This one may be lengthy as I try to recap my entire Amazon experience which started in 2012. To quote Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, “I’m getting too old for this shit.” On my last shift, during an all too brief lull in the action, the guy across the lane from me asked how I was doing. I replied, honestly, that it was killing me. He responded that he knew exactly how I felt. I looked at him and said “No you don’t. How old are you?”. He actually had to think for a few seconds before he said “27”. When I told him I had 40 years on him, he thought again and said 28. Well, don’t that make all the difference?
I just finished an almost 3-month gig in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee (MQY1), just east of Nashville and had lots of time to reflect on the sum total of my Amazon work. It now covers time spent in 3 different departments – picking, packing and ship dock.
I started as a picker in 2012 in Campbellsville KY (SDF1), a non-robotics facility. That was under a program (since discontinued) called CamperForce. I actually talked to the program manager on the phone before taking the job. The program was very well run at that time. We got actual training, including in lab areas where we could scan products and deal with problems. We had mentors who checked in on us after the official training period ended. Senior staff periodically gathered at the exit doors at end of shift to thank us. It’s the only Amazon Fulfillment Center where I felt like they really wanted me to succeed. In my humble opinion, SDF1 set the gold standard for Amazon jobs.
If you want to work for Amazon now you have to go through the regular hiring process, often referred to as blue badge by former CamperForce workers. They have 2 different websites to search for jobs. If you’re just looking for hourly grunt work, look here: https://hiring.amazon.com/#/ If you’re looking for Operations, IT or Support Engineering, you can look here: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/job_categories/operations-it-support-engineering
Amazon has changed quite a bit in the 11 years since then. At that time, you could request the job and the shift you wanted. Now you’re allowed to select the shift but not the job. All Amazon wants now is a warm body in the spots they need. That would explain why 90 pound weaklings are assigned to physically demanding jobs and weightlifters are put in jobs that only require the ability to count stuff. I worked with one guy in Murfreesboro, TN. He was about my age and had a similar history with Amazon, except he had been a stower at his previous jobs. That time around Amazon forced him to be a picker. Totally different physical requirements (another non-robotic facility) and he quit after only a few weeks.
I don’t know if Jeff Bezos will actually admit this, but the Amazon business model is predicated on an endless supply of unskilled labor. Their turnover rate must be astronomically high. When I onboarded here at MQY1, I was one of five people assigned to ship dock. Within 3 weeks, I was the only one left. IMHO, if Bezos changed his business practice to attract and retain quality people, he could be a trillionaire instead of just a billionaire.
So, after that brief digression, back to working conditions. Ship dock is HARD work, more so if you’re a palletizer. Boxes just fly down chutes all day long and you have to stack them on pallets or in carts. It was tougher still watching younger and fitter people doing less strenuous jobs. Minimal training was provided, mostly along the lines of this is how everything should work. Naturally, things didn’t always work as planned and we had to stop to find someone for help. I was told during orientation for this job that ship dock did not have a rate to meet. It was nice not having people constantly on my back to pick up the pace, but it also allowed slugs to keep their jobs. There weren’t many of them but they sure stuck out like a sore thumb. Then there are the couples. At this location, people are just assigned to general areas and told to move where the work is. This rarely happened with couples. They like to stay close, regardless of the amount of work. I estimate that Amazon got the productivity of 1.25 people for the pay and benefits of 2 people where couples were involved.
One of the things that has been more pronounced in recent years is the difference between classroom Amazon and warehouse Amazon. During the onboarding process, you’ll spend a few days in a classroom learning all about the executive approved way of doing things at Amazon. As soon as you start on the floor you learn that nobody really pays attention to that. A supervisor can be briefing a safety requirement at start of shift, with a dozen violations in plain sight, and just ignore them. The item was briefed; the box was checked. There is zero innovation in the warehouse. Everybody who could possibly make a difference is just keeping his or her head down and playing the game to keep a paycheck.
And speaking of paychecks, that is one of the main reasons to work for Amazon. They do pay well and on time. You can usually get as much overtime as you want (up to 60 total hours/week). I discovered something different this time around as a blue badge employee (instead of CamperForce). I initially hired on as a fulltime employee. The first couple of weeks weren’t too bad but then we had back-to-back mandatory overtime weeks that resulted in strained back muscles. I used up all my PTO and vacation time and swapped a couple of shifts to give it time to heal. The back healed but I was still very leery of injuring it again. I’d seen flyers about switching to Flex Part Time and gave it a shot. Under that program, you’re no longer eligible for benefits or vacation time but that was OK with me. You can work as little as 4 hours a week or as much as 60 hours a week. They advertise the coming week’s available shifts every Friday evening at 6 PM. Pick what you want. Sometimes they even offer increased hourly pay for certain hard to fill shifts. You still work in the same department, or any other department that you’ve been trained in. I did a few easy weeks, then remembered I was here to make money. My final full week was a 60 hour week. The timing was just right since the AC on my truck quit on my last day, so at least I’ll have money to fix that.
And last but not least, I never had a sense of accomplishment with Amazon. No matter how many items I picked, packed, or stacked, there were always more to take care of. At least at the sugar beet harvest, I could see the beet pile grow as we offloaded the constant stream of trucks. If the sugar beet harvest lasted 3 months instead of a few weeks, I would do that every year and take the rest of the year off.
