For many years, I was a worker at an Amazon warehouse outside Poznan, Poland. At the start of each working day, we were greeted by the corporation’s motto, written on the warehouse wall: “Work hard. Have fun. Make history.” By day’s end, the motto appeared to us not just ironic, but cruel. Treated like robots and managed by unforgiving algorithms, Amazon workers are denigrated, intimidated, and exploited to breaking point.

Then, this September, my colleague Dariusz died in our Poznan warehouse. He had been arguing with the manager about his heavy workload when he began to feel enormous pain in his heart. But despite his condition, a medic was never called, and Dariusz had to go through the warehouse on his own to get to health responders. It was too late.

In my role as health and safety officer, I’d tried to monitor the company’s behavior toward workers like Dariusz, and other cases where management failed to help suffering workers. But for my efforts to hold the corporation accountable, Amazon fired me. It seems that workers like Dariusz and me don’t fit in the version of “history” that Jeff Bezos would like to write.