Would the rep who claims to be in fear of losing her/his job be employed from that cottage industry? That would make the claim sound a bit more plausible, assuming, of course malice in the review-for-discount corps.
I have heard of organizations like this: http://revleap.me/ (I'm sure these guys are completely innocent, they just happened to come up in a DDG search for "get positive amazon reviews".)
If you search for "work from home" you will find lots of shady organizations paying people (pennies) to post reviews, for example on Google Maps.
It's not a huge leap to imagine a service which pays random online workers to contact negative reviewers with sob stories begging for the review to be removed. And it's not hard to imagine that a disposable worker such as that would indeed be fired (simply not offered additional work) if s/he fails to get a review removed.
The organization I linked too shows a picture of what appears to be some kind of negative review alert delivered to a smart phone.