I just wanna remind everyone that Amazon's commercials are 100% propaganda. Sure, they have benefits and maternity leave. Sure, they get a minimum of 15$ an hour now. But.
But do you know how much of Amazon's warehouse workers are actually Amazon employees? Only about 60%. And that's not during the holiday season, when the number of contractors is exponentially higher.
I've worked in a distribution center. For every 30 pickers or packers, there is at least one manger. Those managers are all Amazon employees, meaning the remainder there is gonna be mostly contractors. Again, this is especially true around the holidays. When I worked there in 2017, the contractors had a three strikes rule. Call out for a shift more than three days (not consecutive, just three days any time at all) and you're fired. You have the flu? Fired. You lost your childcare? Fired. You have no transportation to work? Fired.
A truly horrifying number of warehouse employees were living out of their cars, sleeping at the truck stop across the road. A fellow EMT on duty was so incompetent that he gave a hyperglycemic man a candy bar and made him so sick he could have died. They will require their managers to 40 hours a week (over a 3-4 day period), but the second you cross into overtime territory you're made to leave the building or else. A manager once left in the middle of an active medical emergency because she was going to hit double overtime if she didn't, and she didn't want to lose her job.
Amazon is not an ethical company. They do not treat the vast majority of their employees well, not even their managers. I was an EMT on call in a distribution center and every morning a manager came in with steroid cream he needed put on his head because he was losing his hair from the stress. He wasn't even 30 yet. They do not give reasonable accommodation for disabled persons. They do not allow adequate rest times. They make every single employee clock out before they go through security upon leaving, which can take up to 20 minutes because everyone leaves at once. A Supreme Court justice literally decided that was legal--to hold employees in the building on time they aren't being paid.
Amazon is fucking bullshit. The price gouging alone should be enough to not shop with them whenever possible, but their treatment of warehouse employees is despicable. They treat the backbone of the company like worthless, replaceable drones. Fuck Amazon, fuck Bezos, eat the fucking rich.
