Slashdot Mirror
BBC: Amazon Workers Face "Increased Risk of Mental Illness"
Rambo Tribble writes "The BBC is reporting that an investigation into a UK-based Amazon facility has uncovered conditions that experts believe foster mental illness. At the root of the problem seems to be unreasonable performance expectations combined with a fundamentally dehumanizing environment. From the article: 'Amazon said that official safety inspections had not raised any concerns and that an independent expert appointed by the company advised that the picking job is "similar to jobs in many other industries and does not increase the risk of mental and physical illness."'"
Oh, is your employer the one that held a food drive for you because you wouldn't have enough food for thanksgiving with the shitty pay you get, or was that a different wal-mart?
Also, I don't own a kindle, and I'm aware of, and try to avoid the modern slavery in electronics production.
Call me back when they find evidence of actual people with actual mental illness which is actually attributable to the job. Until then its just finger pointing at a big target.
What prompted this investigation? Sounds like a news crew just looking for a story they can call big.
Yes, that was my first thought when reading the article.
And since you did not provide a link here is one for people wondering what we are talking about.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Having worked in a warehouse before, the physical toll of WALKING on a concrete industrial floor can be bad. My back, feet, and knees were in bad shape after about 9 months. You need to wear proper foot attire but most people working these jobs don't learn that until it's too late. Brand new athletic shoes were "flat" after 2 months yet they looked like they were in mint condition. There's a reason why they have the padded safety mats anywhere that people tend to stand in one place for hours on end. Look under the feet of your checker at your grocery store! I don't doubt the job is mindless and can be torture for someone who has independent thought but to say that someone is at risk of "increased mental illness" is garbage. The plight of the Amazon.com workers is nothing new. Amazon isn't treating their workers drastically different than other warehouse/shipping companies. They're just getting picked on because they're the biggest (like Apple getting attacked for the child labor at their suppliers). If we as a people want this situation to change, then we as a people need to stop clicking on "express shipping" and be patient.
Amazon is working on it, it is just a matter of time.
Working at hopelessly automated amazon warehouses where you are treated as a physical automaton with no free will is "similar to" working in a traditional warehouse in the same way ozone is "similar to" O2. It's made of roughly the same thing, but isn't exactly good for you.
My experience as a warehouse worker consists of exactly 4 days from almost 30 years ago. It was a distribution warehouse for a major NJ supermarket chain and reading this article immediately brought me back to that experience.
I was in college and I needed a summer job, as the land surveyor I had worked for the previous summer wasn't hiring. The warehouse job was available and conveniently located so I took it figuring 'how bad can it be?' My recollections:
1) The job was basically to drive a pallet jack up and down endless rows of various products; pick A number of B product, C number of D product, etc.; stack and arrange the boxes so that they didn't all fall off as you continued picking, then bring it to the wrapping machine and finally drop it off in the loading zone. For every pallet you got a computer printout noting the maximum time allotted to fill the pallet. By the end of the fourth day, I was still struggling to get the orders picked in even TWICE the allotted time. It was far and away the suckiest work I ever did.
2) On top of that, the people who worked there were just sad and pathetic. The 'old-timer' union guys looked like they were entirely used up even though none appeared to be past their mid-40s, to a man they all appeared lifeless, joyless, and miserable. Then there were the younger guys, not in the union yet, mullet-headed yokels who *aspired* to be among the 'old-timers' with the blank gaze of death. I was struggling with the idea of tolerating the job for the summer...how one signs up for a lifetime of that...I can't even imagine.
Luckily for me, the evening after that 4th day the surveyor I worked for the previous summer called me and said they had a guy quit and if I still needed a job. I said unequivocally 'Yes!' and called in 'quit' at the warehouse the next morning.
That was a 'traditional' warehouse job, and I can fully relate to how it would affect workers precisely as the article states. I can only imagine how much worse it is now.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave, By Mac McClelland, March/April 2012 Issue, Mother Jones.
"My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine."