‘This has to be satire’: Viral TikTok claims Amazon workers nap at stations

The company has faced numerous labour complaints

A TikTok has gone viral for its claims that Amazon warehouse workers are allowed to nap at their stations.

The clip, which has been viewed more than 1.7 million times, claims Amazon workplaces “treat us like family.”

“At Amazon you can sit down when you’re tired and take a nap at your station,” a caption from TikTok user @rare.ssur reads in the video, which shows a man sitting on the ground in a warehouse of some kind.

The Independent has reached out to the video creator and Amazon for more information.

After years of claims about worker abuse inside of Amazon facilities, some commenters were sceptical about the video’s claims.

“Is this HR pretending to be an hourly team member?” one viewer wrote.

“THIS HAS TO BE SATIRE” another said.

Their scepticism isn’t baseless. Amazon does have a record of paying social media users to talk about the company’s positive aspects.

At the end of 2021, Amazon quietly ended a programme that paid hand-selected workers to post positive messages about the company on social media to counter “untruths” about working conditions inside its warehouses.

The @rare.ssur TikTok account, which began posting videos at the beginning of this year, has a number of clips making positive claims about Amazon, including that warehouse workers make nearly $50 an hour, even though average fulfillment center employees usually make less than half that at the company, according to data from ZipRecruiter.

The account also features a number of posts alluding to vague schemes to make thousands of dollars each month, including something called the Apple method, showing a safe full of Apple products.

TikTok videos aside, Amazon workers have long complained about high productivity targets inside warehouses forcing them to work brutal hours and sometimes even pee in bottles, which the company denies.

Over the holiday season, when the company faces extreme demand, workers at two Chicago facilities walked out to protest for better conditions.

The company has also recently began asking workers to do 10-plus hour graveyard shifts, a policy Amazon delivery drivers have said is causing them to stay out late and make high numbers of deliveries, compromising their safety.

In March, an Amazon warehouse employee sued the company for allegedly not letting workers take their full mandated rest breaks.

The company has also been accused of inappropriately stifling labour activity, with the National Labor Relations Board claiming in January that Amazon “repeatedly broke the law by threatening, surveilling, and interrogating their Staten Island warehouse workers who are engaged in a union organizing campaign,” which the company denies.

Last year, California signed a new law and became the first state to mandate that retailers like Amazon can’t penalise workers for missing productivity quotas because of health and safety needs, such as bathroom breaks.