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Amazon, the largest online retailer in the United States for more than a decade, is poised to overtake Walmart to become the country’s top retailer, full stop.To meet the “fast, free shipping” promise at the heart of its strategy to achieve retail dominance, the corporation has built an army of contingent and subcontracted last-mile delivery workers. The most underpaid and precarious among them, making the speediest deliveries, are managed by Amazon’s Uber-like delivery platform called “Amazon Flex.”

This brief identifies key facets of the Amazon Flex labor model and discusses their negative impacts on job quality. It draws on Amazon’s own corporate filings, statements, and contracts, as well as government documents, press reports, research by academics, industry groups, and advocacy organizations, and conversations with Flex drivers organizing in New Jersey. It concludes by recommending organizing, policy, and legal interventions for improving the conditions of Flex drivers and a growing population of workers facing similar challenges on the job.

Key Points

• Amazon uses a system of interconnected labor practices—digital surveillance, algorithmic management, independent contractor misclassification, mandatory arbitration, and class action waivers—to maximize the labor value it can extract from Flex delivery drivers and to minimize the responsibility it bears for their job quality.
• That labor model subjects Flex drivers to intolerable and often illegal working conditions, including systematic wage theft, unlivable pay, inadequate benefits, unsafe work speeds, racial discrimination, job insecurity, unpredictable schedules, and a lack of recourse for workplace mistreatment.
• Through Flex and its public policy work, Amazon is eroding labor standards in the broader last-mile delivery sector and beyond.

Key Recommendations

• Amazon labor model changes: Amazon should properly classify Flex drivers as employees under labor and employment laws, eliminate independent contractor agreements, arbitration clauses, and class action waivers in its Flex driver contracts, and end its use of opaque algorithmic management practices. But Amazon is unlikely to do any of that without worker and government action.
• Organizing support: Labor institutions, worker advocacy groups, and funders should support Flex driver organizing—because organized workers can raise job standards by making direct demands of Amazon and by advancing public policy change.
• Public policy change: To compel change to the Flex labor model, policymakers should establish worker data rights (including the right to access and correct data used in work management), regulate workplace digital surveillance and algorithmic management, ensure Flex drivers and other app-based workers have full access to gold-standard worker protections, and ban mandatory arbitration and class action waivers.
• Public enforcement and investigation: State Attorneys General and City Attorneys should take legal action against Amazon Flex for independent contractor misclassification. State workforce agencies should conduct unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation audits of Amazon’s Flex operations to quantify losses to state coffers resulting from Amazon’s misclassification of Flex drivers as independent contractors. The Federal Trade Commission should investigate Amazon’s independent contractor misclassification and use of mandatory arbitration in its Flex operation as anticompetitive issues. And members of Congress, following their probe of the Amazon Delivery Service Provider program, should launch an inquiry into the shadowy Amazon Flex operation.