Looking at this story (the wider Amazon story) it seems to me a lot of the value is getting extracted from employees in a sort of creeping way.
So you might go to an interview where the manager says there's pager duty now and again, but it's not too intense. You get on the job, and it's a whole lot more intense than expected. You can't leave because you've just turned down a bunch of other offers and moved towns. You adjust to delivering maybe 25% more work hours than you thought. The company might do better hiring a colleague for you, but they don't, so you lose out on free time while all the benefits of your increased production goes to shareholders.
There's no recourse for this, and management knows it. They can hire people and make them work harder than they've been told, as long as it's within the range where a sensible number of people won't be looking for other jobs. At the same time, you have great reputation (well maybe that's changing) so there's a queue of fools applying to get in.
So you might go to an interview where the manager says there's pager duty now and again, but it's not too intense. You get on the job, and it's a whole lot more intense than expected. You can't leave because you've just turned down a bunch of other offers and moved towns. You adjust to delivering maybe 25% more work hours than you thought. The company might do better hiring a colleague for you, but they don't, so you lose out on free time while all the benefits of your increased production goes to shareholders.
There's no recourse for this, and management knows it. They can hire people and make them work harder than they've been told, as long as it's within the range where a sensible number of people won't be looking for other jobs. At the same time, you have great reputation (well maybe that's changing) so there's a queue of fools applying to get in.