I’ve got a couple of friends that work at Amazon warehouses. Both, military men, describe Amazon in glowing terms as an employer and rave about how the compensation is very good compared to other warehouse work (lots of talk about the benefits and stock). Interestingly, they both take the position that workers that are unhappy are generally the people that are unreliable, slow at work, and disliked by coworkers.
Honestly, i have trouble reconciling the negative far leftist portrayals of Amazon warehouse jobs with their experience.
There are probalby good ones and bad ones - especially more good ones after the big outcries (and stuff involving courts) of the past years.
But I think you have unadvertidly hit a big point: "slow at work".
What means slow at work? Instead of 100 pieces you only do 95?
In that case you get psychologically pressured on several lanes to up your speed. A red traffic light, a talk with a manger to "eleminate blockades", a big board telling you and your coworkers you are slow...
If you happen to be in the last third performance wise it surely would feel like hell.
And do you know what happens when people forced to work faster and faster? They break.
How many people work at Amazon for say, 20 years, and how many go after less than 5? How is that compared to similar jobs in other companies?
I can't speak for amazon directly, but the work pace / methods at warehouse work like this:
You are slow if you are at 80% of the workload of the average person who is skilled at their job (on the job for a while).
Can you imagine having to work with someone, who, after 6 months of training is sill only carrying 80% of the boxes / routes that you are?
The big boards generally do not give employee names. They will show a listing of everyone with confidential references (or none, you just see your score "87" and then can see the distrubution curve that is un-named. most places actually just give this info to you when you log in your order or over your headset, no one else sees or hears.
A couple of challenges for warehouse / courier centres and newer hires:
a) Lumping goods out of a trailer can be hard work if not palletized, and it comes in spikes of workload. Think of LA, when a large container ship has just arrived, the next 3 days are swamped with work. A truck load of tires or athletic weights may not get more time on the standard than a truckload of dollar store items. This lumping work is typically given to contract temp for hire employees and is crap work. It used to go to itinerant day workers, paid in cash, that would wait at the fence to be called, at least it goes to temp agencies now so the workers have more protections, but it is still crap work.
b) The offloading / onloading lines (pack off at drop ship centres) can also suck. Why? some supervisors, especially night shift suck, and think that it is funny when the new guy gets 2 hours of off loading car tires, or reels of cable wire, with no relief help. Relief help (aka a second person) should be automatic for that sort of thing after 15-20 min and it is the supervisor's job to balance the work. That relief person is there to let employees take bathroom breaks, and to help lend a hand when the work spikes heavy or too fast.
On average, for an average shift, the standard times and workload works well. Unions are on top of monitoring this at most warehouses and unionized ones follow similar standards to avoid becoming unionized.
When supervisors are a-holes, to new workers, it does not work well.
I think most jobs can be described that way.
