HR "is alwaysstruggling to automate and keep pace with the scale of thecompany," says one anonymous employee.(Image:Shutterstock)

(Bloomberg) –Tony Banks told Amazon.com Inc. right away when hetested positive for COVID-19. More than a month later, he's on themend, but struggling with fatigue and shortness of breath thatmakes most physical activity feel like he's just sprinted up ahill. Banks says he's in no shape to return to work at the Indianawarehouse where he walks miles every shift.

Yet somewhere in an Amazon human-resources operation thatalready extended his medical leave once, Banks is seen as anemployee abandoning his job. The company has twice in recent weeksinitiated automatic termination proceedings against him for missingshifts.

"I understand that it's overwhelming right now," Banks says."But for all the resources they have, it's almost like amom-and-pop operation."

Related: Are digital tools the future of HRoperations?

After suffering delivery delays and mass absenteeism during theearly weeks of the pandemic, Amazon has hit another snag: a humanresources department ill prepared to handle the thousands ofrequests pouring in from sick employees and those who need to stayhome to care for their children or elderly relatives.

It's unclear how many employees are stuck in limbo, butBloomberg spoke with six such workers, who work in facilities fromNew Jersey to Indiana. They say they're owed back pay for timespent on sick leave or in quarantine, have been scheduled forshifts while sick, or were denied leave despite providingdocumentation of conditions Amazon says should make them eligibleto stay home without pay.

Many companies would struggle with this unprecedented emergency,made harder by the federal government's largely ineffectiveresponse to a pandemic that has sickened more than 1.8 millionpeople and killed more than 100,000. Meanwhile, state governmentshave grappled with an influx of unemployment claims.

But the design of Amazon's HR department reflects the strengthsand weaknesses of the company's culture. It's heavily automated,which helps Amazon grow quickly and restrain costs but these daysleaves employees hitting dead ends with chatbots, smartphone appsand phone trees.

Three people with experience in the company's human resourcesgroup say the unit has been weighed down by competing priorities.HR is expected to offer workers the same speedy customer service asAmazon's customers, while practicing a level of frugality thatAmazon sometimes takes to extremes, the employees say.

HR "is always struggling to automate and keep pace with thescale of the company," says one of the people, who all requestedanonymity because they signed confidentiality agreements. "Thehorror stories happen because [HR] people are overwhelmed. And theydon't have the resources and the mental capacity to deal with[workers] because they're pulled in so many different directions.It's bound to have negative, real-life human impacts."

Amazon says Banks, the employee threatened with termination,shouldn't have received those notices and that they were sent afterBanks failed to submit proof of his condition when applying toextend the leave.

"These are unprecedented times, and we're working fast tosupport our employees, partners and provide critical services tocommunities in need," Lisa Levandowski, an Amazon spokeswoman, saidin an email. "We've created 175,000 jobs across America, increasedwages, adjusted time-off options, just to name a few, to supportthe hundreds of thousands of employees who work in our sites. Likeall companies we're rapidly adjusting to support our teams."

Amazon has added some 2,500 full-time and temporary staffers tothe human-resources teams that support its logistics group sincethe beginning of the year, she said.

The pandemic has created one of the biggest challenges inAmazon's quarter-century history. While the company has benefitedfrom a surge in online orders from home-bound shoppers, Covid-19has sickened more than 1,100 employees and killed nine, accordingmedia reports and internal information gathered by workers. Amazon,which declines to disclose how many employees have caught thevirus, has kept its operations running without widespread closuresthanks in part to a hiring spree and new safety measures designedto adapt the company's logistical prowess to public healthguidelines.

Behind the scenes, however, the hiring binge and health crisishave put enormous pressure on a human-resources operation that wasalready struggling to keep up with Amazon's growth. The company inthe last half-decade has added an average of 130,000 workers ayear. Then, during a six-week period beginning in March, Amazonrecruited a mind-boggling 175,000 people to help it keep up withsurging orders and plug warehouse slots abandoned by workers tooafraid to show up.

Amazon has worked for years to minimize the human effort behindadministrative work. It's part of a company-wide mandate to deployautomation and advanced software, a bet that Amazon can invent thesystems of the future and keep a lid on costs at the same time.Automatic processes are a necessity for an HR department that dealswith many millions of employee inquiries a year. But those systemscan be of little help to an overwhelmed staffer who needs time tosift through Amazon policies and government leave laws on behalf ofan employee.

For a time, Amazon outsourced some of the work—sending employeesseeking family or medical leave to ReedGroup, a provider ofoutsourced leave management services. But issues cropped up,including missed return dates and employees coming back from leaveto find their paychecks hadn't resumed. (ReedGroup didn'timmediately provide comment.)

Amazon began shifting the work back in-house late last year,completing the transfer on March 2, two weeks before the firstCovid-19 case was confirmed among the company's U.S. workers. Manyemployees stopped showing up or cut shifts short, moves Amazonsupported with an offer of unlimited unpaid time off without riskof termination.

Andre Goodin, who works in an Amazon warehouse outsideBaltimore, fell ill in April and was ordered into quarantine whilehe waited for a Covid-19 test that ultimately proved to benegative. Back at work, he had a second scare. A colleague he workswith closely tested positive, days after a team meal during which asmall group ate pizza together. Goodin, told by on-site HR to waitfor Amazon to contact him if they determined he was at risk ofexposure, decided to quarantine anyway.

Amazon says it has no record of Goodin coming into contact withsomeone who tested positive for Covid-19. The company says it usesvideo footage to determine such exposure and defines contact forthe purposes of its contact-tracing program, as more than 15minutes of exposure within six feet of a person.

By then, Amazon's offer of unpaid time off had expired. Thecompany said people suffering from Covid-19, those in quarantineand people who needed time to care for loved ones or shelter withat-risk family members, would be eligible for leave. But the delugeof requests overwhelmed Amazon's ability to respond.

Goodin, still trying to get the pay he believes he's eligiblefor his first quarantine, isn't optimistic about ever getting paidfor his second. He has hit dead ends when trying to use Amazon'sself-service options and says he has spent hours on hold waiting tospeak to representatives of Amazon's Employee Resource Center. "Itwent from being able to call and talk to a person, to now, theyautomatically redirect you to the website and hang up on you," hesays.

Goodin and other hourly warehouse employees typically use asmartphone app for most workplace issues. They can also ask forhelp from on-site human resources teams. For many tasks morecomplicated than requesting time off or fixing a missed time cardpunch, though, they must open a case with centralized HR teams inthe U.S., Costa Rica and India.

Staff at an employee call center in San Jose, Costa Rica, wereused to the occasional call from frustrated employees worried thatdelayed responses from HR would mean termination or a missedpaycheck, according to someone familiar with the operation. Amazonwas already struggling to manage call volume as it took backmanagement of leave services from ReedGroup, the person said. Thenthe virus struck, and the phones began ringing incessantly."Obviously, no one saw that this was going to happen," the personsays. "Amazon was, and is still not ready for the volume of casesthey have."

For some employees, being left in limbo has made them reconsidertheir choice of employer.

One worker at a warehouse on the East Coast, who toiled onweekends to help Amazon deal with the surge in orders, sometimesputting in 20 hours of overtime a week, was burned out. In April,she asked for unpaid leave to catch her breath. She made sure toput in the request early, giving Amazon almost three weeks torespond. Human resources never did.

"I've been their biggest supporter," she says of Amazon. "I wentfrom feeling 100% on them, to, I'm at zero. It's like we'rereplaceable."

Another employee, who recovered from a case of Covid-19 caughtearly in the pandemic and had her illness confirmed by an antibodytest, asked HR to compensate her for that sick time. The companymisinterpreted the request, she says, and put her on unpaid leave,a sequence of events Amazon says its system shouldn't allow. Afterdays of trying to contact someone to fix it, and hours spent onhold, the worker says she was patched through to a call centeremployee in India, who couldn't help her.

"They only opened a ticket," she says. "The department I neededdoesn't work weekends."

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