Amazon Australia is a division of the global online retailer, Amazon. They opened in Australia in 2018. Amazon staff their warehouses with contractors engaged through Adecco. The warehouse floor has aisles of shelves as far as the eye can see, all stacked with a seemingly random assortment of goods. Amazon Australia operates a workplace around a culture of fear where their performance is timed to the second. Workers are expected to constantly work at 'Amazon pace', described as somewhere between walking and jogging. There are high pressure targets, which makes workers feel like they can't go to the toilet and sometimes push them to cut safety corners. Workers can be sent home early without being paid for the rest of their shift when orders are completed; and everyone is employed as a casual and constantly anxious about whether they'll get another shift.

Amazon has a slogan 'Work hard. Have fun. Make history.' Teams huddle together on the warehouse floor at the start of their shift. "I say Amazon, you say 'efficiency'," a supervisor chants. "Amazon!" "Efficiency." The supervisor asks someone to lead the daily team stretches. The workers are asked to share an Amazon 'success story'. This is all designed to gear 'Amazonians' up for the high-pressure day ahead.

Employees here responsible for storing, picking, and packing tens of thousands of items each day are a small cog in the huge machine behind Amazon's vision to be an everything store for anyone, anywhere. The technology prioritises Amazon's same-day deliveries. Each worker has a hand-held scanner 'gun' and trolley and their role involves collecting items from the warehouse shelves to make up people's online orders. Once you collect and scan a product, a new item automatically appears on the scanner, along with a timer counting down how long you have left to find and scan the next item. "The item might be six aisles away and you have 15 seconds," he says. "Technology gets it wrong. You're paranoid, you don't know if the manager knows that's unreasonable.

Each worker's performance is calculated into 'pick rates'. If you're collecting 'small items' from the shelves, you're expected to collect about 120 products an hour two items every minute. The employees say they're left physically and mentally exhausted at the end of each shift. If staff don't meet their rates, they say a supervisor will approach them and ask if something is wrong. Workers say it's never explicitly said, but everyone understands that poor pick rates result in fewer shifts.

The warehouse is located in Dandenong South, an industrial area next to one of Melbourne's most disadvantaged suburbs. Many of the staff are often living pay packet to pay packet. National Union of Workers national secretary Tim Kennedy says the level of casualisation in Amazon's warehouse is "unheard of" in Australia. "In a lot of the facilities where we represent workers, up to 40 per cent of the workers will be casual or labour hire, but nowhere have we ever found in Australia that a major company running its logistics supply chain uses 100 per cent labour hire casuals not employed by them directly. "It allows Amazon to have no legal obligation to workers in regards to unfair dismissal or any sense of job security." This structure gives Amazon the flexibility to respond to the demand of its daily orders. For staff, it means they are called on, cancelled on and have their shifts shifted at the drop of a hat often less than 24 hours before their start time. Sometimes their rostered shifts are even cancelled on the morning of the shift, via text message.

Amazon assert that "As they grow their local operations, they will be transitioning the majority of associates to full-time permanent employees with competitive pay and benefits, as they have done in other places where we operate around the world." Shortly after the publication of this story, Amazon announced it would create 500 permanent roles at its Melbourne and Sydney warehouses over the next 12 months.

Amazon says the safety and well-being of associates is top priority, but staff say they feel pressure to cut corners to meet their pick rates and ensure they get another shift. Workers have told us they jog with trolleys, stack their trolleys so high they can't see over them and pull items off high shelves without safety equipment to beat the clock.

A number of the workers we spoke to say to meet targets, going to the toilet in the middle of a shift isn't possible, so they usually avoid drinking water. And the warehouse can get hot, so people get dehydrated. Amazon says this is not accurate. "We encourage associates to carry a water bottle with them and most do. Water coolers are available throughout the fulfilment centre (and break room) and are replenished during the day," it says.

Break times are also a pressure point according to several workers, who said taking a full break would affect their pick rates. This is because workers say they're expected to be back on the floor ready to scan their first item the minute their break officially ends. But this doesn't take into account the time it takes to collect your trolley, sometimes from the other end of the warehouse, or to go back through security checks. "It might look like I've been on a 20 or 25-minute break, so I was constantly questioned by Adecco". "I would say, this is bullshit, you know the reason. It's because I had to walk to the other end of the warehouse to pick my first item."

"When people feel like their efforts aren't good enough usually what they do is just work that much harder and that's why in part we're seeing people, even though they're not being told to do this, they're effectively skipping rest breaks, not drinking water... to meet expectations and prove their worth to their employer which is really about shoring up their job security. "It's not fair to put in place what I would consider unreasonable and in some cases unattainable deadlines, but then blame."

In recent months Amazon workers in places like the UK, Spain, Italy, Poland and Germany have begun mobilising to call for better conditions from their $800 billion employer. These highly casualised workplaces are difficult to unionise and globally Amazon has been hostile to union activity. In Australia, Amazon doesn't appear to be breaching any clear industrial laws or awards. "I think they've probably examined the laws in detail and they're doing what they can to stay just within those laws" Associate Professor Sarah Kaine says.

1 Explain Amazon Australia's HR planning process?