The moment you hit that “Place Your Order” button, a chain reaction sparks, sending a team of warehouse workers and delivery drivers into the frenzy of activity to get your package to your door before the end of the day.

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For those of us sitting at home at our computers, Amazon is one of the modern world’s great luxuries — but for the people who make up the cogs of the machine that make it possible, it’s a grueling push in sweatshop-like conditions that wreak havoc on their bodies and their health.

Amazon has been called one of the worst places to work in America—but to see just how bad it really is, we took a deep dive into life is like working inside one of their warehouses.

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Inside of an Amazon warehouse, it’s sink or swim. Amazon wants its workers to be as productive as their colleagues—and they’re not afraid to fire them if they fall behind.

Their employees track their work with scanners—not unlike the ones you see in grocery stores—that are equipped with a program called “ADAPT”. It tracks how many items they’re scanning, and if you pause even for a second, it tracks it and pushes into an algorithm that can get you fired.

On average, employees are expected to scan a new item every 11 seconds — which adds up to more than 300 items an hour. If you take a break—even to go to the bathroom—the machine starts adding up your “time off task”, and if it gets too high, you’re gone.

Warehouse workers say they’ve seen colleagues who gave five years of their lives to the company sent packing because of their numbers.

So how many people get fired by ADAPT? One warehouse was forced to report its numbers during a lawsuit, and their figures are staggering. That one warehouse alone had let their efficiency program fire 300 full-time employees in a single year.^[1]

9 Workers Pee In Bottles And Trash Cans

When pausing your work for a second can cost you your job, taking a bathroom break can be career suicide. It’s especially bad if you’re nowhere near a toilet — and so some Amazon workers have admitted that, to keep their jobs, they pee in bottles and trash cans.

Not everyone’s willing to take those kinds of drastic measures, but the people who hold it in suffer in their own ways. Some have admitted that they don’t drink a drop of water for their entire 10-hour, physically-demanding shift, while others have held it so much that they’ve developed urinary tract infections.

Delivery drivers are pushed just as hard. They have to deliver so many packages that some have admitted that, to make their orders in time, they defecate in their delivery vans.

Others just speed.

“I had to, the way it was designed. You’re going to have to do that,” one Amazon delivery driver told the press after admitting to driving 120 mph to finish his route before nightfall. “I had a few crashes… but not bad crashes.”^[2]

8 Amazon Workers Get Injured At 4X The Normal Rate

As high as the risk of getting fired might be in an Amazon warehouse, the risk of getting injured is even higher. One warehouse has reported having 422 injuries in a single year — which is more than 4X the industry average.

Amazon’s high injury rate is directly linked to their intense quotas. Demands on workers are so high that many don’t see any way to meet them without taking short cuts — and so basic safety guidelines are ignored just to get those packages out faster.

But in an Amazon warehouse, getting injured is no excuse for taking a break. That’s why their factories come equipped with vending machines that dispense free pain medication to anyone with a work badge, so you can pop a few pills and get to work.

One worker admitted to a reporter that she’s started “popping [Advil] like candy” because of the aches all over her body. It’s probably unhealthy — but before she started popping pills, she says that she’d end up in such horrible pain that she’s collapse onto the warehouse floor and cry.

Another worker, whose on-the-job injuries have left her bulging discs, back sprain, joint inflammation, and chronic pain put it like this:

“I’m still too young to feel like I’m 90 years old.”^[3]

7 A Man Having A Heart Attack Wasn’t Given Help For 25 Minutes

When Thomas Becker had a heart attack in an Amazon warehouse in 2017, he begged his colleagues: “Do not let me die.”

But they did.

His coworkers immediately called their supervisors and asked them to call 9-1-1 for help, but the Amazon warehouse’s management was more concerned about the security of their building than they were about the man who was dying on their concrete floor.

Management demanded everyone present give them their personal information, including their social security numbers and dates of birth, before they called for help.

In the meantime, nothing was done to help Becker. There were defibrillator boxes around the warehouse that could have saved his life — if they defibrillators in them. But instead, they were empty, just pasted onto the wall for show, and so nobody could do anything for him until the emergency responders arrived.

It took 25 minutes for anyone to call 9-1-1 — and when they did, management refused to let them in through the loading dock door that would have brought them directly to Becker. Instead, they had security question the responders at the door, then walked them the long way through the facility, adding another 7 minutes to their response time.

By the time someone finally reached Becker, he’d already stopped breathing.^[4]

6 Amazon Had 6 Deaths In A Year

Becker’s death wasn’t a one-off incident. Two years later, another worker had a heart attack — and once again, the Amazon team left him dying on the floor for 20 minutes before doing anything to help.

Between Nov. 2018 and Nov. 2019, the company had 6 deaths within its warehouses, and they’ve managed to brush off the blame for every one.

The only time they were ever even briefly charged for an employee’s death was after an Indiana worker named Phillip Lee Terry was crushed to death by a forklift in 2017. Terry was a former marketer with no experience with heavy machinery, but when he got a job at Amazon, he was almost immediately put in charge of riding and repairing forklifts.

He was given no training. A co-worker gave him brief, verbal instructions, but that was done entirely off-the-record. Terry didn’t know the proper safety precautions required to work on a forklift — and so, when trying to repair one, he ended up crushed by a 1,200-pound metal platform.

Courts briefly ruled that Amazon was at fault, and, for Terry’s death, fined the company — which had made $72.4 billion in profit that year — $28,000.

But even that was brushed aside. Amazon appealed to Gov. Eric Holcomb, who was trying to convince them to bring their next headquarters to Indiana, and — hoping to lure in their business—he waived the fine and absolved them of all blame.^[5]

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5 Amazon Robots Have Sprayed Workers With Bear Repellent Multiple Times

An Amazon warehouse made national news in Dec. of 2018 when a robot punctured a bear repellent can, spraying every employee within range with a type of mace meant to be used on a 600-pound beast.

50 workers got sick, 24 of whom were sent to the hospital and one of whom was brought into intensive care. It was horrifying — but as reporters started looking into it, they quickly realized that it wasn’t even the first time it had happened.

Earlier the same year, another bear repellent can had been dropped to another Amazon warehouse floor, once again exploding and spraying an entire team. And a few years before that, a robot had sprayed its colleagues by running over yet another can of bear repellent.

That’s three times in just a couple of years that a factory full of Amazon workers just trying to make a paycheck got bear spray in their eyes — and every time, it was because of a robot that just wasn’t programmed to be careful enough.^[6]

4 Amazon’s Pickers Walk 20 Miles A Day

“Stowers” and “Pickers” — the people who collect the merchandise and bring it to the conveyor belts for packaging — have to do a lot of walking. In fact, it’s pretty normal for them to walk up to 20 miles a day.

Amazon’s tried to sell that as a positive. They even have a training video in which an employee boasts that she’s lost 20 pounds from all the walking — but for the workers, it’s not exactly fun. Most of the walking is done on concrete floors, leaving employees in so worn down that they tend to rely on the pain meds in those vending machines to get through a day.

“I feel like I’ve been hit by a garbage truck,” one worker told a reporter, before admitting that she takes a minimum of four pain pills a day.

Amazon’s defense is that they’re trying to do away with these jobs and replace them with robots — but the statistics show that the robots just make things worse. In factories that have robot stowers and pickers, the employees packaging are forced to put through items three to four times as quickly, putting intense strain on their bodies.

Keeping up with the robots is even more brutal than all that walking — and, as a result, injury rates are even higher in Amazon factories that use robots.^[7]

3 Workers Put In Mandatory 60-Hour Weeks

During the off-season, Amazon workers have fairly normal hours. They usually put in four 10-hour shifts each week, giving them a standard 40-hour work-week. But when the holidays come, work becomes nothing short of brutal.

From mid-November to the end of Christmas, Amazon workers are required to do mandatory overtime, working 60 hours a week.

There’s no way out of it. The warehouses put a freeze on time off requests when the holidays come near, and anyone who tries to call in sick can get fired for taking too much unpaid time off.

Injuries skyrocket during these holiday rushes, according to an independent study of Amazon’s injury claims. The workers are pushed so hard and given so little time to rest that their bodies just can’t handle the strain.

“It’s like doing 11 1/2 hours of cardio five days a week,” one worker has said. “You’re going up and down stairs, squatting down, getting on your knees, getting back up.”

“For the 60-hour workweek,” another says, “you’re a slave.”^[8]

2 Amazon Workers Demonstrate Suicidal Tendencies

Reporters for the Daily Beast reviewed 9-1-1 calls from Amazon warehouse and found that, between Oct. 2013 and Oct. 2018, emergency responders were sent to Amazon warehouse to intervene in suicide attempts at least 189 times.

The key word there is “at least”. Their investigation only looked at call logs for about ¼ of Amazon’s warehouses in the US, and it didn’t look at any in other countries — and so 189 is only a small fraction of the real number.

These workers get suicidal for a wide variety of reasons, but almost every one can be traced back to Amazon’s quota system.

One call came from a woman in Florida, who said she was “going to go home and kill herself” because she’d been fired for inefficiency; another came from a man who was considering hurting himself because of “all the demands his employer has placed on him”; and a third just outright told police she was planning on either “[running] her vehicle into an 18 wheeler or cutting her throat.”

“It’s this isolating colony of hell where people having breakdowns is a regular occurrence,” one former employee told them. “[It’s] mentally taxing to do the same task super fast for 10-hour shifts, four or five days a week.”^[9]

1 Amazon’s Solution Is To Replace Everyone With Robots

So how’s Amazon going to deal with being called one of America’s worst workplaces? Simple — by firing everybody and bringing in machines.

Amazon is actively working to replace their staff with machines. They recently announced a set of robots designed to replace their packers, and they’re already planning on using them to get rid of 1,300 warehouse workers in American alone.

But that’s only the first step in a bigger plan. Down the road, Amazon’s actively looking into just replacing every single human being in the entire factory. One Amazon Director told a business magazine that the company is “10 years away” from being able to create “lights-out”, human-free warehouses.

The only reason they haven’t done it already is that the technology doesn’t exist yet.

“There’s a variety of technology that’s come out,” the Amazon director bemoaned, “but it’s not close to where we need it.”

But in another 10 years or so, all of these Amazon complaints will finally go away — because all of the workers will have been replaced by machines.^[10]

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Tesla is the most valuable automaker in the world. This is incredible considering it was founded in 2003 and released its first car in 2008. Its older and well-established rivals like General Motors Company, Daimler AG and Toyota have been in the business for decades.

However, Tesla is not your traditional carmaker. It actually created its own niche, which puts it somewhere in-between being a carmaker and a tech company. This has made it attractive to jobseekers who want to be part of something new and unique. However, as many have found out, there may be more to what meets the eye.

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10 You do not walk close to Elon Musk’s desk

This is not a written rule but is one many Tesla employees follow to the letter. Elon Musk is so infamous for impulsively firing Tesla workers at random that one manager forbade his workers from walking close to his desk whenever he is around.

Strangely enough, you do not need to commit a blunder to become Elon’s next victim. Answering an unplanned or unclear question wrongly is enough to send you back to the job market.

Some employees talked about one unfortunate engineer who was fired after finding himself at the receiving end of Musk’s tirade sometime in October 2017. The engineer was going about his business at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Nevada when a colleague told him Elon wanted to see him.

The engineer walked up to Elon who shouted at him about something that was not working. The engineer was unsure if Elon was talking about a tool or a robot. Elon Musk ignored his questions and kept using the f-word while asking if he “did it”.

When the engineer asked for further clarification, Elon Musk called him an idiot and told him to “f—k out and don’t come back”. The whole thing did not even last a minute and the engineer never knew why he was fired.^[1]

9 You only attend important meetings

Let us face it. Most employees hate meetings, especially when they are long, boring and unnecessary. You are in luck if you work at Tesla where Elon Musk has strict rules on who should attend meetings and how and why meetings are organized.

Elon Musk says meetings at Tesla should be small, brief and infrequent. According to him, a perfect meeting has between four and six attendees. It could be larger but only when necessary. However, in this case, large meetings should be brief and straight to the point.

Tesla employees are permitted to leave meetings the moment they realize their presence is irrelevant. While many employers will cringe at this and consider it rude, Elon Musk says it is actually rude to make an employee attend a meeting where their presence is not required.

So why is Elon Musk so particular about unproductive meetings? It is not about the employee but the business. Elon Musk wants his employees working at all times. So if you are not at a meeting, you had better be at your workstation.^[2]

8 You can bypass your manager

Information, in most organizations, flows through the chain of command. That is, it goes from a worker in a department to his manager, who passes it to the manager of another department who then passes it to a worker in that department. Feedback follows the same pattern too.

However, things work a bit differently at Tesla. A worker in one department can bypass his manager and the manager of the other department to speak directly with a worker in that department. This rule also applies to higher-ups including vice-presidents and Elon Musk himself.

This unique communications strategy was revealed in a memo written by Elon Musk and sent to all Tesla employees. In the memo, Elon Musk said the traditional chain of command is slow, dumb and unintelligent. According to him, information must flow quickly and easily if Tesla hopes to become successful.

Talking of success, Elon Musk added that chain of commands only make managers feel more important than they are and encouraged departments to compete against themselves, which is harmful to the success of the company. He added that managers who attempt to control the flow of information would be fired.^[3]

7 You may be sued for leaking information

As with many other large tech companies, Tesla employees have a thing for leaking private company information to the press. Tesla is fighting back by threatening leakers with dismissal and lawsuits.

Sometime in May 2019, Tesla security team sent an email to employees revealing they had fired and sued several employees for a range of offences, including sharing production data with journalists and posting private company information and phone numbers on social media.

In the email, the security team added that every worker needed to protect company information from unspecified people who wanted to see Tesla fail. However, it appears Tesla employees do not care since the email warning them against leaking company information was also leaked. That is why you are reading about it anyway.^[4]

6 You will receive low salaries

Is Tesla a car company or a tech company? This answer matters a lot especially when we want to compare its salaries to that of similar businesses.

If we consider it a tech company, then its median salary is too low. However, it we categorize it as a car company, its median salary is right in the middle of the auto industry. It is neither too high nor too low even though garbage collectors earn a bit more.

In 2020, Tesla revealed it pays its middle-skilled workers $15 an hour or $47,147 a year. However, this is an overestimation since a $15 an hour salary will be equal to $31,200 a year (if we count using the 40-hour workweek and the 52 weeks in a year). This is lower than the salary of a refuse collector who earns $19.90 an hour or $41,400 a year.^[5]

Low wages have been a recurring issue at Tesla. In 2018, the median salary of a Tesla employee was $56,163 a year. This included basic salary, bonuses and stock. In comparison, Ford’s employees earned $64,316 while General Motors workers earned $77,849.

The reality of the Tesla’s low salaries becomes clearer when we compare it to other tech giants like Facebook and Alphabet. Facebook has a median salary of $228,651 while Alphabet has a median salary of $246,804. However, many Tesla employees say they do not mind the low wages. They work at Tesla because of the challenging environment and not the money.^[6]

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5 You will work long hours

On November 26, 2018, Elon Musk tweeted “There are way easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week”. He later sent a follow-up tweet saying, “But if you love what you do, it (mostly) doesn’t feel like work”.^[7]

This statement has huge implications, one that only Tesla employees understand. In one sentence, it means Elon Musk expects Tesla’s employees to work overtime, every time. Maybe this was how Tesla arrived at the overestimated salary we talked about in the previous entry.

As any Tesla employee will tell you, everyone works long hours. This includes Elon Musk who sometimes sleeps under desks in the factory. Some employees find working long hours inspiring because it makes them push themselves to their limit. Others however, think it is a clear evidence of terrible management.^[8]

4 You get free Red Bull energy drinks

Tesla raises the standard for overworking employees. A typical shift at Tesla lasts for between 12 and 16 hours. This lasts for the entire week and sometimes, weekends, particularly during tight production deadlines. This leaves many Tesla workers so tired at the end of their shifts that they just stare into empty space as if they were zombies. Employees call this the “Tesla stare”.

So how does Tesla keep employees awake (and turn them into zombies) during long work hours and compulsory weekend shifts? It does that by giving them free cans of Red Bull energy drink of course. They gobble it down to keep them at alert. However, not everyone gets a free can. Some employees say they sometimes buy their own drinks.^[9]

3 You may pass out from stress

Tesla’s long working hours, weekend shifts, compulsory overtime and strict deadlines leaves its workers stressed. Hundreds have experienced seizures, chest pains and shortness of breath while working. Some even faint, falling on their faces and hitting their heads on the floor so hard that they end up with cuts.

As of 2017, ambulances occasionally drove into Tesla factories to transport injured workers to a hospital. However, Tesla’s managers (who are often under pressure) never stopped the assembly lines to attend to injured people. They just told other employees to keep working while the injured person remained on the floor.^[10]

2 You cannot form or join a union

Tesla employees are restricted from forming or joining a union. While this is not official Tesla policy, Tesla’s behavior indicates it does not want its workers to unionize.

For instance, on May 21, 2018, Elon Musk sent this tweet, indicating employees who unionized would lose their stock options: “Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing?”^[11]

The tweet was just one of Tesla’s many anti-union activities. It has threatened pro-union employees, fired workers for pro-union activities, stopped workers from distributing pro-union flyers to other workers and enforced a dress code to stop employees from wearing clothing with pro-union insignia.^[12]

1 You can be fired without warning

Tesla is infamous for firing its workers without warning. You could be working hard one moment and will be told your services are no longer needed the next. There is usually no hint that you are about to be laid off or that someone else on your team has been laid off.

For instance, one engineer realized his manager had been fired when he did not show up for a meeting.

Many layoffs supposedly begin as meetings and conferences. A former salesperson in Tesla’s energy division said she received an email at 1 a.m., asking her and her team to attend a video conference later that day. She was among the 250 people fired during the meeting. The layoff was indiscriminate since it affected everyone including those who met their sales quotas.

Another employee who worked on the vehicle delivery team was fired an hour after arriving work on a Monday morning. He knew something was off when three managers walked in and called a colleague into the conference room. It was unusual to see three managers together.

He only realized there was a problem when the colleague packed her stuff and left the room. He thought she was laid off for underperforming until he was invited into the room and told he was being laid off because his position was abolished. No one had told him anything about this earlier.^[13]

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