SEATTLE — Amazon surprised its warehouse staff throughout the country today with the announcement of a mandatory 22-hour warehouse shift to commemorate Labor Day, exhausted employees have confirmed.
“Labor Day honors the sacrifices made by workers for better pay, safety, and quality of life, and since our dedicated warehouse staff loves to bring that crap up constantly, we thought there’d be no better way to commemorate the day than forcing them all to work a 22-hour shift. Think of it as a team-building experience but with minimal breaks,” said warehouse manager Kelly Stanton. “They’ll get a few extra bucks in their paychecks, plus they’ll already be in the building for when their next shift starts. I mean it’s called Labor Day, why not get a little extra labor out of everyone so I can get a nice fat bonus come Q4?”
Warehouse staff were slow to embrace their employer’s interpretation of the holiday.
“We all just got a text from our boss to pop in for a Labor Day celebration, and the next thing we knew security was locking the doors from the outside and said we couldn’t leave until the holiday was over. You gotta help me, they confiscated our phones and I haven’t eaten in 15 hours,” said order picker Sheldon Wallace through six rows of barbed wire. “They even took our piss jugs away to ensure we’re ‘commemorating the holiday in the spirit of Amazon’s values’. Is this all because we asked for a dollar-an-hour raise? God, I’m beginning to forget what the sun looks like.”
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos ruminated on the true meaning of Labor Day.
“Hmph. Another holiday for the peasants, how quaint. If they want a day off to feel good about celebrating the working class building this country then they can work somewhere which doesn’t share our ambition for controlling the world,” said Bezos. “They should feel lucky to work almost an entire day without stopping, as a testament to how much of their blood, sweat, and many tears drive shareholder value. They can have the day off to grill when I replace them all with robots, once the damned things stop self-terminating mid-shift.”
Amazon announced the Labor Day celebrations would continue with an involuntary 72 hour marathon viewing of anti-union training videos.