I find the descriptions of distribution and shipping jobs sound very familiar. Those are the exact environments I saw in the late '60s on the assembly line at Texas Instruments. My wife worked there for about a year putting the labels on transistors. She sat in front of a noisy machine all night, either setting up the label or feeding transistors into the machine. There were strict breaks, lunch times, and just tedious work where you were evaluated almost entirely on the quantity of work. I've never been in an electrical assembly environment that changed all that much from the TI model. When I worked building F-16s in the '90s, the harness fabrication and electronics assembly jobs were still very tedious and dull with demanding hours and limited freedoms. There were more machines doing automated testing and even stuffing boards with components, but anywhere there were manual jobs, the environment was restrictive and demanding. I don't know for sure, but my guess is if you are on the assembly line at GM or Ford, you'll also have to stay right there on the job and meet quotas.
My youngest daughter works in the distribution center for GameStop, the video game retailer. The work is cold in winter and hot in the summer with a steady stream of trucks coming and going constantly. That's just the nature of a distribution center. I suspect UPS, FedEx, and other shippers are under similar stresses. It just goes with the territory. Frankly, the only job I ever had that I never worried about losing or being part of a layoff was the US Navy.
