My family member has been working at an auto plant for over a decade now. She does not seem depressed. She is grateful for the job (had to use personal connections to get it) and would be scared of the thought of robots replacing her.
Agree. Everyone has some version of their own hell. Somewhere out there.
First, it seems like they have optimized every last detail to the point where people are robbed of their individuality. If your wrist watch tells you when to pee, that leaves traces not just in your underwear, but in your psyche.
Second, traditional blue-collar work came with a social support network, build-in. There was a sense of belonging that can be described as anything from “class consciousness” to just the typical camaraderie of working a job, any job, with the same team for years. Amazon actively works against this when, for example, working against the formation of unions. They also inadvertently prevent it through their reliance on temporary work, and rapidly changing assignments, work procedures, etc.
I kinda feel like you are comparing highly paid, often unionized factories with Amazon. Of course Amazon will come up short.
But when I read, say, about how modern chicken processing plants work, Amazon doesn't sound so horrible.
Here's the 2017 list of worst OSHA violations; Amazon doesn't appear on it.
https://www.safetyandhealthmagazine.com/articles/16362-oshas...
Frederick Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management[1] was very popular 100 years ago, and included things like time and motion studies[2] which served to optimize processes as much as possible and remove individual variations as much as possible. The whole point was pretty much to make every worker a replaceable cog in the industrial machine.
I'd argue that this is actually pretty much what happened - and as the abilities of robots and other forms of automation grew, it was easy to replace humans because so much of the work had already been precisely measured and systematized.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Principles_of_Scientific_M... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study
What I basically found out trying to "retire early" is that there are the "high" paying career jobs in offices and everything else is $10-$15/hr. crap work. There is barely anything in between, mirroring what is happening to the middle class--it is being hollowed out so that there will only be rich and poor and nothing else. Places like Mexico are already like this. It is sad and completely avoidable, but oligarchs and autocrats don't want it that way.
So revolution it will be. Only a matter of time and hunger.