Granted I can only give you a sample size of one, but during the downturn, things got pretty bad in a number of ways, mostly in that staffing was severely restricted and pressure was put on production to produce a lot with only a few people. That also leads to having to work at an unsustainable pace.

High turnover and having lots of temps to try and make things work, even semi-permanent temps, is generally the norm as far as I can tell. And yes, it can really screw with production. Lots of people who don't know what they're doing is always hard to deal with.

So yeah, I think it was the downturn that led to people getting treated like crap, but maybe Amazon really is worse than most. I've never been there, so I don't know. I can tell you that when you have lots of temps, you will see people getting fired all the time for screwing up or slacking off. Some of them even deserve it.