Tim* has worked in a Woolworths warehouse for more than a decade. He’s helped load trucks and done other jobs, but mostly he “picks”.
When he arrives at work, he puts on a headset that tells him where to go, what items he needs to take from the shelves and pack and how long it should take him to do it. All the while, the company measures his productivity and pushes him to go faster.
For years, the company has tracked almost every minute of his day. Take a long bathroom break and a team leader might ask where he’s been. His performance percentage out of 100 appears on the screen when he clocks off, based on an algorithmic management system that predicts how long it should take to do each task.
With a market capitalisation of about $40bn, Woolworths is one of Australia’s largest companies. This kind of tracking and time pressure isn’t unique to the supermarket chain, but workers who are responsible for keeping shelves stocked claim they are increasingly being pushed to comply with unrealistic and risky standards.
Late last year, the company introduced a new framework to enforce an efficiency rate for picking of 100%. Workers who weren’t meeting the standard would be put into a coaching program. Some were directed to “stop all time wasting and non-productive behaviors”, according to warning letters seen by Guardian Australia. Failure to improve could lead to disciplinary action and even loss of employment. One worker described it as a “bullying” tactic.
Tim, who is over 60, said he was pushed to improve his rating. He got it to more than 80%, then 90%, then 100%, he said, but in his effort to work harder, faster, he was injured.
“You might get someone that’s … 20 years old and goes to the gym every day. And someone like me. I’m getting the average between him and me,” Tim said. “Obviously, I can’t keep up with him.”
“We’re going down the same path as Amazon,” said another worker, Ross*. “We’re not robots, we’re humans.”
A spokesperson for Primary Connect, Woolworths’ supply chain arm, said its coaching framework helped “to ensure a fair approach to the standards is applied to any personal circumstances or abilities”.
“As the country’s largest private sector employer, we are committed to ensuring that our workplaces are safe and productive for our teams and customers,” she said.
Efficiency v reality
Work in a Woolworths warehouse can be relentlessly physical: stacking products and boxes that can weigh up to 18kg on to pallets, wrapping them and getting it all into trucks. Much of this is timed.
The amount of time workers have to complete a task is meant to reflect how long it would take “a person with reasonable skill, applying reasonable effort”, a baseline of performance known as “engineered standards”, according to a memo issued by Primary Connect.
But Guardian Australia spoke to a dozen current and former workers for Woolworths and Primary Connect, who claim the standards are unfair and putting their safety at risk. All requested anonymity for fear of losing their jobs.
As more people shop online, there’s been growing attention to the treatment and tracking of workers in warehouses run by e-commerce conglomerates like Amazon. In June, the state of California fined the company for failing to properly disclose its productivity targets to workers – a decision the company is reportedly appealing. But Australian warehouse workers have long been subject to this style of control. Engineered standards were introduced by Australian supermarket chains in the late 1980s and 1990s and were the target of industrial action.
“It’s a fantasy of total efficiency,” Christopher O’Neill, a research fellow at Deakin University who studies workplace automation, said of engineered standards. “The argument was: this was a ‘scientific’ way of rationalising work and eliminating wasted time,” he said.
“It’s basically a pseudoscientific veneer over this kind of fantasy of being able to control every second of every day.”
This year, Woolworths workers told the United Workers Union (UWU) that safety “could be jeopardised if pressure is placed on workers to work faster”.
According to the union’s submission to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s supermarkets inquiry, the standards don’t adequately take into account “gap times” – moments when a task cannot be completed because there is congestion in an aisle, a product is missing, or a spillage.
One worker described a recent job to Guardian Australia where she was told it should take 14 minutes to pick 96 items from multiple locations, which she said was “not achievable”. Others say the times don’t adequately take into account the need for longer bathroom breaks, variations in physical ability or worker fatigue throughout the day. The rates are meant to be reviewed every two years to reflect changes in the warehouses.
While 100% has long been the target, workers said this wasn’t strictly enforced until recently, so long as they were consistent and not taking long breaks. Older workplace documents state that “100% is our goal, not our minimum expectation”.
The new “Coaching and Productivity Framework” included “Glidepath”, a new “timeline” to push workers to improve and reach 100% performance, according to documents seen by Guardian Australia. If they didn’t meet the required targets and there were no mitigating factors, the worker would be “counselled and may be disciplined”.
After strong worker pushback, the framework was “paused” before it was rolled out to all sites – but workers are concerned it will be reintroduced.
According to the Primary Connect spokesperson, the standards that outline how long it should take to complete a task are based on a person “working at a safe and conscientious pace that can be maintained for the duration of a shift”, while the framework helps provide a “consistent approach” for its teams.
They said the company has listened to feedback from workers and the union on the framework, “and will engage our teams in the distribution centres in due course”.
Susannah* was picked for the program and warned after being told her performance was less than that of others on her team. She said she was told she would have to be retrained, despite working at the site for years, and was expected to climb to about 90% in just a few weeks. She said it was “humiliating” to be followed around the warehouse by a “coach”, just as it causes daily embarrassment to have your efficiency score shown on the screen for anyone to see when you clock off for the day.
The framework documents say that the engineered standards have not changed, but according to the UWU’s research and policy officer Lauren Kelly it represents “a sharp break” from how they were enforced as recently as last year.
“My worry, and the worry of the members, is that the response will be that we just need better data on how long it takes to do these tasks,” Kelly said. She claims the system is designed to be “disciplinary and coercive”.
‘It’s just pressure, pressure, pressure’
It’s difficult for some to reach 100% without rushing or taking shortcuts, workers say. Some jobs might be simple, but others are like “playing Tetris on a pallet”.
There’s also congestion – the forklifts and other items clogging the aisles. In the warehouse where Tim works, several workers say the standards don’t sufficiently account for the building’s layout, including the location of bathrooms. Neither are glitches in the voice pick technology itself. According to a memo introducing the new framework, seen by Guardian Australia, any unexplained “gap time” should not exceed five minutes on top of the expected standard.
“They say, ‘Oh, it’s all built [into] the standards’, but the problem is it doesn’t cover that gap,” Tim said. Exemptions to the 100% standard are “rare”, according to the Primary Connect memo, and for situations where a worker is pregnant or has a disability.
The recent push for 100% led to injuries as well as mental stress, workers say. “These people go a bit harder and those little niggles that they’re managing are now injuries,” Tim said. “It’s just pressure, pressure, pressure.”
According to preliminary data from Safe Work Australia, there were 1,283 serious claims in grocery, liquor and tobacco product wholesaling in 2022-23 – accepted workers’ compensation claims that resulted in an absence from work of one working week or more (this data precedes the new framework). That’s a frequency rate of 13.5, compared with food manufacturing, which was 11.4, or coalmining at 11. The frequency rate is calculated by the number of claims per million hours worked.
In June 2023, warehouse worker Basel Brikha was killed after pallets collapsed on to him at a Woolworths site in western Sydney. A SafeWork NSW spokesperson said the investigation was ongoing. Guardian Australia understands Brikha was not working under engineered standards at the time of his death.
Workers say Safe Work numbers are unlikely to reflect true rates of injury, as casuals may not report incidents for fear of losing shifts.
Sammy* has worked at a Woolworths distribution centre for about four years. First as a casual with a recruitment agency and eventually full-time. Each roster, he might be sent to a different part of the warehouse: manual pick, for example, or salvage, where they sort through returned goods from the stores.
He felt his back getting weaker and sore. Eventually he was diagnosed with bulging discs in his spine, aggravated by work, but treatments such as cortisone injections haven’t helped. For a while he had no complaints about how he was treated. He had workers’ compensation and was put on light duties, but after about a year, he was back to normal work, he said.
“If they’re sending me to salvage or maybe manual pick … I’m scared that I’m going to be feeling pain after I finish work.”
Automation on the horizon?
Some workers leave because of the pressure. Jake* worked at a Woolworths distribution centre in Perth about three years ago via a labour hire firm. He was a pick-packer, and even then he felt the engineered standards were often unrealistic.
In one section with dog food or soft drinks, for example, the pick rate might be fairly reasonable. But in another, say alcohol, the beer and wine boxes were heavy and all different sizes. Nevertheless, they all had to fit together on the pallet.
“I remember getting a pick estimated time for two pallets that was mostly cartons of beer and it was something like 19 or 21 minutes and I ended up doing it in 45,” he said. “And so of course, that dropped my efficiency percentage way down.”
Jake did receive training in the safe ways to pick things up, but said once you’re on the floor and have efficiency percentages hanging over your head, that goes out the window. “You’ve got the time limits, you’re rushing, you’re panicking. You’re not thinking. And so … the risk of injury is there,” he said.
Phil* worked at the same Perth distribution centre with Jake. “It was pretty difficult to achieve 100% efficiency,” he said, “even after working my arse off and completing the job as quickly as I could.”
Eventually they both left, partly because of the frustration over pick rates. “I was like, I can’t do this. There’s no way I can get to that level without physically hurting myself,” Jake said.
There are fears the new enforcement of standards and workplace surveillance could be a way to push some workers out. In recent years, Woolworths has announced plans to close three warehouses in Sydney and Melbourne and replace them with two new sites with more automation – a move that will see hundreds of job losses.
“If a warehouse just materialised with full robots that could do the work, they wouldn’t hesitate to get rid of us,” Tim said.
* Names have been changed
Do you know more? Contact ariel.bogle@theguardian.com
