Some Amazon contracted delivery drivers in the US say they are feeling overwhelmed and overworked by dramatic increases in workloads during the pandemic
Lauren Kaori Gurley / VICE : Tweets: @vice , @laurenkgurley , and @motherboard Tweets: @vice : Amazon's contracted delivery drivers say that their workloads have dramatically increased during the Covid-19 pandemic, in some cases more than doubling. https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/... Lauren Kaori Gurley / @laurenkgurley : The plight of Amazon's delivery drivers has largely been overlooked during Covid, but their conditions are the most grueling I've heard about. I spoke to workers around the country, many who've seen their quotas double, about working on the frontlines: https://vice.com/... @motherboard : Amazon's contracted delivery drivers say that their workloads have dramatically increased during the Covid-19 pandemic, in some cases more than doubling. https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This VICE report extends a documented arc about Amazon's last mile. Interviews in [[a:933346|2018 already flagged pace pressure, missing pay, and no health insurance among drivers at third-party partners]], and BuzzFeed News reporting showed how the subcontracted delivery network lets Amazon shed responsibility for conditions and accidents on its routes.
What changed with the pandemic is scale: drivers quoted here say workloads more than doubled as Covid pushed delivery volumes up, making the structural pressures visible earlier coverage described acute enough to become a labor story in their own right.
First-order effects
- Contracted drivers at Amazon's delivery service partners are absorbing doubled quotas and longer days immediately, with the physical toll landing on workers employed by small contractors rather than by Amazon itself.
Second-order effects
- The DSP partners carrying these routes face a squeeze between Amazon's volume demands and driver attrition, forcing choices on hiring, route density, and pace that echo the pay-and-pressure complaints from 2018 interviews.
Third-order effects
- If volume-driven workload increases persist, the liability-shedding structure of Amazon's subcontracted last mile becomes harder to defend publicly — the later finding that third-party drivers suffered an injury rate of one per five full-time-equivalent workers shows where this trajectory led.
The trend: E-commerce's pandemic surge is transferring the cost of faster last-mile delivery onto a subcontracted driver workforce whose conditions sit outside Amazon's direct employment accountability.