DELIVERY drivers working for online e-commerce giant Amazon urinate and even defecate in their vehicles to meet crushing deadlines, an undercover journalist has claimed.

The BBC reporter, who worked at an Amazon depot in the UK for two weeks, said drivers often exceeded the speed limit to deliver up to 200 parcels a day on a fixed salary the equivalent of less than the minimum wage.

“On my first day delivering parcels for Amazon I soon found that things like tiredness and toilets aren’t taken into account when Amazon plans its delivery routes,” the reporter wrote.

“I tried to do the job as quickly as I could while keeping to the speed limit. I was considered very slow. Other drivers at the depot admitted to speeding. One driver said to get the job done he had to go at 120mph down the motorway.”

The journalist, “Chris”, added that “a few drivers admitted to peeing in a bottle in their van because they didn’t have time to find a toilet”. “Another admitted having defecated in the back of the van on one occasion,” he wrote.

Chris said he would arrive at the depot at around 7:30am — some drivers having to travel up to 90 minutes to get to work — before being let inside the warehouse at 8:30am to sort and load his parcels for the day.

The company provided drivers with a handheld scanner, programmed by Amazon with a route to follow. “If all goes to plan the drivers may be on the road by 9:30am,” he wrote.

“Sometimes the parcels aren’t ready until much later. The drivers earn a fixed rate per day for their route but nearly every day there was a problem with the scanner, which delayed me.

“Most days I would get back to the depot at around 8:30pm. I would regularly notice the same faces that I’d seen in the morning back in the warehouse in the evening so I know I wasn’t the only one struggling to finish the round in the expected time.

“Like the other drivers at my agency, I was expected to be available for work at least six days per week.”

Once on the road, he said, the job was “quite straightforward and sometimes enjoyable”. “If the customer is at home it’s easy. Knock on the door, check the name on your scanner, hand over the parcel and move on,” he said.

“On the whole people are pleased to see you so the customer satisfaction rubs off on you a little. There is no time for chatting though so the interaction with customers is minimal.

“When I tried to help one customer locate her parcel, my agency supervisor barked down the phone: ‘If it’s not in your van forget about it and move on. Stop trying to do customer service. You don’t have to be nice’. The customer cancelled the order.”

Amazon told the BBC in a statement that it was “committed to ensuring that the people contracted by our independent delivery providers are fairly compensated, treated with respect, follow all applicable laws and drive safely”.

The contractor, AHC, said the claims put to them by the BBC were “historic and based on isolated examples which occurred over a year ago”. “Since then we have made changes to the way our checks are carried out and taken a number of steps to improve our ways of working,” the company said.