amazon unfairly treats them as independent contractors, denying them overtime pay and forcing them to spend so much on gas that they sometimes earn less than the hourly minimum wage.