I worked at an Amazon warehouse in Texas as a seasonal employee about a month ago. It was an absolutely miserable experience - and I say that as someone who has worked plenty of low-end manual jobs. I only lasted a month.
Shifts were 10 hours and had two 15 minute breaks and a 30 minute lunch. The floor is large and there is no cafeteria, so it usually was more like a 15 minute break after you walked over to the breakroom and nuked lunch.
That in and of itself was not so bad - I've had food service jobs where we had no breaks at all. But that combined with the actual job duties, combined with the conditions, combined with rigid management, and 1984 "ministry of truth" style propaganda - all that added up to an absolutely miserable experience. It's very hard for me to really communicate why it was so miserable, because I don't fully understand it myself - but I will try. But I will say that I've spent time in prison - and I would choose prison any day over returning to work at Amazon.
I applied online, went on an interview and started a month later. I had a few months free and being a long time Amazon customer and admirer I thought it would be an interesting job to check out for a little bit. I heard it was a warehouse for just books and dvd's, and that it was a brand new warehouse that was just opening up. I read a long PR piece talking about how Amazon had every year changed the design of the warehouses based on what they had learned from the warehouses built previous years. So this was a brand new design that was supposed to be more efficient and also more thoughtful of workers.
I was assigned a shift - Sunday to Wednesday 6am to 5:30 pm. I was not given an option, and when I finally found an HR contact a week before I started to ask if it was possible to change shifts I never heard back from them.
So I was like whatever and went to orientation. It was me and 6 others. By the time I left the job a month later, only 3 remained of that original group. The first to leave and the one I got to know the best was an ex-hooters girl who was my age (31) who was sick of waiting tables and wanted to work for a company she could move up in.
She left a week and a half in after having severe allergies in response to the thick coating of dust throughout the warehouse and on all the shelving we were working "stowing" product on. It turned out it wasn't just books and dvd's - in fact that was a small percentage of what I worked with. Mostly it was cheap consumer goods - the kind I despise and that is slowly killing our planet. The shelves often reeked of toiletries and chemicals and perfumes of various kinds, mixing with the dust to inspire a sickly feeling. FYI exposure to dust and chemicals are conductive to good health.
The job was simple: take some carts of newly shipped product and "stow" them on the shelves: i.e. find space on the shelving where it fits and scan it into the system so it shows up as being available and ready to ship on the online website. It was fairly easy in some ways - the problem was doing that for 10 hours with hardly any interruption, and being surrounded by all that dust and smell and crappy mindless consumer goods. I didn't feel good about what I was doing. I had 3 days off, which I thought at first was great - but it would usually take me those 3 days to just recover from what I experienced in the 4 I was at work.
(Note: if I was given some freedom as to when I did the job, or the timing or duration of breaks, or how long my shifts were - this would not have been that bad a job. I can put up with shit for a few hours - but not 10 without a real break to speak of. And that was it - it was either work within these rigid parameters or not work at all. And so I chose the latter.)
It was a mindless monotonous job, but to make matters work, all over the place Amazon had signs saying "Have fun". Every morning and afternoon after we had our group meeting they repeated this over and over again before we went off to work. Trust me, no one was having fun. Maybe a few in management, but certainly none of the direct workers. It was insulting.
I could go on, but I'm bored. I will finish with something I came across recently, which can be compared to my experience. How bad you consider the job depends on what you compare it to. If you believe that someone living is misery (or, to put it more mildly, doing uninspiring and unimproving labor) is worth it for someone else to receive at a cheap price what in many cases is an unneedful trinket, then my point is mute. But if human happiness and potential is valuable, then this is not a job worthy of human beings. John Ruskin said it much better than I:
"We have much studied and much perfected the great civilised invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. Truly speaking it is not the labour that is divided; but the men: – Divided into mere segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin.
"Only in right understanding on the part of all classes of what kinds of labor are good for men, raising them & making them happy, and by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour can this evil be met."
Prior to working there, I had begun taking seriously the treatment of the animals whose products I ate - milk products, eggs, meat ect. Part of what inspired me to work at Amazon was to see what I was supporting when I purchased from them.
Needless to say, I will never again buy a physical product from Amazon - and am trying to ween myself off their digital products. We are far past the time when such demeaning labor should be supported.