Emily's Experience at Amazon Warehouse

• Position: Picker (employee who walks around finding, scanning, and collecting items that people have ordered)
• Location: Amazon warehouse SDF8, which is a 2.5 million square foot warehouse located in Southern Indiana, across the river from Louisville, Kentucky
• "[The Amazon scanner guns] wirelessly upload your location and how long it's been since your last bar-code scan in real time. If you're going too slow, the scanner will display a message telling you so. If you go too slow too often, a 'coach' will come find you to tell you in person."
• "The real problem, I was told, was the subtler plague of injuries from working through pain for fear of getting fired for low productivity numbers. That's where Amazon really stood out—repetitive stress injuries."
• "When my alarm goes off for my second full day of picking, it is the worst my body's felt in my entire life...I pop Advil like candy all day, not even bothering to track when my last dose was..." But SDF8 is no stranger to pain like Emily's, so the Amazon management team installed painkiller vending machines for employees.
• "I came to SDF8 to understand what it feels like to work in a fulfillment center. But the thing I really and truly understand now is that, regardless of how broke I may be, I'm the upper class. I always will be. I won't ever really understand what it feels like to work here, because I know I get to leave."
• "Nearly every drop of 'brain work' has been wrung out of this job, like so many others...As more and more skill is stripped out of a job, the cost of turnover falls; eventually, training an ever-churning influx of new unskilled workers becomes less expensive than incentivizing people to stay by improving the experience of work or paying more."
• "Why should we have to work like this just to prove that we're worth shelter and food?" -Fellow Amazon employee

Emily's Experience at Convergys Call Center

• Position: Customer Service Representative
• Location: Call center located in Hickory, North Carolina
• "There's a huge body of research directly linking repetitive, low-control, high-stress work with increased risk of mental-health issues—particularly depression and anxiety. Many of these studies were actually conducted in call centers because they're such a perfect model of a low-control, high-stress workplace."
• "Okay, who is it this time?" -Paramedic arriving at the call center to respond (another) employee panic attack
• "Reps talked about constant monitoring and micro-management, having as little job control as assembly-line workers, and metric-obsessed bosses counting not just how many seconds you spend on every stage of a call but also how many you spend in the bathroom. A good rule of thumb: the more interest management takes in workers' use of the bathroom, the more that job is going to suck."
• "It's emphasized that we must make a sales offer on every single call unless the caller formally invokes his or her right not to hear it, and we must hear a clear 'no' three times before we're allowed to stop making offers."
• "I've been developing a sort of callus over the earnest part of myself that genuinely cares about the customers and wants to do a good job for them. It thickens every time someone says something terrible to me. As it gets tougher, I've become increasingly numb to my customer interactions, good and bad. It's harder for angry people to upset me, but I get much less pleasure from making people happy. This dead, muted feeling reminds me a lot of depression, and it worries me."