Dear Andy Jassy, President and CEO of Amazon:
CC: Jeffrey P. Bezos, Founder and Executive Chair
Doug Herrington, CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores
Dave Alperson, Vice President of Amazon Logistics
Beth Galetti, SVP, PXT
If you go to the Amazon app homepage, there’s a light blue banner encouraging customers to shop women-owned businesses. On aboutamazon.com, a tab on Women’s History Month sports the hashtag #EmbraceEquity. Another page discussing the company’s workplace culture describes Amazon as “inclusive” and “safe.” I have to tell you that this carefully curated image simply doesn’t align with my experience as a woman working in an Amazon delivery station.
I started with Amazon during the chaos of the pandemic. I’d submitted my application with my fingers crossed, but I was shocked when I actually got the position. I had no prior warehouse experience and no clue what a job in logistics entailed. When I showed up at DHO5 on Day One, I was intimidated by the pallet jacks, the conveyor belts and concrete floors. I didn’t think I would last more than two weeks.
But I did. After about a month, I had settled into Stow, my regular process path, and I noticed something uncomfortable that was happening daily. Our site’s playlist heavily featured explicit, sexually graphic lyrics; many of the lines were also extremely sexually violent. In my opinion, the content of the songs disparaged women. Above all, I felt that the strong sexual nature of the lyrics was inappropriate for an environment where people were working so closely together. (In these songs, there was also constant use of the racial slur “nigger,” which I discussed in another letter.)
Mr. Jassy, if you’ve never been inside of a delivery station during Sort, it might be hard to grasp the intensity of the music played during the shift and understand just how difficult it is to evade or even just ignore it. Played on commercial-strength speakers, it fills the building. For reference, the volume feels similar to the intensity of the music inside of a nightclub. Ours didn’t seem to be a company-wide playlist; the managers running the dock and the Sort floor decided what the team would listen to, linking a phone to the speakers via Bluetooth, and then we’d all listen to whatever was playing on that person’s phone. If you didn’t want to hear what was playing, there was really no recourse. The two places in the building where one could find respite from the music were the restrooms and, ironically, the managers’ offices near the site entrance. Obviously, I didn’t work in either of those areas.
At first, I considered whether I could afford to say anything; I really needed to keep my job. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to make waves by complaining. COVID-19 had changed the economic landscape around me, and with my role at Amazon, I was considered an essential services worker—which meant that I would remain employed regardless of my city’s lockdown status. In the midst of all of the uncertainty and instability in the economy, I was highly grateful to have landed a full-time job that came with a guaranteed 40 hours a week and consistent overtime opportunities. But one day, my discomfort won out and I decided to broach the situation with the Area Manager running the dock.
When I explained my position to him, he seemed stunned. Aside from my discomfort with the sexually graphic nature of the music playing at the dock, I told him, I was also offended at hearing the word “nigger” constantly in the songs we listened to (on Sort, it was not uncommon to hear the word “nigger” upwards of 2,000 times a day). He asked me if I had a problem with curse words. I told him that slurs and epithets had specific cultural meanings, and weren’t typically considered ordinary curse words. We didn’t reach a resolution during that conversation but weeks later, we found ourselves back on the topic. He called me hostile and we had to continue our conversation in the managers’ offices, where an Operations Manager joined us. The OM questioned us both about the situation and after a while, he sent me back to Stow. This conversation did nothing to change our playlist at DHO5—however, it did change the way that AM (and many of the other AM’s) treated me. Someone in our building even shared the content of my complaint with other associates, and multiple coworkers let me know that they were aware that I had spoken to Leadership about the music. One day, a manager somehow played multiple clean songs in a row, and a Picker near me took notice. He shouted at me that because someone had complained, “now we have to listen to all this faggot-ass music.” As it turned out, his concerns were in vain—after about an hour, the dock reverted right back to its usual playlist of songs denigrating women and “niggers.”
When my site closed, I was transferred to DHX3 and I was excited to get a fresh start. My second day in the building, I was back at the dock, listening to song after song filled with the same old slurs. I was shocked. Here I was, brand-new site, brand-new Leadership team, and the same old issues were resurfacing. I told myself that this time, I had to ignore it. Speaking up hadn’t worked out well for me at DHO5. I didn’t feel strong enough to go another round—being cursed out, threatened with physical violence, and assaulted. Without having another job lined up, I didn’t feel that I could afford to quit if things went south again.
My Operations Managers, Area Managers, and even DHX3’s Human Resources representatives, didn’t seem to see the issue with forcing all of the employees to listen to music and lyrics of such a strong sexual nature—which, in and of itself, wasn’t even the main focus of my concerns. After all, some of the lyrics were sexual but didn’t necessarily denigrate women, like the lines about how “wet” one could get his sexual partners, or commending women for having a “deep pussy.” To me, the more pressing issue was the fact that most of the songs seemingly degraded women. Songs on our playlist had lyrics labeling women as “sluts,” “hoes,” “thots,” and “bitches.” Describing them as “run-through” and “bussdowns.” Many of the songs featured lyrics that glorified rape (typically, the rape of a woman who was a girlfriend or daughter of someone with whom the song’s vocalist had “beef”). There were often references to drugging women with “molly” or Percocet to get them to have sex. At DHX3, the dock played “U.O.E.N.O.” so frequently that it could have been our site’s theme song. The song’s pro-rape lyrics had been largely condemned by the public, deemed so offensive that sneaker giant Reebok ended its partnership with rapper Rick Ross over his verse in the song—yet there I was at work, hearing it daily, sometimes twice a day. Some lyrics were so outlandish that it felt as if the only purpose could be to embarrass women (like the song where a man described having a woman snort cocaine off of his “dick”). Still other lyrics, referencing “murdering” and beating up “the pussy,” felt more like gratuitous violence than just overt sexuality.
As I expressed to multiple leaders in my building, I found the content of the songs to be extremely misogynistic. Songs like “pushin P” and “The Percocet and Stripper Joint” seemed to reduce women to sex objects, only good for stripping and “giving head.” A lot of the songs on our playlist referenced prostitution and pimping women for money. Many of the lyricists even used the inherent quality of being female as an insult for other men: While some songs named so-called weak men as “faggots” or “dick riders,” in others, like “Fine China” and “Jimmy Cooks,” men dissed each other with the labels “pussy” and “bitch.” In one line that still stands out starkly, a man insulted another by labeling him a “pussy” who had “a vagina.” This, I thought, was what the men of Amazon really thought of us.
I couldn’t reconcile the reality of my workspace with Amazon’s on-paper policies, its internal and external materials championing equal treatment for everyone, and condemning obstacles to diversity. I felt sure that if I spoke to Human Resources, they would check out the situation and come to the same conclusion that I had: that this music created a hostile work environment for women working in the building and could even be perceived as discrimination. I could not have been more wrong. When I spoke to the HR representative at my site, she seemed unfazed. She told me, “Technically, these buildings aren’t supposed to have music. But the music gets people going.” I got the gist of what she was saying. The music was motivational for associates, something to break up the monotony of our tedious work. Though I raised the issue with her more than once, it was made clear that I was an outlier on my team and that my team wasn’t going to alter a policy for one person—and so it continued.
One night at DHX3, I was inducting across from another associate when a song came on, in which a man sung about “fucking” lesbian twins. When the Operations Manager on the shift came to our belt, the associate told him “This music is trash.” The OM laughed and jokingly said he was going to tell the manager who was playing the music. I blurted out that I was surprised that this particular manager was playing this type of music. (By then, I had come to expect it from most of the managers in the building, but not her.) He started tripping over his words and trying to walk back what he’d said. He said that he wasn’t sure it was really her, then said again that it was, then finally settled on “She must not know what they’re saying.”
I can’t speak for the other women, but I was offended by the music situation at our site. The actions of the leaders in my building felt like discrimination, even though my team kept telling me that it wasn’t. Through it all, a nagging voice in the back of my head kept saying that it wasn’t right—that if I did the same work as the male employees in the building, I deserved equal treatment. I’ve worked as an Unloader, Stower, Splitter, Picker, Waterspider, Diverter. I’ve pushed carts in the Yard in the summer heat; loaded delivery vans while fielding sexually harassing questions from DSPs; was often pulled out of path to pick up slack at the dock when they fell behind. HR had insinuated that I was asking to be treated specially—but in my mind, I was asking to be treated equally. On top of everything else, I felt embarrassed listening to music with such explicit sexual language while working side by side with male employees and managers. To me, the music just helped to contribute to a more sexual environment and I felt that it made our working conditions less safe. The work in the delivery station is fast-paced, labor-intensive, extremely physical. I could handle all those aspects of my position—but I remained unwilling to accept that the sexual “vibes” in our building as part of the job.
I reported my concerns to an off-site HR team but building Leadership still could not be compelled to change the music. I started to seriously consider the moral ramifications of continuing to work for a company where Leaders were okay with setting this kind of example for their subordinates. I knew that taking in hours and hours of what I felt was hate speech against women, was affecting my own mental health. I can’t count the number of days that I snoozed my alarm for an extra half hour or forty-five minutes, just to give myself time to cry before heading into my shift. I worried that I was starting to internalize the negative things I would hear at work. I was frustrated with myself, and angry that I wasn’t mentally strong enough to just ignore these issues for the sake of keeping my job.
Again, my concerns were not kept confidential. In 2023, A Back Half Area Manager at DHX3 made an announcement on the mic at the end of Stand Up. He said, “Due to some complaints, we will no longer be playing rap music,” and a collective groan went through the launchpad. I was stunned. I thought back to the conversation I’d had with my Site Leader, where she’d told me that if she were to cut out the offending music, she would be “excluding just one genre.” She said that would be neither fair nor appropriate. I’d acknowledged her point and told her that I didn’t want her to get rid of any specific genre because of me. As an associate, it wasn’t my place to tell her what she and her team could or couldn’t play in her building—I made this point very clear to her. (I remember using the phrase “majority rules.”) I never, ever asked her—or anyone at Amazon—to stop our site from playing rap or any other type of music. I only wanted a solution for the fact that I felt uncomfortable listening to hour after hour of slurs directed at women, and people describing sex in terms so explicit, it could easily have been labeled pornography with bass (as well as the lyrics’ constant references to “niggers,” which was also part of our conversation).
After the announcement, people began coming up to me to tell me that I was the reason we were being censored. One man, who had transferred in from DHO4, told me that this new rule was racist. Another associate berated me in front of the entire dock crew, telling me that it made no sense for me to say anything because we were all adults. One night when I was unloading at the dock, a coworker asked me why I would take a warehouse job if I had “a problem with sex.” I didn’t have an answer for her. Clearly, I had come into Amazon unprepared for what the job entailed; I had never had a job where you could expect to hear the words “pussy,” “dick,” “fucking” and “sucking,” dozens of times in a workday.
Within a week of that AM’s announcement, the team was back to its regular playlist, but things still didn’t go exactly back to normal. More people on my team were aware of the complaints I’d made about the music, and the confrontations escalated. Associates threw customer packages at me; I was cursed out on a regular basis; my coworkers called me a “nigger,” “bitch ass nigger,” “pussy ass nigger,” “bitch,” “snitch,” and “racist.”
And it wasn’t just the AA’s. On Front Half, the music became even more explicit, and one Process Assistant became noticeably more sexual in her interactions around me. (To be clear, she was never directly sexual with me; she never touched me nor did she call me sexual names.) But it definitely felt as if the things that she was doing were in response to my complaints. One day, during PSL, she and an Area Manager were sharing a bag of chips on Delta-Echo; as I passed their laptop cart, the AM reached out her hand for the PA to lick the rest of the cheese dust remnants off her fingers. She took her time licking it off finger by finger; I said nothing, but still the AM made the comment that they “need to stop because the bitches are watching.” I simply continued picking routes and ignored them. Another time, as the dock crew was heading to our ten-minute break, this same PA followed an associate closely, grabbing out at her backside and telling her that she wanted “those big, beautiful buns.” Some of the other AA’s followed her lead. One day, at the end of PSL, a Learning Ambassador (who had complained multiple times that the music should not be changed) turned a man around and began to spank him, telling him that she just couldn’t help spanking him because his “ass is so big and juicy.” I stayed out of these incidents and began using my personal time off options to avoid PSL or leave Sort early.
In late January, an AA wrote a polarizing comment on our site’s physical VOA board. (*I’m going to assume that as CEO, you have access to site comments if you want to review what it said verbatim. But I’ll paraphrase it here, so that I don’t violate the non-disclosure agreement that I signed as part of the condition of my employment with Amazon.) The person complained that the music played at our site was too sexual and that it was like “a sex club” instead of work (the comment even acknowledged that our building is a warehouse—which was one of the main objections used to shut down my complaints about the music). When I read that comment, I was stunned. My site leader had always maintained an air of shock in our discussions regarding the abusive, sexually violent, and misogynistic language in the music that I was forced to listen to during Sort, and I was continually led to believe that I was the sole employee who was uncomfortable. Another comment on the board simply stated that an AA did not feel safe in our workplace. To me, the person’s sentiment wasn’t so far-fetched. Just last November, we’d had a gun violence threat where an associate threatened to, among other things, “kill everybody in here” and “blow this fucker up.”
After seeing those VOA comments, a Learning Ambassador parked herself in front of the whiteboard during our break, launching into an expletive-laced rant expressing anger about the comments and the fact that they had been written anonymously, with no employee login provided. Multiple employees (some of whom were new hires that she had trained) questioned her as they passed the board, asking if she knew who had written the comments. She answered, “You know who the fuck wrote that” and asked why someone would “write this shit.” It seemed apparent that she thought the “someone” was me.
The next time I crossed paths with my site’s L6 Operations Manager, I asked to meet with him. A HR rep sat in on our meeting, and I relayed the comments to both of them. I explained that even though I hadn’t written either of them, I felt that others reading them would assume that I had. I didn’t know exactly what I expected him to do—I just knew that I didn’t want to face the backlash over the comments as more and more people saw them, especially other Leaders working on our shift. I even speculated that the comment regarding the music may have even been a coworker mocking me because of my prior complaints. My OM’s response shocked me. He said that he didn’t think it was anyone mocking me. He told me “You’re not the only person who’s complained about the music.” His tone was matter-of-fact and sure, and when I pressed the issue, he reiterated his statement. I was confused—what he was saying was a stark contrast to what my site leader had told me in one of our conversations. She had told me that she had never experienced anything like what I was talking about, in her entire Amazon career. I didn’t understand why, if other people had shared similar concerns about this issue, I had been treated with disdain and disbelief when I broached the subject.
In that meeting with my L6, I took the opportunity to look him in the eyes and tell him that I felt, because of the sexually violent music that Leadership played on my shift, he and the other managers were indirectly accountable for some of the discriminatory behavior occurring in our building. While I wasn’t absolving individual associates of their own actions, in my opinion, the sexual atmosphere created by the music that our managers played, had very real, non-abstract consequences: creating a predatory work environment where male coworkers were far more comfortable being sexual with female employees than they otherwise would have been. I reminded him that he had worked with me at DHO5, where I had first raised these concerns; incidents of a sexual nature occurred frequently in both of the buildings where the music had been an issue.
These occurrences are far too numerous for me to list them all in this letter. So, for the sake of brevity, I’ll just call out a few: At DHO5, I was regularly paired with a particular male coworker at induction. He often wore a navy T-shirt which read “I Eat Ass;” under the words was a crude graphic of a man performing that sex act. As we listened to songs about oral sex, group sex, and anal sex (sometimes working less than three feet apart from each other), he would ask me questions about the types of sex mentioned in the songs. One night, he asked me, “Do you like to get high when you gettin’ [sic] your guts blown out?” I told him I had never been shot. He laughed as he corrected me. “No, that’s not what gettin’ [sic] your guts blown out means. It means gettin’ [sic] fucked.” Another time, after finishing PSL at DHX3, I was crossing the launchpad with several other female associates when the Learning Ambassador who was directing the Prime vans used the traffic control baton to mime spanking us. On another occasion, at DHO5, a Learning Ambassador who was diverting with me was arguing back and forth with a female AA, and their conversation was inappropriate but mostly playful—until the tone changed and he warned her that if she didn’t stop talking, he would “shove [his] dick in [her] ass and break it off inside.” I felt sick to my stomach—but he and I had to work together for the remaining hours of Sort.
I think that you owe it to all of the women working for Amazon to take a hard look at how Amazon responds to these types of allegations. Throughout my time as an employee, I spoke to multiple people, at several different levels of the organization. At various points over the last three years, I shared detailed accounts of these incidents with my Senior Station Manager, over a dozen Area Managers, several Operations Managers, multiple in-building HR reps, visiting ACES team members, Senior HR Investigators outside of the building, and even the Regional HR Manager. I gave them explicit details of what was happening at my site, and I can’t shrug this off as “just a few bad apples.”
Someone told me that the actions of my team at Amazon may have violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act; I don’t know if this is true. I’ve read pages and pages of information on the subject and I still don’t have the answer. I am not a lawyer; I don’t even have a college degree. It would take someone far more educated than I to unravel the legal complexities of this whole mess. This, however, I can say with certainty: the things that I’ve seen and heard at Amazon directly conflict with the picture that you paint on our company website, with pages labeled “Women at Amazon” and “Diversity and Inclusion.” If you and your team cannot hold yourselves accountable to those principles, you shouldn’t present yourselves in such a light—to your shareholders, to your customers, to the public. I would further posit that both our recruitment and orientation materials should present a clearer picture of what people can realistically expect when they come to work here. I wasn’t expecting rainbows and roses—but I’ve worked steadily since I was sixteen years old, and I have never encountered the level of misogyny and discrimination against women that I witnessed in the delivery station.
Several months before DHO5 closed, I had a conversation with the Site Leader there. Our talk was long-winded and surprisingly pleasant. At the end of it, I told him, “The things that I would fix about Amazon, I’m not in a position to change.” This fact remains true. You, however, have the power to affect that change. I hope that in sharing my story with you, I can inspire you to do so.
Signed,
A Fellow Amazonian