Pol Pots Pooter
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2018
Someone over in the Moviebob thread asked me to do this, so fuck it why not. I'll copypasta what I said over there to get the ball rolling.
That "corporate minimum wage":
Corporate "culture":
Working conditions:
A year at the shithole:
Garbage in, garbage out:
That "corporate minimum wage":
It was actually a pay cut to half its tier 1 work force, basically anyone with tenure over two years. I was a four-year employee and my total compensation was actually cut by 30 cents an hour because they nuked variable compensation and RSU's. That came down in October, and variable compensation for hourlies is doubled in Q4 which meant an effective pay cut of a dollar an hour, buck-fifty for overtime hours. Throughout October and November we worked 50's, and during all of December 60's which is normal for peak. Screwed me out of about $600 in pay throughout peak off the bat, and there were people there who did the math and were getting screwed out of up to $1,600.
I didn't stick around for my five-year anniversary bonus, which would have been $10,000 in stock vestment. Part of that "minimum wage" was a revocation of stock options, including anniversary bonuses, in favor of...a $1,500 before-tax bonus. That corporate minimum wage fucked me out of nine thousand bucks. That's why I told the fuckers to eat shit and left.
I didn't stick around for my five-year anniversary bonus, which would have been $10,000 in stock vestment. Part of that "minimum wage" was a revocation of stock options, including anniversary bonuses, in favor of...a $1,500 before-tax bonus. That corporate minimum wage fucked me out of nine thousand bucks. That's why I told the fuckers to eat shit and left.
Corporate "culture":
Of course that says nothing about where FC's are. Unless you're in a facility that has to be somewhere due to fresh and/or one-day delivery, they're all in at-will employment red states where the cost of living is rock bottom, so they can pay employees even less, screw them over harder, and extract even more in tax breaks from the local government. Basically the entire system is built from the ground up to fuck government as hard as it can for every last red cent that can be swindled out of them.
Back in 2017, a little discussed part of the Trump tax cuts was effective caps on de minimis fringe benefits. Management used to hand out dollar vouchers for use in snack machines in the FC's, but after the regulation on caps to de minimis, they started handing out scratcher tickets which could get you prize items, but almost always rewarded dollar vouchers for the snack machines. The swindle was that by turning in the scratchers, you signed off for the vouchers and it would be itemized on your pay stub as bonus pay. That's right, they itemized $1 snack vouchers as taxable income.
They loved giving out Alexa devices during peak as random drawings. Like anyone who works at Amazon wants an Amazon wiretap in their home.
Back in 2017, a little discussed part of the Trump tax cuts was effective caps on de minimis fringe benefits. Management used to hand out dollar vouchers for use in snack machines in the FC's, but after the regulation on caps to de minimis, they started handing out scratcher tickets which could get you prize items, but almost always rewarded dollar vouchers for the snack machines. The swindle was that by turning in the scratchers, you signed off for the vouchers and it would be itemized on your pay stub as bonus pay. That's right, they itemized $1 snack vouchers as taxable income.
They loved giving out Alexa devices during peak as random drawings. Like anyone who works at Amazon wants an Amazon wiretap in their home.
Working conditions:
Piss in water bottles is if you're lucky. I've seen people straight up shit on the floor, it was pretty common actually. Vomit in totes and throw the totes on the inventory conveyance line because they don't dare head to the toilets to sick up. That one was always fun because I worked inbound hazmat part of the time, so guess to whom puke totes went. Worst part is the totes have holes in the bottom, so the entire time they're on the line they're dripping vomit everywhere.
Wanna talk about hazmat, I got a story about hazmat for you. Remember the bear mace robot story from last year? Well, in my FC some sped stowed a bottle of high-molar hydrochloric acid in an open bin with a bunch of lithium-ion batteries. My FC was low-hazmat and just moving Li-ion batteries through it was often enough a herculean task, let alone a bottle of extremely potent and dangerous acid which wasn't even flagged hazardous in the system.
I saw this, went thermonuclear, and pulled the bottle of acid on the spot to report to a manager. That manager didn't see the problem and told me to put it back because it had a customer order pending. I went to their manager, same thing, and again. It took going to the facility's general manager before I found a vest who had apparently taken a chemistry class in their life, who would override the customer order so I could...just go ahead and send it to pack.
The funny thing is Bob wouldn't even be able to get his fat ass inside an FC. Literally. Every FC has turnstile security gates you have to badge through to enter, and they were pretty narrow. We had one guy who was a cleaning contractor for a while, who was about Bob's size, who couldn't fit through the gate and had to get security to let him in through a special, regular, door for deliveries, guests, and tour groups.
Jewelry sections inside Amazon facilities are in cages with their own security checkpoint complete with their own incredibly fine-tuned metal detectors. As in "goes off on jeans buttons" tuned. Pretty obvious why, it's a fucking jewelry section. Less obvious is that almost all of it is cheap Chinese shit that's less expensive than the pairs of panties they basically let walk right out the door because panties don't trip metal detectors.
People hated it up there. Rate was so high even the best workers could barely make it. You had to walk ten minutes and through security to go piss, and all that was TOT. There was basically no climate control in the cage. The loophole used to be, they couldn't make you go up there, and if you had body piercings that couldn't be removed you couldn't go up because you'd trip the metal detector and have to get wanded.
The number of people -- mostly women -- who claimed to have body piercings skyrocketed. Management figured this out and would start making people go through security anyways, and if you tripped it on the way in you were excluded. The number of people who got body piercings skyrocketed.
The clitty-titty piercing cold war continued, until one fateful shift where a young woman who had just gotten nipple piercings was told to go up, get written up, or leave. She didn't have the time to leave and she was on final written, so she had no choice but to take the fresh jewelry out and go up. Spoiler alert, her piercings got infected, and it was this whole thing.
Management's final solution to this, was they had a badge lanyard card drawn up. It was a little paper doll that employees were supposed to mark up to show where they were pierced, so that when they tripped the metal detector and got wanded, they could flash the card to security and get past. Of course, this information was recorded by security, so Amazon has an electronic record of employees with intimate piercings.
EDIT: I also had this buddy who had a prince albert. One of those 0ga. "why would you do that to yourself?" monstrosities, which we all knew about because if he walked the wrong way through security his dick would set off the metal detectors, he'd have to go through secondary screening, and he was very vocal and quite proud of his dick piercing.
Wanna talk about hazmat, I got a story about hazmat for you. Remember the bear mace robot story from last year? Well, in my FC some sped stowed a bottle of high-molar hydrochloric acid in an open bin with a bunch of lithium-ion batteries. My FC was low-hazmat and just moving Li-ion batteries through it was often enough a herculean task, let alone a bottle of extremely potent and dangerous acid which wasn't even flagged hazardous in the system.
I saw this, went thermonuclear, and pulled the bottle of acid on the spot to report to a manager. That manager didn't see the problem and told me to put it back because it had a customer order pending. I went to their manager, same thing, and again. It took going to the facility's general manager before I found a vest who had apparently taken a chemistry class in their life, who would override the customer order so I could...just go ahead and send it to pack.
The funny thing is Bob wouldn't even be able to get his fat ass inside an FC. Literally. Every FC has turnstile security gates you have to badge through to enter, and they were pretty narrow. We had one guy who was a cleaning contractor for a while, who was about Bob's size, who couldn't fit through the gate and had to get security to let him in through a special, regular, door for deliveries, guests, and tour groups.
Jewelry sections inside Amazon facilities are in cages with their own security checkpoint complete with their own incredibly fine-tuned metal detectors. As in "goes off on jeans buttons" tuned. Pretty obvious why, it's a fucking jewelry section. Less obvious is that almost all of it is cheap Chinese shit that's less expensive than the pairs of panties they basically let walk right out the door because panties don't trip metal detectors.
People hated it up there. Rate was so high even the best workers could barely make it. You had to walk ten minutes and through security to go piss, and all that was TOT. There was basically no climate control in the cage. The loophole used to be, they couldn't make you go up there, and if you had body piercings that couldn't be removed you couldn't go up because you'd trip the metal detector and have to get wanded.
The number of people -- mostly women -- who claimed to have body piercings skyrocketed. Management figured this out and would start making people go through security anyways, and if you tripped it on the way in you were excluded. The number of people who got body piercings skyrocketed.
The clitty-titty piercing cold war continued, until one fateful shift where a young woman who had just gotten nipple piercings was told to go up, get written up, or leave. She didn't have the time to leave and she was on final written, so she had no choice but to take the fresh jewelry out and go up. Spoiler alert, her piercings got infected, and it was this whole thing.
Management's final solution to this, was they had a badge lanyard card drawn up. It was a little paper doll that employees were supposed to mark up to show where they were pierced, so that when they tripped the metal detector and got wanded, they could flash the card to security and get past. Of course, this information was recorded by security, so Amazon has an electronic record of employees with intimate piercings.
EDIT: I also had this buddy who had a prince albert. One of those 0ga. "why would you do that to yourself?" monstrosities, which we all knew about because if he walked the wrong way through security his dick would set off the metal detectors, he'd have to go through secondary screening, and he was very vocal and quite proud of his dick piercing.
A year at the shithole:
After each peak season they actually plan to fire people and hire new people to keep a constant churn of non-tenured employees. They don't cut productivity quotas to account for post-peak inventory drop-off, which means a huge chunk of employees can't make rate and get fired. This is also the point they get really behavioral write-up happy and will fire people at the drop of a hat, even for offenses that normally would get you a first written.
After that's kaizen season, which means all the managers with hard-ons for promotions implement exceptional ideas that hurt everyone's productivity even more. And if you can't make rate due to stupid fucking ideas, fuck you, out the door you go even though it was your exceptional manager's fault. If you're lucky and your manager's not a complete sped, you get to make it to summer and work in "climate controlled in name only" conditions, where management arranges for private ambulances outside to care for employees with heat stroke rather than turn the AC up, because it's cheaper to nearly kill workers.
Then you get prime week, which is peak season level stress and slave driving but this time around in heat stroke conditions.
Then you get kaizen 2.0, exceptional individual boogaloo, in the middle of back to school season when management is trying to get all the peak merchandise in the building while implementing even more exceptional ideas, and pushing everything that really matters for peak preparation to the last fucking second.
After that's kaizen season, which means all the managers with hard-ons for promotions implement exceptional ideas that hurt everyone's productivity even more. And if you can't make rate due to stupid fucking ideas, fuck you, out the door you go even though it was your exceptional manager's fault. If you're lucky and your manager's not a complete sped, you get to make it to summer and work in "climate controlled in name only" conditions, where management arranges for private ambulances outside to care for employees with heat stroke rather than turn the AC up, because it's cheaper to nearly kill workers.
Then you get prime week, which is peak season level stress and slave driving but this time around in heat stroke conditions.
Then you get kaizen 2.0, exceptional individual boogaloo, in the middle of back to school season when management is trying to get all the peak merchandise in the building while implementing even more exceptional ideas, and pushing everything that really matters for peak preparation to the last fucking second.
Garbage in, garbage out:
Right when I started there was a woman there who'd blow dudes, on the job, right in the middle of shift, on the production floor. Ten bucks a pop. Dunno if anyone's ever seen pictures of an Amazon warehouse, but most of it is pretty isolated and remote and it's easy as fuck to get away with shit like that. That is, until she was caught sucking a dude off by a supervisor.
So at Amazon, they have an hourly production quota, that's the "rate" you always hear about. X number of units processed per hour. They also have a metric called "time off-task" or TOT for short, which tracks the amount of time that passes between actions that change inventory status. Too much time between actions (five minutes), you acquire TOT; too much TOT in a single day, and you're written up or fired outright. Unless you're in certain roles or processing certain types of items, rate is actually pretty easy to hit; TOT is what kills you, because there are lots of different reasons one might get TOT without it being their fault.
So, the chick who was sucking a dude off right there plain as day. She was fired -- for being off-task sucking dick for money. The dude that got sucked off didn't get shit done to him.
Then there was a couple who was caught fucking in a gaylord on top of a bunch of inventory. Both of them were actually fired, not for the fucking I suspect but for the fact they had to hazmat liquidate all the inventory they were fucking on due to bodily fluids.
One of the other jobs I worked there was inventory control. Meaning we had scanners and went around checking to see if shit's where it's supposed to be according to the system. We also had to deal with damaged goods and were the first point of contact on potential thefts, which we sent on to loss prevention.
Just about every peak, near the top of stolen inventory were sex toys. Vibrators, dildos, butt plugs, cock rings, bondage gear, you name it, if it could be smuggled out inside an orifice it was. Never stopped being funny, especially when you ran into a case of theft of one of the really niche, really fucked up sex toys Amazon sells.
Speaking of, there was one time when all the magnifying glasses myself and my colleagues used to read tiny labels, inspect very small and detailed jewelry, and the like disappeared. Completely. Around the same time we found a rogue clear glass butt plug the size of a coke bottle, and if you held it just right you could use it as a magnifying glass. So we used a monster butt plug for three months as an improvised magnifying glass because management wouldn't provide us proper replacements, or try to figure out who stole ours (another department raided our shit overnight because they broke theirs being speds).
Women's underwear was a big theft item, too. You gotta figure, high end lingerie came in singles packages no bigger than your thumb and it was the easiest thing in the world to disappear an $80-100 pair, with no one the wiser for how slapdash inventory management really was if you're not being exceptional about how you do it. I never did it, never would have done it, just pointing out why lingerie was a big theft item.
At one point we had a serial panty thief. She'd strip down right there in the aisle, take her nasty-ass old dirty panties off, put the panties she aimed to steal on, then trash the old ones or even put them back in the inventory bins.
So, Amazon -- well, Integrity staffing solutions, the sub-contractor they used to use to produce labor for which they didn't have to provide time-off or insurance -- loved to put help wanted ads up in the local methadone clinics for peak. If you have a pulse and can pass a spit test, you're in indeed.
One of Amazon's other little tricks to make up for labor shortcomings is what they call "CamperForce". Basically, itinerant workers who live in RV's and work part-time, seasonal, and/or travel to where work is requested. Most CamperForce workers are retirees who live out of RV's. Apparently, from what I've heard from Amazon CamperForce workers, they have a strong representation in the itinerant swinger community.
So at Amazon, they have an hourly production quota, that's the "rate" you always hear about. X number of units processed per hour. They also have a metric called "time off-task" or TOT for short, which tracks the amount of time that passes between actions that change inventory status. Too much time between actions (five minutes), you acquire TOT; too much TOT in a single day, and you're written up or fired outright. Unless you're in certain roles or processing certain types of items, rate is actually pretty easy to hit; TOT is what kills you, because there are lots of different reasons one might get TOT without it being their fault.
So, the chick who was sucking a dude off right there plain as day. She was fired -- for being off-task sucking dick for money. The dude that got sucked off didn't get shit done to him.
Then there was a couple who was caught fucking in a gaylord on top of a bunch of inventory. Both of them were actually fired, not for the fucking I suspect but for the fact they had to hazmat liquidate all the inventory they were fucking on due to bodily fluids.
One of the other jobs I worked there was inventory control. Meaning we had scanners and went around checking to see if shit's where it's supposed to be according to the system. We also had to deal with damaged goods and were the first point of contact on potential thefts, which we sent on to loss prevention.
Just about every peak, near the top of stolen inventory were sex toys. Vibrators, dildos, butt plugs, cock rings, bondage gear, you name it, if it could be smuggled out inside an orifice it was. Never stopped being funny, especially when you ran into a case of theft of one of the really niche, really fucked up sex toys Amazon sells.
Speaking of, there was one time when all the magnifying glasses myself and my colleagues used to read tiny labels, inspect very small and detailed jewelry, and the like disappeared. Completely. Around the same time we found a rogue clear glass butt plug the size of a coke bottle, and if you held it just right you could use it as a magnifying glass. So we used a monster butt plug for three months as an improvised magnifying glass because management wouldn't provide us proper replacements, or try to figure out who stole ours (another department raided our shit overnight because they broke theirs being speds).
Women's underwear was a big theft item, too. You gotta figure, high end lingerie came in singles packages no bigger than your thumb and it was the easiest thing in the world to disappear an $80-100 pair, with no one the wiser for how slapdash inventory management really was if you're not being exceptional about how you do it. I never did it, never would have done it, just pointing out why lingerie was a big theft item.
At one point we had a serial panty thief. She'd strip down right there in the aisle, take her nasty-ass old dirty panties off, put the panties she aimed to steal on, then trash the old ones or even put them back in the inventory bins.
So, Amazon -- well, Integrity staffing solutions, the sub-contractor they used to use to produce labor for which they didn't have to provide time-off or insurance -- loved to put help wanted ads up in the local methadone clinics for peak. If you have a pulse and can pass a spit test, you're in indeed.
One of Amazon's other little tricks to make up for labor shortcomings is what they call "CamperForce". Basically, itinerant workers who live in RV's and work part-time, seasonal, and/or travel to where work is requested. Most CamperForce workers are retirees who live out of RV's. Apparently, from what I've heard from Amazon CamperForce workers, they have a strong representation in the itinerant swinger community.
