Liverpudlians criticise new Amazon warehouse plans
Residents in a Liverpool community have attacked a plan to build an Amazon warehouse that will create an estimated 1000 jobs.
Stonebridge Cross in Croxteth was once home to the Gillmoss estate. It has now been earmarked for a 1m square foot warehouse by Stoford Developments according to reports in the Liverpool Echo. The area was recently cleared, and residents moved, with the promise of 500 new homes, a replacement secondary school and a supermarket.
Quoted in the newspaper was Elizabeth Heard. She has lived in the area for 58 years: “We don’t want to be looking out over a huge warehouse. When the people who lived there had to move out, they were promised they could come back when the new houses were built. How can they come back when a warehouse is built?”
Another unnamed resident is quoted: “We don’t want Amazon moving to the area, they are not socially responsible, they don’t pay tax in this country. We want a public meeting with the mayor Joe Anderson because we know he’s behind the plans.”
Liverpool council say that interest from Amazon and the creation of jobs is too good to turn away and that the new homes and amenities can be rebuilt in another part of the city, as yet unspecified.
Paul Linnot says
9:51 am on 19/08/2012
The headline of the article is misleading. The majority of Liverpudlians will be completely behind the plans. The chance to create up to 1000 jobs in an area in desperate need for employment opportunities cannot be opposed. Get it built.
james says
1:55 pm on 19/08/2012
12:43 PM on 19/8/2012
Sunday Times reported that staff at Amazon Marston Gate near Milton Keynes – were required to work seven days a week and “punished” for being ill (where staff with a sick note received a “penalty” point; six points meant dismissal). The quotas for packing – 140 items an hour, which is only slightly below the 5 items per two minutes of 2001. Collecting items for packing can mean walking up to 14 miles during a shift.
The break periods seem shorter too: one of 15 minutes and another of 20 minutes in an eight-hour shift. Amazon paid £6.30 per hour, 57p more than the minimum wage, but charged £8.50 for transport unless staff could arrange their own. They were also warned that there were surveillance cameras watching them at all times.
Perhaps Mr Anderson wants to put his prawn sandwich down , and understand what modern slavery is all about . and get out of bed with these Luxembourgers . while he still has some credibility. Joe socialist don’t think so .
Gerry007 says
10:34 pm on August 19th, 2012
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I have packing experience, going way back to a Warehouse job @ 16 and packing 140 items an hour is not possible on a continuous hourly/daily/weekly basis.
Given Amazon sell or forward items of all different sizes & packaging. I see very little difference [excluding sheer volume] with our ‘small’ operation.
We reckon a member of staff packs 15-20 orders an hour, which includes locating, selecting packing type & packing with labels for post.
Sometimes then if an item needs special attention, our rate can fall way behind.
Funny enough, I had an occasion over the weekend to post of another site [not online selling related]. about corporations move to trading in the UK, and the profits go elsewhere = minus Corp taxes on Profits.
Part from that article:
If Corporations paid western labour charges, they would not be here, that I agree on.
We cannot, no longer expect people in the West to live a substandard lifestyle, just to get goods made [>packed<] here at a silly low price.
The minimum recommended wage in the UK is £7.75p hour in London.
The East is very, very cheap [I know because we import from there], Items that would cost 50 cents to make in the West, cost a fraction of that in China.
Wages in some parts of the East are still @ less than a $1 an hour.
The corporations are buying really cheap & selling as high as the market will stand.
-End-
I am not anti big selling platforms, but if we let all these big Corporations pay little or no taxes here [as with some UK banks], then we are not going to get out of this mess.
Letting them push us around & buy their way to push others out, is not right.
Mark says
2:23 pm on August 20th, 2012
>We reckon a member of staff packs 15-20 orders an hour, which includes locating, selecting packing type & packing with labels for post.
From the videos of Amazon fulfilment centres each order is processed by many staff, each doing a single part of the order.
The people who pick the items are not the same as those who pack the items (the pickers load the required items into the automated sorting system that takes the items to the packers)
It may be possible for somebody to pack 140 orders per hour if the items are brought to them by an automated system and all they have to do is place them in the packaging. A lot of the orders will be simple (such as a single book) which has specialist, easy to use, packaging.
The jobs will not be particularly satisfying, one of the reasons why Amazon tends to locate in areas with high unemployment.
elvis says
1:28 am on August 21st, 2012
amazons locating and picking and packing is pretty much all done automatically by machinery with minimal human import. they can easily pack 140+/min.
elvis says
1:32 am on August 21st, 2012
“modern slavery”
what??? 8 hour shifts lol. I do many hours longer than that often 12-16 hours with only a 15-20 minute break to get some food down me. It’s called running my own business so please don’t say it is modern slavery as it isn’t. People just expect everything to be handed to them for nothing or for very little effort these days. It’s not modern day slavery, it’s called “grafting”.
Gerry007 says
4:01 pm on August 21st, 2012
.
Oh Please, no comparison….
You don’t work for £6.30 per hour or even £7.75 per hour, do you?, and If you do, you should not be in business, because you’re not making money.
Gerry007 says
2:58 pm on 19/08/2012
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Re; ‘ and the creation of jobs is too good to turn away and that the new homes and amenities can be rebuilt in another part of the city’.
Missing something here, am I?.
What is wrong with Amazon locating in;
‘another part of the city, as yet unspecified’.?
radroach says
7:28 pm on August 19th, 2012
I think the difference is that Amazon would need one large self contained site, whereas housing and amenities could be scattered around the area somewhat, on various smaller sites.
Cassie says
4:10 pm on 19/08/2012
I do not know the area so have no idea what it looks like and whether it really would be a blot on the landscape but I have heard a lot about there being a real need for jobs in the area. As it is described, it sounds like a very good idea. Perhaps another location could be looked at, but I assume this location must have good access to major roads, motorways etc needed for Amazon to distribute the goods as effectively as possible. The excuse of
“We don’t want Amazon moving to the area, they are not socially responsible, they don’t pay tax in this country”
sounds like utter rubbish to me. The gerneral public don’t care two hoots about things like that unless it directly affects them, eg more money for benefit payments!
Gerry007 says
4:26 pm on August 19th, 2012
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Maybe the unnamed resident who said this is intelligent enough to understands the problem this country has with Corporations [Amazon not being only one + ebay + 100's more]taking their profits offshore & paying NO taxes on profits in this country in which it trades.
A public meeting/enquiry may be the way forward & to find out some truths & facts about it.
Lee Wainwright says
8:56 pm on September 5th, 2012
I’m sorry but you may be missing the mood of A LOT of people in the UK, who DO actually care if a large corporation pays its taxes in the country it trades in. Lets put this quite simply.. Amazon is buying goods cheaply from the far east. I’m going to guess it negotiates very reasonable business rates with the local authorities. It mechanises the picking and despatch process creating far less jobs than first claimed.. and most of these will be mind numbingly tedious unskilled jobs with little prospects for growth and advancement. In doing so it reduces the competitiveness of any competing retailer either online or in the real world. I’m not a tree hugging hippy or an anti-capitalist by any means but what we are seeing is the erosion of the high street (4 out of 10 shops in many city centres is now vacant) and the squeezing of small independents. Some might say.. fair enough.. if you can’t compete then no problem the consumer wins.. but what we forget is that small retailers bring specialism to markets (cycle shops, music shops etc) and they also bring diversity.. like the record shops we used to go into who had rare imports and delisted back catalogue albums.. Amazon is the new Tesco’s in this respect
Chris says
6:46 pm on 20/08/2012
Of course there is a very simple answer. That is that Amazon and indeed other corporations look for a part of the Country where not only is their highh unemployment but that there is land available and the locals are looking for work.
Then areas such as Liverpool where the locals are happy living their lives on benefits would be shunned and other areas would be the ones to benefit from the developm ent.
Unfortunately Government money(you can bet your last pound that this scheme is attracting a lot of Grants)tends to direct such projects to areas of high unemployment without considering that the locals may be very happy living their lives on benefits.
Gerry007 says
8:10 pm on August 20th, 2012
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I am not a Liverpudlian & have been there probably twice in my life, but if I was from there I would find the comments on here quite generalizing about them, lazy & depending on hand outs as quite insulting.
Amazon are only there because there is a good deal to be had, even though they will put nothing back into the system, by hiving their profits offshore.
I am sure your suggestion to go elsewhere would be welcome by the previous residents who were made promises to return & then told NO, you’ll have to go somewhere else.
Lee Wainwright says
9:08 pm on September 5th, 2012
I find your comments about Liverpool people very offensive and ignorant.
The only laziness I see is your glib generalisation. Do you know liverpool? or have you just been watching re-runs of “Bread” and “boys from the blackstuff” ? Liverpool is a vibrant city with 2 Universities attracting students from around the world. It has many large employers where productivity is as high as anywhere else in Europe (Ford Cars for example). Yes there is a section of society which has a dependency culture.. but that exists elsewhere to the same degree.. The issue here is whether the promises made to a community are to be broken to facilitate a corporation who will take resource from this community and pay NOTHING back in taxes.. please refrain from such ill-informed stereotypical nonesense
Jimbo says
9:02 pm on 20/08/2012
“Then areas such as Liverpool where the locals are happy living their lives on benefits”. Is that what you think?
Chris says
10:46 pm on 20/08/2012
I’m sorry if anybody from Liveropool is upset by my comments but there are parts of the country who are crying out for development. Places such as Cornwall where I live where when schemes are put forward invariably find that the Politicians and Bureaucrats read the small print of some obscure rule or regulation(all written by the same Politicians and Bureaucrats) and say(as I have had said to me in the past). “If you were in Birmingham(or London or Manchester or Liverpool) this scheme would attract considerable Public Money. But it is clearly against the rules to allow such a project in Cornwall”
So in a country where there are many remains of Industry past the rules specify that there cannot be industry present or future. A classic example of this is the scheme to re-open a Tin Mine in Cornwall. Even the United Nations has seen fit to argue that it should be stopped. Why? because the remains of Mining’s History might be damaged if there was Mining Present or Future.
I’m sorry Mines have to be where the ore is. If there is Tin Ore under the ground then that has to be where the Tin Mine is. It is just not sensible to try to develop a Tin Mine in say Wigan because while historically there was Coal being Mined in and around Wigan there is no Tin Ore in the ground.
So if the people of Liverpool do not want an Amazon Warehouse then perhaps Amazon should be looking elsewhere in the Country.
Cornwall and the Cornish need jobs. We would welcome jobs. We might argue about the appropriate place to put the jobs but this is more a case of Yes we would welcome them. Is over there better than over here but we want them.
Unfortunately we have far too many jobs in Tourism. But on the whole Tourism jobs are not high paid and for many they are not 12 month a year. Tourism is predominately a Summer Industry. In the winter there is a bit of refurbishment and development. But Tourism is essentially Easter to the end of September with the main season July and August. A warehouse like Amazon is proposing is 12 month a year with peaks such as at Christmas. But it is 12 month a year and that is what Cornwall needs and would welcome.
But no doubt the Politicians and Bureaucrats have said to Amazon-”Here is a list of acceptable locations. We will give you maximum Grants only if you chose from this list. If you want to go to such as Cornwall then a) We will oppose you and b) We will stop you getting any Grants. Yet 1,000 full time 12 month a year jobs would do magnigficent things for Cornwall and the Cornish.
Gerry007 says
11:31 pm on August 20th, 2012
.
Please see the comments made above by;
james says
1:55 pm on 19/08/2012
12:43 PM on 19/8/2012
Even people in Cornwall would not do it for this money, even for a 12 month job….
Dan Wilson says
12:52 am on August 21st, 2012
@chris
“Mines have to be where the ore is.”
It’s rather the same with Amazon warehouses, I venture. They are best sited where the buying public are.
What’s the population of Cornwall? Maybe 400k? The population of Merseyside is somewhere in the region of 1.5m people. And it’s in an area where there is a closeby population of probably double that.
Now Amazon (which is a commercial enterprise, not a charity or govt agency) could locate a warehouse in Truro. I think you recently said it had a population of 25k.
But that would be crazy. Positioning a distribution hub at the end of a sparsely populated peninsular at the very edge of the nation wouldn’t make economic sense.
This isn’t discrimination against Cornwall. It’s economic reality. Do come and join us in the 21st century some time.
Dan
Chris says
10:08 am on August 21st, 2012
The logical result of your policy would be that every single person in the country and every single business and enterprise of any sort would be crowded in one small part of the country (probably London and the South East)while leaving the rest of the country derelict. How would you like sharing London and the South East with perhaps 60 million other people?
In fact what has happened is that we have developed across the bulk of the countries landmass(except for the tops of a few mountains and similar). There are masses of businesses existing in such as Cornwall and Pembrokeshire and Sowdonia and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. We used to have Regional Development Grants which were supposed to enable businesses to relocate to far distant parts of the country to provide necessary jobs.
Rather than me joining the 21st century may I suggest that you should leave the 18th century.
Yes Truro has a relatively small population but just down the road with a good bus and train service as well as roads(perhaps not Motorways or Dual Carriageways but still quite adequate for people to get to work are Falmouth, Penryn(where the University is), Camborne, Redruth, Newquay, St Austell, Bodmin etc.
Gone are the days when we have to have the Mines or the Mills at the end of the road so we can walk to work(although there are probably many who would argue that it is green to walk to work and far more healthy exercise than driving to work).
Also of course Amazon from the Liverpool Warehouse will not just be supplying Liverpool and Manchester via Carriers they will be supplying the whole of the UK.