I always see a sociopathic, corporate smirk.
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Some are…squishier than others, but yes.
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What’s your job title? Do you do shift work in a FC or are you just speaking on behalf of other people?
Don’t you think one should be skeptical of a view of a company gleaned from a tour provided by that very same company? Isn’t that always going to be a PR function and thus hide anything about the company that might not sit well with visitors?
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That’s fair. I used to use burner and the like to comment on most sites, but I changed to using my twitter login last year. I also see why you might be skeptical, given your recent blipvert incident, I might be working with Reg or something!
I’d say compare their opinions with those of other warehouse workers. Warehouse work is miserable. Nobody wants to be there long-term. It’s physically VERY HARD and mentally mind numbing.
Ride the rapids of the Potemkin River!
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At a guess, he crawls around on the ceiling lowering bottles of water to employees on silken thread.
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Don’t tug your company collar! You don’t want it to go off, do you?
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Yeah. I did warehouse order picking one summer for an auto parts supplier. It was pure capitalism. You couldn’t take pee breaks, you had two breaks you had to take and a lunch break, all for a total of an hour, and they weren’t paid breaks. There was no AC, and this was Memphis, so hot and humid. They passed out salt pills.
You were constantly monitored for pace–and this was the late '80s, so it was a guy with a stop watch, as well as how much you pulled thru the day, against an error rate. You had a pull rate to meet, and that was set on Monday and then adjusted each day to the previous day’s average, so it went higher and higher. And the faster you went, the more likely you were to get a raise or not get fired, so some people would go really fast–not team spirit or playing to a curve. The only reason you weren’t running by Friday is running wasn’t allowed.
We wore gloves to protect our hands, one pair a day. By lunch the cotton gloves would be in shreds, then the paper cuts started. Just from shrink-wrapped parts, pasteboard packaging, but you were moving fast. The pay was just over $7/hour, which wasn’t too bad then, not good either, just not too bad.
Sometimes people passed out.
When I’d get home from work, I was worthless. No brain anymore, no desire to do anything but sit on the couch with a really cold beer. Too tired to change channels. It was horrible. Oh, and I come from a family of construction workers, so I was used to hard work and was in good physical shape. A good part of the fatigue was from the soul-crushing routine/pace.
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Former Amazon FC Employee: It’s hard work. Really hard. The operational side of Amazon was run very much with military-grade aesthetics.
You will obey the rules. You will perform your task exactly as directed.
Having said that, it was not a horrific job. It definitely had it’s downsides (summer sucked in all of the buildings I visited/worked in) but at least it was indoor work. It’s not for everyone - physical fitness matters. I didn’t enjoy being a drone, so left “ops” as quickly as I could, but if you don’t mind that, it’s not terrible.
The temp agencies are fscking evil. They will suck you dry without mercy. They are also the usual gateway for folks to get “in” as a badged employee. If you can show value to your PA/AM, you’ll get converted to a badge. Saw it time and again over years and years.
Just .02 of someone who was there @RNO1, LEX1/2, and PHX3/4.
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Obligatory: Why not both?
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Money magazine calculated that Mr. Bezos becomes $257 million richer every day. There are about 542 thousand Amazon employees, so:
$275,000,000 a day / 542,000 employees = $507 per employee per day. (or $63 an hour)
My intuition says that Amazon can scrape together a $15 minimum wage.
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Update: They’re real and getting paid by Amazon.
They’re literally PR people. I’m not sure how “real” that makes them beyond using their actual names - they’re responding to comments on (terrible) warehouse working conditions and wages by talking about their own wages and conditions. But even if accurate, their experiences aren’t relevant because they’re PR people, not warehouse workers…
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I agree with you on warehouse work. I did it one summer in the Deep South. It was brutal. I’d eat like two cheeseburgers for lunch every day, and I was still losing weight. Hot and labor-intensive work. Minimal breaks. Very little autonomy. It was hard, and I suspect Amazon is no different.
The thing I think most people take issue with is the fact that the work is so hard and people are paid so little, but the company brings in an enormous amount of revenue. It’s not some random distribution center. It’s a distribution center owned by the richest person in the world - someone who makes more money in a day than most people do in their entire lives. The disparity is hard to swallow.
That said, I spend a couple thousand dollars a year at Amazon. We all love the convenience, but we hate what it takes to get there.
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You, uh, really have a hardcore definition of astroturfing there.
A little formalized maybe.
But astroturfing is fundamentally a deception tactic, I don’t see deception here.
Okay. Maybe not this is not ordinary astroturfing. But what is it? What is it for? Doesn’t it look creepy to you?
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