Dear American Workers considering applying for the annual hiring glut Amazon goes through for the Christmas Blackout:

Please read this missive from oft-remembered years gone by (AKA sometime in the mid 2010s)

It sounds like Amazon is terrible to work for too

Oh boy howdy if you knew what kind of an understatement that is.

First off, if you're in the 90% of Amazon Associates that work in the warehouses, get ready to jump through the Integrity Staffing Solutions LLC hoop. Welcome to the world of Subcontracted Hiring, where you begin at part-time with no benefits because you technically aren't an Amazon employee. Shifts are 12 hours, no budge. You're expected to take what hours you are given and basically act as if you're on-call 24/7 on the off-chance that a surge puts your warehouse into pseudo-blackout and they start calling in anybody that hasn't worked 40 on the week yet. But this doesn't even scratch the surface on how Holidays are handled: Hard blackout means 14-16 hour shifts (depending on how close to Christmas you are), dangerously crowded picking floors, packing floor running as fast as possible, and no formal breaks. You take your break in-place (i.e. find a spot that's not in anybody else's way and collapse for 15 minutes.) All this time you are being hammered with the "move up to an Amazon Associate!" line, where they tell you 15% of blackout workers will be asked back as Amazon Associates during the January wind-down. What they don't tell you is that Integrity Staffing will use every dirty trick in the book to axe the other 75% of workers by February. I got laid off because, for three days in a row after Blackout, i clocked in from lunch when the clock said 12:00. That is, I was technically over my 30-minute lunch break by seconds. This is compared to Holiday Blackout, where all time clock infractions are basically ignored if they're within ten minutes. How did I find out I was laid off? I came in for my next shift and found out they had deactivated my badge. I couldn't even enter the building.

Fuck Amazon. They're a garbage employer.