I did a bunch of warehouse jobs when I was at uni. Some of the most depressing and soul crushing jobs I've ever had. The worst ever one I had was pulling a massive roll of sandpaper to a line and then another guy pressed a button to cut it. Then we lifted the cut sandpaper on to a pile. Repeat for 8 hours.
I didn't stay in that one past one day, far too boring.
Let's not romanticise these jobs. I think you're confusing the endorphins from exercise, which most warehouse jobs don't need, with the job.
I mean, most warehouse work is a horror show. I was in between jobs in my early 20's and had to take a job at a dvd packaging warehouse and it was fucking awful. You didn't know what you would be doing from day to day, 12 hour overnight shifts, sub par or no safety equipment etc. I have never been as dispondant as I was after six hours of folding hundreds of one side of a cardboard standup display for some b-movie.
I worked in a warehouse picking and packing orders when I was in college.
It was a fantastic job relative to my other options. I got paid 2x minimum wage and lots of overtime. The job rocked compared to the retail jobs that were my other option.
It's pretty easy to shit on a job like that, and the pay, when you're making well into 6 figures and have a comfy office job with free snacks.
Amazon warehouses are no picnic, and their attrition numbers show it. But compared to industries that exploit immigrants and where wage theft is common, a warehouse job is objectively better.
A lot of people don't understand how hard it is at the bottom of the labor force.
Because people work day and day out shitty doing shitty manual labour without people even noticing them. Having worked there fur very long the whole article is just big whining, for some reason Amazon warehouses is a popular subject.
One of the people in the article says he's worked in other warehouse jobs before, and was never treated like a piece of crap (his words) until he worked at the Amazon warehouse. So there is a claim that this warehouse in particular is worse than others.
The couple of people I personally know that have worked at Amazon warehouses says they're pretty well ran in comparison to other warehouses.
And I know personally that my experience working in a small-business warehouse back when I was young was absolutely garbage. Smaller businesses rarely get any news coverage, but I worked in a warehouse with zero ventilation, no safety training, no safety equipment, nobody trained in logistics, broken and improper lifting equipment, etc. This is par for the course at a workplace with zero outside scrutiny.
Amazon warehouses are at least run by professionals in logistics, have proper safety procedures, equipment, training, etc. As I understand, the 'bad' part is the volume. But at the end of the day, even a well-run warehouse job is a warehouse job. It is physical work.
> Post an assessment that shows this are the widespread conditions in the industry, or at least other examples of companies doing the same.
What? Hot summers with lots of heavy lifting and long shifts for low pay, all while being treated by management as a completely replaceable cog (because at-will employment, union busting, and the low-skill nature of the job means YOU ACTUALLY ARE a replaceable cog)? That's warehouse work.
I'm not even sure if there are studies about this because it's just... completely common knowledge among the populations who work these jobs. Here's a blog post for example from 2011, describing exactly this conditions at probably-not-amazon from a former employee. Note he talks in broad strokes -- not "my employer sucked", but "warehouse work sucks". https://warehousetomarketer.wordpress.com/2011/07/03/warehou...
> What an appalling way to see things.
I'm not making a moral judgement. I'm describing reality. I don't think positive descriptions of reality can ever be appalling, unless your goal is to bury your head in the sand.
Focusing on Amazon doesn't solve the problem because Amazon is not the problem. They're just one more employer behaving the same way as all the other employers, in a system that explicitly allows and even incentivizes this behavior.
Realizing that working conditions for low-skill blue collar folk are systematically crappy, and that we need a systematic solution, is not "appalling". It's realistic and pragmatic.
Besides which, counting on the beneficence of particular corporations and/or particular instances of PR pressure has never been a sustainable method for producing good working conditions or livable wages.
Focusing on specific company's workers instead of focusing on systematic improvements to the negotiating power of labor is what's appalling. It takes a serious political problem and turns it into a corporate PR problem that's solvable without addressing the underlying problems. Because the empirically effective PR expenditures --
installing air conditioning, clamping down on loud mouths, token improvements to workplace culture, marginally shorter shifts... none of this makes manual labor on $12/hr with zero workplace protections and a minimal social safety net any less dehumanizing.
(And Bezos's net work has absolutely nothing to do with whether working conditions in warehouses suck -- IDC if the CEO is making 100K or 100B, and neither do the employees working in the warehouse because their job sucks just as much either way.(
But those jobs are already shitty. I visited Amazon warehouse once, the workers there aren't happy. Guess no one will if your daily work is about following instructions on the screen to move stuff from A to B. The warehouse is noisy, and the process is optimized in a way that there is very little human interaction. Those kinds of jobs are the one that need to be automated.
I've worked at warehouses over summers in high schools and it was tough but I don't regret it. This place sounds like a third world shithole.
Everything else aside, the "terrible" working conditions at Foxconn that people get so riled up about sound better then this Amazon warehouse in the US.
It's not warehouse work like traditional warehouse work. It's mostly sorting and putting items on shelves and in boxes. Lots of people that ave work in stores doing that all the time.
It's unreasonable workload/productivity requirements that are the problem.
I'm curious how they attract people to work for them, if it's common knowledge they are terrible to work for? Is that there just aren't enough other, better warehouse jobs? The few folks I have known who worked in warehouses (non-AMZN ones) generally didn't like the work, but I didn't hear outright horror stories like these.
This is very interesting. I’ve heard that warehouses have poor conditions, but not poor pay.
Anecdotally a friend of mine said that the warehouses pay very well, especially in smaller towns where there are less opportunities for young people who need short term work or flexible working hours.
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