Getting Caught Working Undercover at Amazon I Oobah’s Great Amazon Heist

Who wants to see more of Oobah Butler on VICE?

Several years ago, I had the opportunity to visit an Amazon warehouse in Portland, Oregon USA. Within minutes, I noticed no fire alarm pull handles. I asked about it, and I was told there were two in the lobby, the only two in the entire warehouse. I asked what employees were supposed to do if they noticed a fire, and I was told that they would need to “find” someone with a radio to notify safety so that team could engage an alarm. I contacted the Oregon state fire marshal who told me these stations should be located throughout the warehouse by law. I asked them how the building passed inspection. That office told me it was up to the “local” fire department to perform that inspection. I contacted the Troutdale, OR fire department and asked them about it. They told me that they were told to ignore the absence of the alarm stations because Amazon had been granted a waiver. After multiple phone calls, no waiver could be located, and no government agency wanted to discuss it further. There are now 9+ warehouse centers in the Portland area, and they all lack fire alarm alert stations. Amazon gets away with breaking safety rules with impunity. Government agencies and local press are afraid to take Amazon to task. It’s dangerous and irresponsible.

Former Amazon employee, i describe my time working there realizing you aren't a cog in the Machine, you aren't even a ball barring. You are the grease, something, by design, to used up and replaced at regular intervals

That last bit of your lawyer realizing that you actually got away with it was incredible. You could see that he was thinking through every legal loophole that could catch you, and he realized that you did it. So cool!

44:40 the look on the lawyers face here as he processes the sheer brilliance & creativity of the one & only Oobah Butler… priceless!

A year ago an Amazon driver stopped at my house as i was watering the garden. He begged me to hose him down. It was 102F and he was bright red. He said, there's no A/C in the van. I hosed him good.

"Keep your head down, don't piss the wrong people off." - That's literally the exact advice I was given when I had to jail time. So, sounds like a really wonderful place to work.

I used to work at Amazon for quite some time and I find a lot of this fairly funny. I had quite a bit of knowledge about management at these warehouses and how the process works, and more importantly how it is supposed to work. For example the whole bottles of urine thing is because people have no idea how Amazon is supposed to handle these situations. Time off task is something at Amazon and there is a procedure for this. Basically it tracks the time between scans, and when you go past that time it will add that time to their time off task, and it's specific types of scans so that you can't just randomly scan something. The key is that they are supposed to pull up the top people that have the most time off task. The managers are then supposed to talk to those employees and get reasons for each of the time off task gaps. Each of those gaps then should get categorized as being excused or unexcused time off task. So things like verified time talking to a manager, having equipment problems, and going to the restroom would all be considered excused time off task. If you then have more than a certain amount of unexcused time off task, for instance time spent talking to other employees or time that the manager was told they didn't remember what they were doing, they would get a write up or even fired if it was too much time off task. If you use excuses like you went to the bathroom half a dozen times a day then they wouldn't write you up the first time, but they would ask you if you have some type of medical excuse or to make sure to go at breaktimes. I was usually told to have that conversation if that excuse was used more than 4 times in a day, really three times because it was only pulled for the first three quarters of the day. The problem really is that either the employees don't know this, or the managers don't. I worked at over half a dozen warehouses, and some of them followed this policy, other warehouses had managers that had no idea what the corporate policy was. Unfortunately this was a common theme at Amazon. Turnover on frontline managers was terrible. Basically every 1-2 years the frontline manager would change, and it would take a good manager at least 3-6 months to get to the point where they knew all of these policies. And within a year or two those managers would end up getting promoted. If they were a bad manager then it usually took around a year before Amazon would let them go. So the majority of the time you either have a new manager or a bad manager. Most of the higher up managers were a lot better though and genuinely did know the policies, which is exactly why they don't understand why stuff like this is happening despite them continually training the new managers to do things like let their employees take bathroom breaks and not count it against them for time off task. The same thing even happened in the HR departments in the warehouses. On the plus side corporate HR and managers knew their stuff. I can't tell you how many times I had to argue with HR or managers and ended up having to get things escalated until someone higher up knew the policy and would back me up. The result in at least one case was an entire warehouse with hundreds of employees having their entire time off task process reviewed and updated, along with managers finally getting proper training on how to process time off task. This by the way was a warehouse that had issues with employees peeing in bottles and having other accidents because the frontline managers and HR had thought that bathroom breaks were supposed to count towards time off task. But corporate HR was very quick to let them know when they realized this was the case, and explain that they would only count it if it was determined to be an unreasonable number of bathroom breaks and the employee had been notified that it was unreasonable previously and told to bring in a medical excuse if they really did need to use the bathroom that often. A similar thing happened with insubordination. Policy was that a refusal to do a task was not insubordination. First the manager had to ask why the employee was refusing an order, for example maybe there was a safety concern or they hadn't been trained on that task. Then they had to resolve any concerns. Then if the employee still refused they had to inform the employee that they would be fired if they continued to refuse. And then if it was still refused that was insubordination. It's a long but clear process, and one that I'd say half the frontline managers I dealt with had no idea about, and probably a quarter of HR had no idea.

I would like to share that while working as an Amazon Delivery Driver, I was bitten by a dog and was actively bleeding in my van, and it took almost 2 hours before they made a decision for me to come back to the warehouse so I could go to the hospital. From the time I was bitten, to the time I had gotten to a hospital, it was 3 hours. I then had to get rabies shots directly into the bleeding wound.

I’m officially using this comments section to challenge Jeff Bezos to a cage fight

As a former Amazon employee, it always struck me as ironic that they claimed the metal detectors were for employee safety yet there were no metal detectors on the entrance, you only ever used them when exiting. Louisville, KY.

27:17 Oobah - “maybe I should take it down” Lawyer - “IT’S STILL LIVE NOW?!?” Oobah - “Yea…” 😂

This is one of the best videos I've ever seen on here.... freaking hilarious, informative, and enlightening.

I love how much your lawyer loves you and also how much he hates you.

WHILE WATCHING THIS VIDEO I GOT AN AD FROM AMAZON SAYING HOW GOOD IT IS TO WORK AT AMAZON LMAOOOOOOOOOO 💀💀💀💀💀

genuinely one of the only vice videos I've watched in full in the recent years- nice work!

Love the Ocean's Eleven angle!!! Great video and thank you for supporting the hard workers at Amazon worldwide!!!!

I'm honestly impressed that someone random in Amazon recognized him because I never heard of him, lol

Having worked at an Amazon warehouse for two years, one thing immensely apparent is that the environment brings out the worst in people.

32:57 “HERE’S THE RAT POISON!!!” 😂☠️ I can’t stop laughing