The Guardian 10/10/2023
Dozens of contract workers at Amazon warehouses say they were tricked into toiling and living in grueling, squalid conditions
Momtaj Mansur wanted to go home to his mom and his brother and the pastures of Nepal’s southern plains. He felt like a prisoner, he says, in a roach-infested bunkhouse in Saudi Arabia, out of work, hungry and deep in debt.
The 23-year-old had come to Riyadh, the Saudi capital, in 2021 to work for one of the world’s biggest companies: Amazon.
Instead of his dream job, he says, he found low pay and misery. Amazon managers berated him, he says, for being too slow as he hustled across a vast two-story warehouse, grabbing iPhones and other items ordered by customers across the Arabian peninsula.
Then in May 2022, he says, he and many of his Nepali co-workers were abruptly let go from their jobs at the Amazon warehouse. They were 2,400 miles from home with no wages and little food.
Mansur says he pleaded with the Saudi labor supply company that held their employment contracts and had placed them in what amounted to temporary positions at Amazon: if there was no more work, let them return to Nepal.
The Saudi firm, he says, demanded he make a terrible choice. He could stay in a place that, for him, was “like a hell”. Or he could push his family back in Nepal deeper into destitution by paying a $1,300 exit fee, a penalty for leaving before his contract was done.
“I told them: either kill us or send us home, but don’t give us so much pain,” he says.
Momtaj Mansur is one of dozens of current and former workers who claim they were tricked and exploited by recruiting agencies in Nepal and labor supply firms in Saudi Arabia and then suffered under harsh conditions at Amazon’s warehouses.
Their accounts provide insight into how major American corporations profit, directly or indirectly, from employment practices that may amount to labor trafficking, which is defined as using force, coercion or fraud to induce someone to work or provide service.
Forty-eight of the 54 Nepali workers interviewed for this story say recruiters misled them about the terms of their employment, falsely promising they would work directly for Amazon. All 54 say they were required to pay recruiting fees – ranging from roughly $830 to $2,300 – that far exceed what’s allowed by Nepal’s government and run afoul of American and United Nations standards.
During their time in Saudi Arabia, these workers say, they were paid a fraction of what direct hires for Amazon’s Saudi warehouses earn, because labor supply firms were taking big cuts of what Amazon was paying for their labor.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/10/amazon-trafficking-links-claims-saudi-arabia-workers-abuses
