Weibee

I work at Amazon fc as well. The managers are all about the numbers. There are cases where they don't want us to use the automated ergo lifts cause it's "slow". So when we get pallets of 100 cases of dog food, cat food, paper, etc. We are told to use the pump carts cause it's "quicker". They don't consider that doing the lifting over and over again for 10 hours kills our backs. Everything we learned in training and safety procedures is thrown out the window so we can meet the daily projections.

TL,DR: Depending on what your job is, you can be treated like shit.

Alright, so there's a lot of people talking about speaking to HR. Let me explain how it works to work at an Amazon FC. First off, talking to HR isn't going to do anything because, when you first start off at Amazon, you don't technically work for Amazon. You are considered a "white badge" and are employed by a company called SMX. Official Amazon employees are "blue badges" SMX is contracted by Amazon to employ as many people as possible for their peak season.

While you are "white badged" you are on a month to month contract where the contract is severely one sided, because they know you don't really have any other choices of employment. They pretty much hire everyone that applies and there is a group of new hires every two weeks. Amazon shifts are 4 10 hour shifts each week. You are also required to work overtime if Amazon calls for it. Which they have been donig for the past month now. So, yes, that is forced OT. Some people like it, some people don't, again, depending on which part of the FC you work. I work at the docks which is essentially emptying out palettes of boxes full of product varying between 0.5 to 70lbs. There is a lot more stuff on the heavy side than light.

As a "white badge" you don't have any perks and are treated as a resource. The only things you will hear from managers is "go faster" "work faster" "we need to meet today's quota, faster" "why are you slowing down?" etc. As you can see, they reeeeeaaaaaaallllllllly want to meet their quotas. The turnover rate is extremely high because depending on the job, you have to meet a certain rate. If you don't meet that rate within the first 4 weeks, you are given a warning and a week to meet it. If you don't, you are fired.

Another problem is, as part of their "inbound team" there are 5 managers there for some reason. I don't know if this is all FCs, but this is how it is at mine. They have all attended some type of business school and try to apply their business theories to fucking warehouse work.... It doesn't work. I went to business school too, it doesn't translate. AT ALL. They all give people conflicting orders and it actually slows things down and causes tremendous amounts of confusion. People are consistently being moved around and given random orders to do something else that conflicts with another manager's order. The initial manager will ask you why you are doing so and so and be told to go back to where you were last. Oh they will also tell you not to use certain machines because they are "slowing down productivity". The biggest problem is, the supervisors of each section actually have the most knowledge of what's going on and how it would be most efficient, but they are thrown to the side and treated like shit, because they didn't attend some sort of business school.

Another thing, even if the overall productivity is at say, at 150%, they will still tell you to go faster. All these habits are trickled down from the GM of the FC, who directly answers to Jeff Bezos himself.

Also here's a little bonus. Every so often they have "power hours" where the person with the highest rates get a prize. Take a guess at what it is. Go ahead, take a wild guess. $3 - $5 in Amazon currency. Why use currency and not gift card? Cause it's not a gift card, it's 3-5 random pieces of cardboard with gift codes on them for you to redeem on their site. Also these things are old, who knows where they pulled out of. There's also the occasional draws where people win random prizes. By random, I mean they are really fucking random. Our last draw consisted of a cheap curling iron that I don't think they can sell. A box of 30 pieces of Halloween candy. A bag of balloons (I'm not joking). And finally, a $5 gift card to Amazon. How nice. By the way, the curling iron was won by a 20 year old guy.

To be fair, there a lot of good people that work there. One of our managers isn't too bad. She works with us, instead of only barking random orders.

Like OP mentioned, it's not bad if you're working there temporarily. Even manager positions have a high turn over rate. It's definitely not a career. Also, Jeff Bezos is one of the most anti-innovation CEOs out there, so please stop riding Amazon's dick. Everything that Amazon does, has to be approved by him. Ever wonder why their in house products (Kindle aside) are so shit?