TIME

WHEN HUMANS BECOME ROBOTS

A group of workers with their fists raised in solidarity hold a scrawled sign: “We are humans not robots!” They and others at an Amazon warehouse in Minnesota protested in March and on July’s Amazon Prime Days. They were speaking against the day-to-day dehumanizing reality of their workplace.
Workers protest at an Amazon fulfillment center in Minnesota on March 8

If your only interaction with Amazon is packages arriving on your doorstep, it can be hard to understand what workers are unhappy about, or why one described his fulfillment center as an “existential sh-thole,” or why so many others shared stories about crying at work.

I’m among them. I took a job in an Amazon fulfillment center in Indiana over a few weeks—along with a call center in North Carolina

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