6. Employees Are Timed To Complete Tasks
Who knew that working at Amazon could be like competing in a never-ending cycle of Crystal Maze challenges, except nowhere near as fun because there's no Richard O'Brien around to play the harmonica and tell amusing anecdotes about his mother? According to a undercover reporter, Adam Littler, who got a job in the Amazon warehouse in Swansea, Wales, though, there's a sense of questionable urgency associated with completing a number of tasks...
to the point where some employees are actually timed by machines. For those workers employed as "pickers" (whose job is to move around an 80,000 square foot warehouse, collecting items), handsets designate tasks, and then proceed to time them - sometimes allotting them just 33 seconds. "We are machines, we are robots... we plug our scanner in, we're holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves," said Little, who also claimed that the handset would beep if a mistake was made. Does said beep signify a message being sent to the overlords in GPS tower, hidden by keeping track of everything?