For one year and seven months, I have suffered numerous health problems and seen complete deterioration of my well being because of Amazon. I worked night shift to make an extra $2.50 cents an hour to make ends meet for my family. After landing in the Hospital for seizures, stress related illness, rashes and heart problems, as well brain injury, I have finally decided to take back my own life and aid myself back into health. Sorry in advance for any grammar issues, it’s hard to have coherent sentences right now. I’m still in rehab.
My warehouse was dirty, insanely dirty, you could see the dust in the air it was so dirty. There were pieces of broken racking laying around, never picked up or taken care of. The bins in the racking were over stuffed with, well, stuff and the wire retainer that kept the product in the bin, was held together to the racking by a plastic band. It would snap causing the wire to come flying at you and if you weren’t careful, would slash you and leave a wide gash in your skin. The forklifts were deplorable, there were never enough for everyone to actually do their jobs. The hydrogen gas pumps were pretty much always broken, giving a group of 40+ people one gas pump to work the entire night with. Management was extremely hard on us and had ridiculous expectations for units per hour and quality of work. The VNA racking (paper towels, dildos, toilet paper, food) was 45 units and hour, most of us were lucky to make 30.
Safety was a gigantic issue and the highly trained safety team did their best but there weren’t enough of them to take care of us all. We had on average, four ambulances a night leaving our warehouse with injured or sick workers.
Human Resources, or “HR” was absolutely useless. They did their very best to try and answer your question as quickly and as plainly as possible, then boot you out of the line. I was sick for three days, I was told by HR that if I got a doctors note my time would be excused. Keep in mind, December is “Peak Season” and vacation time is frozen for this time. You can only use PTO and UPT. (Unpaid time off). Only problem is, I stopped occurring PTO an entire year ago. So I had no time off to use to cover my sickness. My UPT was the only time I had for anything.
HR on the first day of my leave, was blowing up my phone threatening to fire me if I did not respond within two hours. For the next four days of my leave, I battled them while sick, to keep my job. They tried saying to me, three separate times that they did not accept doctors notes. (In my state, it’s a law. They have to.) I eventually was able to find out how to submit my doctors note by myself and my negative UPT (ground for termination) was forgiven. Not to the help of HR.
To anyone who is considering a job at Amazon, it’s no more than a temporary job. It will ruin you, even kill you. It almost killed me. No job is worth dying over.