What do the badge colors mean?
blue = full-time/permanent employee
white = seasonal/temp employee
yellow = vendors (and DSP employees, if I remember right).
It's more or less their way of tagging you with a yellow star so they know who they can treat like shit. Hah, just kidding, they treat everyone like shit.
I've worked at two different facilities in CA and never once seen those. We still used the white/yellow/blue badge scheme.
Are there any ambassadors in this thread who know what those are?
Saying someone is a yellow badge badge is saying that they are a full time employee with 5-9 years of tenure, most SDEs don't work with contractors so we don't talk about yellow badge contractors all that often.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, the color is actually supposed to be orange, but the color came out yellow.
TL;DR DSP drivers don't encounter many blue badges.
Is an entity imposing an identification system for quickly singling out populations with invisible but immutable characteristics? If so, the Yellow Badge comparison is apt because that's exactly what the nazis did with their badging system.
Amazon identifying people within certain buckets of employment doesn't fit this comparison because opportunities exist (in theory) for people to take other roles, to quit, or to be terminated, making Amazon badges identifiers of a mutable characteristic.
Now, is badging people by employment class a crappy thing to do? Probably. Easy way to enable eyeballing a worker and denying certain perks, for instance. But it's also useful in determining whether a person is qualified to hear certain company-confidential information.
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tl;dr: There's never a good reason to compel visible identification for an immutable trait, but that's also not what Amazon's badging scheme is, so using the comparison risks cheapening the original sin.
Hope this helps anyone reading. And to any historians who probably know better than I do, kindly fact-check me. I only know enough to be dangerous, not useful.