[Applejinx]

If being pilloried for that kind of management behavior costs Amazon sales and effectiveness, it's a weakness that must be stamped out exactly as much as it has to.

Progress is a loaded word. If you said that Amazon has been doing serious optimization on that stuff, I'd call that more accurate. Bear in mind that part of the pressure is 'don't get PR-worthy nosebleeds or have to pee all the time'; in no way is this an effort to make workers comfortable or complacent.

It's just that having people fall over dead, or getting punished for nosebleeds, or pissing in bottles to make quota, are such bad PR that they have to be optimized away. You can't go THAT hard. There's a limit to how hard you can push before it starts to look bad, so you end up having to be just as grimly competitive about the details of work environment.

Anyone thinking Amazon is trying to maximize worker suffering is a fool: there's a point where it becomes a liability, and they will optimize until it's just on the safe side of 'horror story'.