That’s true, but people in a cubicle aren’t working in a physical capacity under extreme conditions. Average travel for pickers is 13 miles a day. That average is taken over the course of a year. During peak season, 20 miles a day is not unusual. That’s in one of the welcome videos but they talk about it in terms of how great it is to lose weight.
People in a cubicle experience the mental fatigue, depression, and emotional drain of feeling like a cog in a wheel. On occasion, they have repetitive stress injuries, usually keyboard related—so wrists.
They do not experience deep chronic physical exhaustion, heat stress, and main joint stress injuries like knees, hips, and shoulders (in addition to wrists). Nor do they experience the anxiety of knowing you could be fired or let go at any moment in the same manner. They can also usually take some of the excess work home with them so their families suffer less. They are also not typically required to work months long bouts of overtime.
Due to bad management, we ended up on overtime for over 7 months. There’s a reason why the standard is 40 hours a week. 55–60 hours a week shouldn’t become a lifestyle, it should be a rarity. It’s destructive to families. Don’t get me wrong, I love the extra money as well as the next person. But after a certain point it scrubs out because you can’t keep up with your domestic obligations. You lose it because you’re too tired to cook so you order out, you have to pay higher rates for child care, and so forth and so on.
Amazon brags about their climate controlled warehouses, but they’re controlled at 90 degrees. Prolonged physical activity at 90 degrees can be dangerous for even the young and healthy. Add anything to that and you increase the risk of having a major medical problem. This is where preemptive management is important and where Amazon fails.
So let’s not pretend like that’s a fair equivalency. It’s not just the dehumanizing aspects of it. It’s the threat to life from managerial negligence, the threat of income loss from “layoffs”, and the reality of being cast adrift when things go wrong because you lose health coverage when you lose your job. Stress injuries aren’t like a cold or even a broken bone. They take months to heal and often linger indefinitely.
