Oxfam report says Walmart warehouse monitoring is driving injury, stress
Nearly half of Walmart warehouse workers say they feel watched most of the time, and 57% say production pace makes bathroom breaks hard.
Oxfam New Zealand’s At Work and Under Watch puts Walmart warehouse monitoring at the center of a worker-safety problem, arguing that constant tracking, pace pressure and discipline are landing on the same job at once. In the survey work behind the report, 57% of Walmart warehouse workers said their production rate made it hard to use the bathroom, a measure of how tightly the floor is run.
The broader findings are hard to separate from the daily grind associates describe. The University of Illinois Chicago’s Center for Urban Economic Development surveyed 444 Walmart warehouse workers across 120 facilities in 35 states and found that 45% always or most of the time felt monitored or watched, 58% said Walmart’s monitoring was higher than at their previous job, 56% said keeping up with the pace was hard, 28% reported being injured on the job, 50% said they felt burned out, and 48% had trouble paying bills in the past three months. Oxfam America said the project was the largest collective survey of Amazon and Walmart warehouse workers in the United States focused specifically on technology and surveillance to date.
That critique lands against a company that presents itself very differently. Walmart says it serves about 270 million customers a week, employs roughly 2.1 million associates, operates more than 10,750 stores and eCommerce websites in 19 countries, and generated $681 billion in revenue in FY2025. It has also framed automation as an assist to workers, not a threat, including a 2024 rollout of 19 autonomous forklifts across four high-tech distribution centers after a 16-month proof of concept. Its supply-chain materials list starting pay of $16 to $34 an hour for fulfillment and distribution center associates, with an average U.S. supply-chain wage of $25.50 an hour.
For associates trying to figure out where to raise concerns, Walmart’s public ethics page says its Code of Conduct is meant to help associates speak up when something is not right, and the company maintains an internal Open Door channel. On time off, Walmart says its PTO policy combines sick leave, vacation time, personal time and holiday time, while hourly associates in the U.S. can earn Protected PTO to cover unexpectedly missed shifts. The gap the report points to is not a lack of language about care or accountability. It is whether those systems feel strong enough when the work is measured by scanners, targets and the next alert on the floor.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
Did this article answer your question?
