FC_Associate

While I didn't mention it in my post my coworker was reassigned to less labor intensive duties once he returned to work. And from my understanding the doctor who treated him ok'd him to return to his normal duties but our direct manager had no problem with him taking longer in this less physical role.

I'm just adding this detail to paint a better picture but I think you've done a good job illustrating that this is the minimum that Amazon in required to do and they shouldn't be praised for doing what the law requires. I'm certainly not here to try and do PR for Amazon, just sharing my personal experiences.

And I'm fairly certain most associates at my station aren't even aware they have an @amazon email address so they definitely aren't checking it. Nice to see another L1 around here.

I will say that from what I've seen my station managers take safety very seriously. Some of this must extend up the corporate ladder because I had a friend who was injured on the job here and Amazon did a very good job of making sure he got the care he required. He actually wanted to come back to work much earlier than Amazon would allow, he missed his coworkers, but they wanted to make sure he was completely healed and made it clear that he shouldn't rush things. He was being paid worker's comp during this time. This certainly made a good impression on me.

I also really appreciated how straight forward the hiring process was. I was unemployed and homeless, I actually lived on an empty lot behind our warehouse for a while, when I was hired and out of all the jobs I applied to Amazon had the most streamlined hiring process. This might not seem like a huge deal but when you're already struggling it was nice to not have too many hoops to jump through to try and land a job.

Obviously due to my background I'm probably viewing my work overly positively, it feels pretty great to finally have a little bit of savings, I've saved up around $1500 over the past year and this is the most money I've had in my entire life, but overall I've enjoyed my time at Amazon. But again, from the reporting I've seen there are still some pretty glaring systemic problems within the company.

Edit: I saw a poster comment under this post asserting that I was being paid to post here in defense of Amazon, the post has since been deleted after receiving some downvotes, for the record I did not downvote the poster, but I will address their concerns. I can certainly understand why my post might raise suspicions. To give some background I have another account on HN that I've been active on for approximately three years and have a bit over 2000 karma. I post a few times a month, and by post I mean I usually just ask tons of questions about topics I have a limited understanding of and the kind people here try their best to explain things to me. I wanted to keep this account separate form that one since I don't post anything Amazon related using my normal account. I hope I don't sound like too much of a shill but I'm somewhat excited to finally be able to contribute to a topic I have some understanding of.

The policy at our station is that if you need to go to the bathroom when not on break or lunch, you need to tell either a line lead, shift assistant, or the people working next to you so that they can cover your post while you're gone so things don't get backed up or packages don't end up spilling on the ground. That's pretty much it. I've worked the night shift before and drink large amounts of water so I could rarely make it through a shift without using the bathroom one or two times in addition to the times I went while on break and lunch. It was never a problem, we would just cover for each other.

There are two main reasons why it's possible that I've never run across such cases, the most logical one being that I've worked primarily in a Delivery Station and not a Fulfillment Center. From what I've experienced the Delivery Stations are, for lack of a better term, not run as "efficiently" as the FC's, so the metrics that are used to track employee performance aren't quite as well quantified. There is still obviously a lot of performance tracking with regards to rates, but due to the less efficient and structured layout of the DS, there seems to be a bit more leeway given.

Also, I think I've been extremely fortunate with the management that I work under and they seem to take worker safety and the overall work environment very seriously. I can't imagine any managers at my station writing anyone up for taking bathroom breaks, and definitely not for handling a bloody nose. Again, just to be clear, I'm not at all refuting the accuracy of those reports, issues like that have definitely occurred in Amazon warehouses, but the environment at my warehouse seems to be significantly more worker friendly. I think this is probably due to our station managers' oversight.

Also, I've only been working at Amazon for slightly over one year, so it's possible that they have been making genuine progress on these issues.

I feel the same way. I know a lot of warehouse associates are active on some of the Amazon Instagram pages, but that's mostly just silly pictures and activities. I don't think anyone would post such detailed responses on their own when they aren't being paid.

Also, in case there is confusion with the term "ambassador", from my understanding this is mostly an internal title for associates who lead some training sessions for new hires. It doesn't come with any pay or benefit increases, it's just a nice thing to do if you like training new hires and want an occasional break from your normal duties. These aren't really meant to be outward facing brand ambassadors, at least that's been my understanding.

Disclosure: I work at an Amazon warehouse.

From my experience the managers at my warehouse are very open to moving people around to fill different roles if you request it. This is obviously anecdotal but from my experience people tend to want to stick to one specific job rather than move around.

1. Based on the stories I had heard I was expecting a much more aggressively micromanaged workplace and much stricter metrics on performance. Overall the warehouse managers have been pretty accommodating about allowing us a grace period to get up to speed on what’s expected of us and really aren’t hovering over our shoulders all the time. So long as you get your work done we are mostly left to our own devices. I was expecting a much more “authoritarian” culture.

2. Many things are run surprisingly inefficiently. To be frank, whatever opinion I previously held about Bezos has certainly gone down, and it isn’t because of the way employees are treated. There are a host of things that seem really poorly optimized here and that were apparent to me within a few weeks of starting, and I have zero previous warehouse or logistics experience, and I'm not a smart person. I’ve heard stories that Bezos is extremely hands on but I can’t imagine he would like some of the problems going on.

A few examples for you: the devices we use for stowing packages(this is the process of taking them off of a conveyor belt and placing them inside large bags or shelves for the drivers to pick up) are constantly suffering from hardware and software errors. In fact at the moment, due to the number of people we having working the night sort, I think it’s around 180-200 right now, we often don’t have enough scanners to go around. The conveyor belts are also constantly jamming resulting in work having to stop. We are starting to do so much volume, last night we did around 82k packages from 10pm to 5:45am, that we literally are running out of space to put things in our aisles, and running out of bags to stow into.

There are also some issues regarding the payroll and HR systems. Our shifts are frequently changing due to the warehouse needing more man hours and this isn’t always reflected accurately in pay or time off accrued. When this happens you need to pay a visit to HR, which btw has always handled things quickly and professionally, but we are told to stay clocked in during this time, as we should be. Sometimes I’ll end my shift and see 20-30 people queued in line for HR. Amazon is paying for this time and it seems to be the result of really poorly implemented back end systems.

3. It’s the freaking night shift at Amazon and like I stated earlier, I myself was unemployed and homeless when I first started, and I was definitely surprised by the quality of my coworkers. Most of us are coming from areas of south LA like Inglewood, Compton, Hawthorne, it doesn’t seem like many of us have any education beyond high school, everyone seems to be living paycheck to paycheck, I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one living out of their car, and many people are working multiple jobs. One of my close coworkers usually arrives after his shift at Walmart ends. Yes, there are slackers and down right mean people, but most people just show up and do a competent job. There is however a rather large group of people who really work their asses off. I suppose it might be down to human nature but when you see your coworkers working hard it makes you want to work hard as well, if for no other reason than so they don’t have to pick up your slack. Really many of us could be taking things a bit easier, management wouldn’t be the wiser imo, but we work so that the guy next to you that has to take his kid to school in the morning gets done on time. I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that things like that surprised me.

4. The free coffee and hot chocolate that comes out of a vending machine is much better than I had anticipated.

Keep in mind that I’m at a delivery station, this is a huge warehouse where we receive packages and sort them for delivery, and not one of the warehouses were products are packaged for shipment. Also, I just ended my night shift so I might fall asleep but I’ll be happy to return later to answer any questions.

Edit: I should add that I really enjoy working here but when I was first hired I was unemployed and homeless, and I’m currently semi-homeless, so I probably have an overly positive outlook on working here. I’ll try and not paint too rosy a picture though.