“I missed a block on Amazon Flex… there was nobody to call when I needed to call out.”
Mariama Jabbi, former Amazon Flex driver, Seattle
I started working on Amazon Flex in 2017, because I needed a job that worked with my schedule as a single mother of two. I was able to get about 40 hours on Flex a week, even though delivery blocks were hard to find sometimes with so many drivers trying to get on the schedule. Still, it was good work for me — I liked the deliveries, and I really liked the flexibility.
In 2020, I got pregnant, and my situation changed. There were a lot of problems going on with my pregnancy, and sometimes I was sick or had emergency appointments.
In January 2021, I missed a block on Flex for the first time. There was nobody to call when I needed to call out for sickness or other emergencies. You are just supposed to cancel in the app 45 minutes before the block starts, and I was too late. Amazon sent a message to me with a warning about missing shifts. I wrote back to try to explain the complications with my pregnancy. I told them Flex was my only source of income and I really needed to work right now, but the warning stayed on my account.
A month later, I gave birth to my third child. I went back to work almost right away, and I tried hard not to miss a single shift even though it was hard with three children at home. I set my availability so my phone would automatically accept new blocks. I needed the hours, but sometimes I didn’t even get notified that I had a block automatically scheduled until I logged in.
On March 25th, I opened the app and realized there was a block scheduled that day. My phone accepted it automatically, and I had already missed the window to cancel.
Just like that, Amazon deactivated my account.
I tried to explain to them I have a baby, that’s why this happened, it will never happen again. They said that would not change my deactivation.
I messaged them again, and got another automated response telling me I was still deactivated. I kept messaging for months to try to ask for an appeal and to actually talk to someone who might understand. They stopped replying.
Being deactivated changed everything for my family. We were living in my apartment when I was working for Flex and I paid everything on my own — medical costs, bills, rent. Suddenly, I couldn’t pay any of that. We had unemployment benefits that were helping us for a while, but they ran out a long time ago. I couldn’t afford to stay in the apartment. A friend who lives in the same building let me and my kids stay with her until I got back to work.
But it’s been almost a year, and I still have not found stable work that is flexible enough. I’m doing a little bit of side work, braiding hair, but it isn’t enough.
Before all of this, I was working on Amazon no problem. I was able to get by. For each block, about 2 to 2 and a half hours of work, I was making $30 - $50. But I wasn’t able to save anything up. I was spending money as I made it. So being deactivated left me with nothing to fall back on.
I still haven’t been able to talk to someone at Amazon.
I just want them to finally hear me. Even after all of this, I want to go back to work with them again. I know there’s a lot of jobs out there, but I chose Flex because of the schedule. I liked making deliveries and I did my job nicely, I just missed a block. I wasn’t sitting home thinking “I don’t want to go to work,” I was not being lazy.
I know they have a lot of people working for them, but it’s not nice to text them and not even get an answer. I understand deactivating you if you do something wrong, or customers are not happy with you. But they need to understand all of us have lives and issues that we can’t avoid. The work is supposed to be flexible, but they don’t care because they have so many workers.
This is why we need the Pay Up policy in Seattle. We need to be protected from deactivation, and we need real flexibility.
Click here to join Mariama & thousands of other gig workers calling on Seattle City Council to pass a first-of-its-kind law for gig workers to raise pay, protect flexibility, and provide other basic rights.