A group of workers with their fist raised in solidarity hold a scrawled sign: "We are humans not robots!" They and others at an Amazon warehouse in Minnesota protested in March 2019 and on July's Prime Days. They were speaking against the day-to-day dehumanizing reality of their workplace.
"I'm among them," Emily Guendelsberger wrote in Time Magazine, July 29, 2019. "I took a job at an fulfillment center in Indiana over a few weeks."
"I wasn't prepared for how exhausting working at Amazon would be. It took my body two weeks to adjust to the agony of walking 15 miles a day and doing hundreds of squats. But as the physical stress got more manageable, the mental stress of being held to the productivity standards of a robot became an even bigger problem."
"Technology has enabled employers to enforce a work pace with no room for inefficiency, squeezing every ounce of downtime out of workers' days. The scan gun I used to do my job was also my own personal digital manager. Every single thing I did was monitored and timed.
"After I completed a task, the scan gun not only immediately gave me a new one, but also started counting down the seconds I had left to do it.
"It also alerted a manager if I had too many minutes of "Time Off Task." At my warehouse, you were expected to be off task for only 18 minutes per shift - mine was 6:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.- which included using the bathroom, getting a drink of water or just walking slower than the algorithm dictated, although we got an unpaid, 30-minute lunch."
"It created a constant buzz of low-grade panic, and the isolation and monotony of the work left me feeling as if I were losing my mind. Imagine experiencing that month after month."