Amazon Turns To Private Prison Industry For Warehouse Training

Amazon has hired a former Private Prison executive to run their warehouse training programs. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Amazon has hired a former private prison executive to run their warehouse training. Wow. Is that poetic or what? So they get this woman that is a specialist in, in how to control prisoners. How do you put 'em in there and control them day to day in several different ways? Pick it up if you would.

Right. I mean, this is almost comically evil for, for Amazon to even do this because we already know, obviously there's horrendous conditions at Amazon warehouses. Right.

Mm-hmm.

We've had people die, their covid protections were non-existent. You know, the stories of people peeing in bottles because they're not allowed to take lunch breaks.

Mm-hmm.

One point, you know, whatever packages per minute they have to pack. So they're like, how could we make this more efficient? Well, what if we just ran it like a prison?

Mm-hmm.

Because that is what these workers are already used to. So we bring in this woman Dayna Howard, who used to be with the Corrections Corporation of America, which is one of the worst.

Biggest, biggest private prison industry.

Yeah.

I mean, it's the biggest in that industry.

They are. And they actually had to change their name because they were doing so many bad things and had bad reputation. So they say, well, this woman was kind of overseeing a lot of these horrible things at CoreCivic, let's bring her in so that she can show us how to treat our warehouses.

Yeah.

The same way.

Well, okay, so it's not, it's how do you control prisoners? I mean, how do you get 'em in line? How do you get 'em from point A to point B? I know all the secrets and I'm gonna do the same thing for Amazon. And so this, the other thing is her specialty was how do you prevent prisoners from stealing? Did you see that?

Yeah.

You know, like they have access to a lot of stuff and they can put it out on the black market by way they send it out the prison. And so her thing was how do we prevent prisoners from stealing? And I'm sure that has some holdover to this, to this new job too, don't you think?

Right, absolutely. Because obviously if you're in an Amazon warehouse, there are all kinds of products, big and small, all up and down the shelves. So yeah, if you're a big company, you do not want people stealing from you.

Mm-hmm.

But you also need to understand the optics of running your warehouses like a prison.

The optics are terrible. I just wonder who's advising on this. You know, I'm sure she's good at what she does, but it's just, when you're under the kind of scrutiny that this company's under all the time, every week there's a new awful story about Amazon.

There is.

You know, what the hell? I mean, you know, why don't you get somebody that hasn't come from the prison industry?