But six months after the warehouse’s opening, I am writing to tell you that it is not, in fact, “human free.” While it’s true that Amazon has automated much of the process of sorting, distributing and delivering goods and eliminated much of the repetitive and backbreaking work it once took to do all of those things, the work of human employees is a necessary part of the facility’s operations. By insinuating otherwise, Amazon is disempowering and even endangering those employees. I know, because I’m one of them.

I have worked at this “human free” facility since it opened, performing maintenance on its fleet of robots when they need repairs. I am part of what Amazon refers to as its “contingency network”: the third-party contracting companies that hire human workers to keep the automated facility running. Each of these companies categorizes workers like myself as independent contractors, so they don’t have to pay for health care coverage, time off or workers’ compensation insurance.

We are the technicians who repair the machines when they break down. The janitors who clean up the messes the robots make when other robots can’t do the cleaning or when management decides it would be cheaper or faster for a human to do the task instead. The programmers who fix glitches in the logistics software. And, yes, the pickers who help their robotic counterparts find the right items by hand when the robotic arms get jammed.

Working in a supposedly automated warehouse is hard, lonely and often unsettling. Because of the employment structure — or, rather, the lack of one — there are no managers or authority figures employed by Amazon on-site. Instead, we are under continuous video surveillance, so we receive guidance from off-site supervisors through a text system on our devices while we work. Sometimes I’ll see only a few other workers scattered around the site; other times it seems as if there are hundreds. After all, a lot can go wrong with six million square feet of automated systems.

For instance, a human being later had to remove the bits of Mr. Bezos’s broken champagne bottle from that oversize autonomous vacuum cleaner. One of my colleagues, who was working on the first “contingency crew,” told me all about fishing tiny slivers of glass out of a constricted opening in the bot’s ancillary tube duct — and he has the scars from the deep cuts on his palm to prove it.