By August 2010, America had supposedly recovered from the Great Recession. But the unemployment rate in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley was near- ing double digits, and anyone who suffered losses had no tangible evidence that an economic recovery had ever taken place. Only one job opening was available for every five seekers, so the career counselors who coached applicants were irrelevant as they attempted to convince us that we were free agents capable of landing our dream job if only we chose the most effective resume format and mastered the art of “personal branding” to stand out among the competition.

A major new employer had recently arrived in the Lehigh Valley and its timing could not have been more opportune. It was agreed that the state would not introduce legislation requiring this e-commerce pioneer to collect sales tax from Pennsylvania residents because we desperately needed the jobs it promised to bring.

Integrity Staffing Solutions (ISS) launched a sustained advertising blitz to recruit temporary laborers to staff Amazon’s new Breinigsville, Pennsylvania fulfillment center (a warehouse) throughout the upcoming holiday season and beyond. Billboards and postcards invited residents of downtrodden neighborhoods in the Lehigh Valley and surrounding areas to apply. The positions paid up to $12.75 an hour and offered full-time work with possible overtime. I completed an online application, printed out my resume on fancy almond linen paper, and visited the ISS office.

Although I’d resisted staffing agencies for as long as I could, I was respectful when I visited ISS because it offered compensation that topped what the other staffing agencies had advertised; and I liked Amazon.com. Amazon delivered nearly-impossible-to-find titles to my door, and I didn’t know it sold anything other than books at the time. I imagined myself surrounded by books when I first visited ISS and knew nothing about the actual job that I was to be assigned. I merely had to pass drug, background, and basic skills tests, and was stunned when they told me I’d start working the night shift as an order picker the following week for $12.75 an hour. They never looked at my resume. It was too easy.

I soon discovered that, despite its technological prowess, Amazon is a labor-intensive operation that sells just about everything imaginable. Receivers catalog inbound inventory; stowers place items on shelves; pickers receive rapid-fire orders through hand-held scanners and place items in plastic totes that are steered around on carts; the totes are placed on conveyer belts and sent to packers; the items are boxed, labeled, and conveyed to shippers. Amazon’s Lehigh Valley center is more than six hundred thousand square feet and multi-tiered. Merchandise is stored in “mods.” There are three floors on the east end of the warehouse, and three on the west; each floor is roughly the size of a football field and it takes roughly five minutes to walk from one mod to the other. Narrow aisles are numbered and shelving units are divided into scannable bins, with each bin holding random merchandise. I scanned thousands of barcodes a night. Everything had a barcode—even me. My labor was tracked through a barcode printed on a white (to denote temporary status) ID badge that hung from a lanyard I wore around my neck.

I walked approximately ten to fifteen miles a night while I worked, the warehouse was stifling hot, and there wasn’t any fresh air to breathe. It had to be pushing 110 degrees on the third floor and, in a fog of confusion, I’d be unable to tell if the numbers and letters were going up or down; or I’d read “twenty-eight” instead of “eighty-two” and walk to the wrong location. When I had to lower myself into a bottom bin and rise again, I’d stagger a little, drop the item in the tote on my cart, and look at my scanner. “Go to P3-G578-D251” it might say, and I’d scurry.

People came from all over. Laid-off teachers, recent high-school graduates, struggling students, and debt-laden college graduates; former managers, construction workers, electricians, and skilled laborers—veterans, immigrants, rural and urban poor (all disenfranchised)—were hungry for a job, any job, with many commuting an hour each way to earn a meager paycheck and a shot at full-time employment with Amazon. Mandatory overtime was casually referenced upon hire and we soon started working fifty-five to sixty hours a week. Management grew increasingly despotic and the worst among them barked and hollered and carried on in ways that I have never experienced in any other workplace. They’d sometimes enter the break room up to five minutes before break ended and start herding us back to the floor. I consistently exceeded the 125-unit-per-hour target rate and was made an “Ambassador.” I was a temp assigned to train the hundreds of temps that were descending upon us daily. Every warehouse job function can be learned in a few hours and we were disposable unskilled laborers, treated accordingly. Everything was non-negotiable.

Peak season officially started in November and, during this “blackout” period, any absence was inexcusable. Doctor’s notes were not accepted. Our schedules were changed to suit management’s needs and single mothers struggled with this most. If an employee accrued six demerit points, his or her assignment was terminated. We could also be written up if we did not adhere to bizarre safety standards. Pickers could be written up if they were caught steering their cart with one hand or holding their scanner while they were pushing the cart. Workers could not be hired after one minor write-up and were indiscriminately let go.

Managers happily referred to us as Santa’s elves at standup meetings. They realized the promise of full-time regular employment would get us to strain harder through the exhaustion, and the coveted blue badge (blue to denote Amazon status) was regularly dangled in our faces. Management effectively pitted worker against worker in a struggle to survive and there was pain on people’s faces as they pushed through fifty-five-hour weeks. Pickers could be seen rolling their eyes and giving another picker a knowing look as they passed each other in the aisles; some would raise their scanners to their temples and mime the pulling of a trigger.

I did not have time to speak to family or friends during peak season, much less celebrate the holidays. My sister phoned after a local news station reported that an Amazon employee set fire to a shelving unit while we were working. The building was evacuated and, if we wanted to keep our jobs, we were forced to stand outside in sub-freezing temperatures for more than two hours, most of us wearing only t-shirts and shorts. I told my sister not to worry and went back to sleep.

Christmas Day passed and we waited to be hired by Amazon. There was conflicting information about the hiring promises. Several temps were told by ISS representatives that around 80 percent of us would be hired, and managers regularly said it would be a “significant number.” January passed and nobody was hired. The Lehigh Valley was blanketed in a series of early-February snowstorms and I missed too many shifts and accumulated more than six demerit points. I returned to work the first day I could get back, walked into the ISS office on Amazon’s premises, and a representative told me my assignment was terminated. I quietly felt relieved. I suffered a chronic dry hacking cough the entire season, was exhausted, and craved sunshine.

On July 23, 2011, Spencer Soper of Lehigh Valley’s Morning Call newspaper published an article titled: “You’re hired…no wait you’re not.” Communication errors led applicants to mistakenly believe they were offered ISS jobs at Amazon; some quit other jobs and were later told they were not needed. I immediately composed an e-mail message to Soper imploring him to further investigate Amazon’s labor practices. He later contacted me by phone and I trusted him immediately because of the questions he asked. I decided to return to Amazon as an ISS temp to work the upcoming peak season, and requested anonymity in Soper’s article. I had been receiving messages from ISS telling me they’d gladly take me back—you’re allowed to return after three months of punitive leave, and they’re so smugly certain that you will. I have never met any of Soper’s other informants and wasn’t aware of the scope of his investigation. I certainly did not expect the story to go viral.

I returned in late August and the pick manag- ers were worse than before. Amazon rotates its managers regularly and my new managers did not know about my previous stint. I was called to the pick desk on two occasions because they noticed I had not scanned an item’s barcode in the minutes leading up to break, and I was accused of cutting off the floor early to get to break. I asked if he’d looked at my rate—I was averaging 150 units per hour and we were haggling over minutes. He answered, “Well, then we’re just losing more when you decide to leave a minute early.” He added, “If you don’t like our policies you’re free to leave.” I’d heard that one before and I just shook my head. “I’ve got a metal rod in my leg,” I pleaded. Security is tight and we had to pass through metal detectors to exit the floor, so I lost precious break minutes every time I set off the detectors and had to wait to have a guard run a wand up and down my body as I stood with my arms up and legs spread. My manager softened. “You’ve got metal in you, now we’re talking. I’ve got metal throughout my body.” Amazon actively recruits ex-military personnel to manage their warehouses and I wondered if he was an “Amazon Warrior.” The company is praised for this while it’s really just more of the same for the veteran—they’re overworked, undercompensated, and subjected to endless hostilities. I never envied my managers’ positions because they clearly suffered under tremendous corporate pressure.

Soper’s bombshell expose, “Inside Amazon’s Warehouse” ran on September 18, 2011. When I arrived to work that day I overheard workers spiritedly chatting about the story. A production assistant announced that our managers were in Seattle for “training” and some pickers let out cheers, hoots, and hollers. The military- management types were later sent upstairs to work behind the scenes, and less belligerent managers were brought in and they thanked us for our hard work. Corporate eventually lowered our target rates and a strange new silence fell over the place; workers were compliant and I hardly heard any complaints. Nobody dared mention a union, except me. I tried, and several workers later refused to sit next to me at lunch. The only union proposals I witnessed were scrawled on the unisex bathroom walls located in the remote corners of the mods.

Amazon lessened its reliance upon temp labor and I was included in a group of ISS temps who were offered full-time regular employment (a blue badge) with Amazon in October. I enjoyed modest privileges as a blue badge, and outsiders could now visit the fulfillment center at the beginning of a shift and think it wasn’t such a bad place to work. Ironically, I perceived work conditions to be even more unbearable when operations were running smoothly and we weren’t subjected to flagrant abuses. The skeptics among us never trusted Amazon’s gestures.

The Morning Call ran follow-up stories that detailed former Amazon customers’ pledges to boycott. “Almost 13,000 boycott Amazon.com,” the Morning Call reported, after more than 12,600 people signed an American Rights at Work pledge. The stories provoked fierce online labor debates and I followed the discussion boards closely. In the spirit of the season, Amazon introduced a “price-comparison app” and encouraged Amazon customers to serve as stealthy retail spies for a $5 discount. Bricks and mortar stores trembled, retail competition appeared more cutthroat than ever, and Amazon’s empire expands every day.

The media hailed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos shortly after Steve Jobs’s death, propping him up as some sort of visionary, quasi-spiritual leader. Forbes gushed over my billionaire boss as tens of thousands of workers quietly suffered inside his soulless warehouses for subsistence-level wages. Bezos once said that Amazon workers don’t need a union because we own the company and several Amazon unionization attempts were summarily squashed. If I worked at Amazon for two years I’d be entitled to eight shares of stock. My Amazon “ownership” felt more like an insult. I’m exploiting myself, I thought. The shareholder in me said, “Drive down operating costs!” But as a worker, I knew it wasn’t fair—we earned more than we took home.

I waited for the ideal opportunity to quit Amazon for good. I wanted to release myself from the confidentiality agreement I signed upon being hired directly by Amazon, so I could speak about my experience. My apartment was broken into and my MacBook was stolen. This happened while revelations about Apple’s labor abuses at its Foxconn facility were surfacing, and I was actually glad to be rid of the thing. I went to work after the break-in, couldn’t concentrate, and wanted to go home. I told my manager the story, asked to be dismissed, and called off the next few nights to accrue enough demerit points to secure my termination. I knew I’d never go back there again, and now I purchase books online through socially-responsible sites with sustainable business models.