I was just reading about how horrible and exploitative Amazon is. How they deliberately hire the weak, the afraid, the vulnerable. I can understand the mindset that designs an employment and recruitment system with the purpose of being able to thoroughly abuse and exploit employees. Doesn't make it any less horrible. I no longer buy anything from Amazon. They're scum. I see well-paid employees expressing their conscience and saying they won't work on surveillance, or won't work on military projects. Where are the well-paid Amazon employees taking a stand against their own company's mistreatment of other employees? I wouldn't be surprised if we had some reading this very thread. Maybe they can tell us. I expect they just don't think about it. Take the money, try not to think about it.
From elsewhere:
Bezos defended Amazon in a fireside chat with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner on Tuesday evening, saying he was “very proud of our working conditions and I am very proud of our wages that we pay.”
He's proud of it. He's proud of the return to the workhouse. He's proud of rolling back workplace protections. He's proud of paying a pittance. He's proud of it all. Or is he oblivious?
Of course he's going to say he's proud of it; he's kinda obligated to. I'm willing to bet he neither knows what the day to day working conditions are, nor does he care.
It does remind me of an anecdote: Early in my career, I worked for Western Digital. They had a headquarters campus in a smaller city in Orange County. When I was there, they started growing. We didn't have the parking space, and people ended up having to park pretty far away up a hill. People were grumbling quite a bit about it, and it had a negative effect on morale to not be able to find a spot in the morning or coming back from lunch. At one of the quarterly "employees ask questions of the CEO" things, someone asked what was being done about the parking problem. The response, from the person who has a reserved parking space, came, "I wasn't aware there was a parking problem."
There's one source. Please don't buy if from Amazon. Read it, find more of your own sources, and if you disagree, please come back and we can have an adult discussion. Amazon warehouses are run like gulags. Need to go to the toilet? That's one demerit. Call in sick? One demerit. Be off sick without calling in? Three demerits. When you get to six you're fired. If I had an employer pull that on me, I'd walk on day one, and so would you. We're not weak. We're not vulnerable. They know who they need to recruit in order to do this.
They pick areas full of people desperate for work. They go to places where they know they will have an effectively endless supply of desperate, vulnerable, fearful people that they can pay a pittance to while they exploit them. It's their strategy. That's how you can exploit people and use them, and their actions are not accidental.
I upvoted you for engaging; what I have to say is very unpopular and most people just blank it and move on. Thank you.
Regardless of their abrasive rhetoric, the accusations against amazon are upsetting. Stories of people running around the shop floor to keep KPI's up, people peeing in bottle since bathroom breaks would reduce their pay. It's horrific, Amazon warehouses are terrible.
Amazon employees too many people to effectively hire based on a strategy of exploiting only the "desperate, vulnerable and fearful," unless that set includes literally anyone in the minimum wage bracket. And if they were as strict as you describe ("Need to go to the toilet? That's one demerit. Call in sick? One demerit. Be off sick without calling in? Three demerits. When you get to six you're fired.") most employees would be fired within a month.
Don't get me wrong - it's tedious, exploitative, exhausting work and I don't doubt any of the horror stories are true, but Amazon is also just a business like any other, and most of those stories are exceptions, not the rule. Amazon aren't drug dealers or vampires, they'll hire anyone who applies and passes a drug screen, and they'll work everyone as hard as they legally can. They're not as evil as you describe for the simple reason that being as evil as you describe would be bad business.
Most of what sucks about working in an Amazon warehouse is normal for a lot of low wage and blue collar work in the US. Just look into what long haul truckers have to do to make ends meet sometimes.
Amazon has the second highest employee turnover rate of the fortune 500 companies. They do fire more people (and drive people to quit) at a significantly higher rate. There are claims from former employees that they have a deliberate policy of firing people at eleven months, before they have to start providing medical insurance and paid holidays. That's legal, and horrible, and every time you or I buy from Amazon, we're saving a few pennies on the misery of those employees.
and they'll work everyone as hard as they legally can
They sure do. They take care (mostly) to stay on the side of legal. I'm not saying what they're doing is illegal (although some of their anti-union activities sure do come close!). Just grotesque and horrible.
Amazon employees too many people to effectively hire based on a strategy of exploiting only the "desperate, vulnerable and fearful,"
I disagree. They put their warehouses where there are large pools of desperate, vulnerable people. They do that because they want to employ those people. A great deal of effort is put into planning where to put those warehouses. They know what they're doing. They know that they're going to get employees who will put up with urinating in bottles because going to the toilet will get them fired. There's evidence that this is the case. You say it's not the case, but then what do you say about the evidence? Is that evidence manufactured? Are people doing it for the fun of urinating in bottles? If you're going to argue that it's not that strict, you need to deal with that evidence. There is a lot out there suggesting it's a horrible place to work, and workers saying it's worse than other warehouse jobs they've had (which would imply that your claim it's simply typically bad, as minimum wage jobs tend to be, isn't true).
From elsewhere:
Bezos defended Amazon in a fireside chat with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner on Tuesday evening, saying he was “very proud of our working conditions and I am very proud of our wages that we pay.”
He's proud of it. He's proud of the return to the workhouse. He's proud of rolling back workplace protections. He's proud of paying a pittance. He's proud of it all. Or is he oblivious?