I work in an Amazon warehouse in West Sacramento

I work in an Amazon warehouse in West Sacramento
quillette.com

Also John Lanchester's compelling (to me) argument that the bailing out of the banks after the crash (which was, on balance, right) followed quickly by austerity (where everyone else unfairly picked up the cheque for the bailout) lead directly to Brexit and Trump, because people were (to paraphrase the film Network) "mad as hell, and not going to take this anymore!" https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n13/john-lanchester/after-the-fall

It really does feel that the university crowd (which I'm a part of) have completely detached from the lives of large chunks of the rest of the country. I get that this account of Amazon workplaces may be rose-tinted. Perhaps this facility is run by a good manager, and others aren't. But as it says, for this to be a specific kind of evil it needs to be compared to all other jobs in a similar environment. There are things that can be made better, sure, as there always are. But I find quite a bit of this middle-class hand-wringing tricky because it always seems to be well-paid journalists going "undercover". They'd probably find any manual labour degrading when compared to their comfortable Aeron chairs and plate-glass offices.

Reminded me a lot of Gell Mann amnesia, which I catch myself suffering from a little too often:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

>Just about every job in my sortation center could probably be done by a robot. In fact, it amazes me that Amazon hasn’t simply automated the entire facility. [...] If I had to guess, I’d say that Amazon continues to employ lots of human beings because, by putting money into the pockets of working-class people, the company creates more customers.

>If Amazon is going to be castigated publicly every time one of its 650,000 employees has a bad day, it may well decide to automate as many positions as possible and do away with most of its human workforce.

>But if John Oliver and his ilk keep harping away at how inhumanely Amazon treats its workers, Bezos might decide to completely automate his operation and people like me will be out of a job.

It's as plain as day that Amazon isn't keeping manual labor around out of the goodness of their hearts. There is no bottom line calculation other than the cost of manual labor vs the cost of automation, and no amount of deflection about the working conditions of warehouse work (whether better than Home Depot or not) is going to keep your job once the scale tips in the other direction.