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911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

businessinsider.com

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Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

#11

Post by walrus01 »

jrnichols wrote: post #2

189 calls over a 5 year period across 46 different facilities, and the original article even notes that many of those were not work related at all. It seems to try to lean towards "Amazon warehouse jobs are causing people to think about killing themselves" but the opposite could also be said - Amazon was able to engage these same employees with suicidal ideations and get them help. Only one seems to have actually kil…

I wonder if the 911 call rate is any higher than the general non working population as a whole, sitting in private residences on couches.

189 calls / 5 years = 37.8 calls per year

37.8 calls / 46 warehouses = 0.82 calls per year, per warehouse

Now assume for a moment, this is probably a low estimate, that a single warehouse has a peak day shift population of 75 persons...

One of the things I have learned first hand, doing VoIP E911 and site address registration for E911 purposes, if you have a sufficiently large number of people (or in my case, live / on-net individual VoIP service circuits), there will be a certain statistically "normal" volume of 911 calls no matter what those people are doing.

Whether they're in a office of a company that rents two floors of a 350,000 square foot office tower in a downtown of a major city, sitting on their couches in a single family home in a suburb playing videos games on their xbox, attending a music festival, literally any imaginable human activity.

I am not trying to say that the Amazon warehouse jobs are not borderline abusive and a staff turnover meat-grinder, they probably are. Have read numerous reports from journalists that have gone "undercover" with the temp/staffing agencies Amazon uses to hire workers for their warehouses. It doesn't paint a pretty picture.

Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

#12

Post by bantunes »

jrnichols wrote: post #2

189 calls over a 5 year period across 46 different facilities, and the original article even notes that many of those were not work related at all. It seems to try to lean towards "Amazon warehouse jobs are causing people to think about killing themselves" but the opposite could also be said - Amazon was able to engage these same employees with suicidal ideations and get them help. Only one seems to have actually kil…

"It's this isolating colony of hell where people having breakdowns is a regular occurrence," former Amazon employee Jace Crouch told the Daily Beast. An anonymous employee told the Daily Beast that the company treated its workers like "robots."

Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

#13

Post by dnbdbsbs »

jrnichols wrote: post #2

189 calls over a 5 year period across 46 different facilities, and the original article even notes that many of those were not work related at all. It seems to try to lean towards "Amazon warehouse jobs are causing people to think about killing themselves" but the opposite could also be said - Amazon was able to engage these same employees with suicidal ideations and get them help. Only one seems to have actually kil…

I too am curious to see the comparison. However, Amazon is the largest public company in the world. How much more does it need to grow before employees are treated well?

Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

#14

Post by max76 »

barkingcat wrote: post #6
SolaceQuantum wrote: post #4

According to the media bias check website[1], the original reporter (The Daily Beast) has a high Factual score, meaning its literal statements are likely true, and a left-leaning bias, meaning the topics it covers will be of more interest to the leftist politics. (This post is mostly because I personally don't think business insider is particularly factual, and so did some research to validate its claims.) 1. https:/…

Who checks the purported bias checkers?

China Daily is in their "Least biased" category despite the fact that it is an English language publication owned by the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China and published by People's Republic of China. I think I have a different definition of bias as Media facts, which seems to be entirely focused on Left/Right biases.

Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

#15

Post by elfakyn »

Mtinie wrote: post #10

> The Daily Beast noted that its report was "not evidence that Amazon staffers experience suicidal episodes more often than other American workers, in or out of a warehouse." And the rate of suicide in the United States is on the rise — the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention estimated that there were 1.4 million suicide attempts in the US in 2017. I wish BI (or better yet, The Daily Beast when they ran the or…

Remember that these statistics are specifically from Amazon warehouses, and not from Amazon warehouse workers calling from home. We'd need statistics on calls from workplaces. A quick google scholar search finds suicide rates [1] in the workplace which are significantly lower than what you cite as general suicide rates. I couldn't find any data on 911 calls, so we can't really draw any statistical information from this data.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074937971...

Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

#16

Post by Spooky23 »

Mtinie wrote: post #10

> The Daily Beast noted that its report was "not evidence that Amazon staffers experience suicidal episodes more often than other American workers, in or out of a warehouse." And the rate of suicide in the United States is on the rise — the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention estimated that there were 1.4 million suicide attempts in the US in 2017. I wish BI (or better yet, The Daily Beast when they ran the or…

Be careful about burying this in stats without context.

Of the 1.4M attempts, how many are expressed at work in the context of working conditions? People handle different kinds of stress in all sorts of different ways. How many threats of suicide are made annually? Way more than 1.4M.

In the context of taking away agency from employees, serious suicidal threats are one extereme expression of stress. I’d be curious how many employees are taking a crap in the workspace deliberately, what the incidence of sex at work is, rates of theft, preventable injury, etc are.

Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

#17

Post by forthehorde »

The name of this article is a bit misleading (as other commentators stated), but the growing suicide rate is troubling. I think the part where employees feel like robots is a huge part of the problem. It's hard to make ends meet in a rough economy and a lot of people don't believe they have any say in current democratic process, one vote is what you get but the whole management of the system is hardly controlled by the electorate. There's a huge feeling of hopelessness, Mark Fisher in "Capitalist realism" wrote how youth fails to cope with the prospect of future that a big part of them will have to do a job they won't find satisfaction in. Some of us can land truly great positions but the suicide rates show a huge population living under distress.

Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

#18

Post by legitster »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #4

According to the media bias check website[1], the original reporter (The Daily Beast) has a high Factual score, meaning its literal statements are likely true, and a left-leaning bias, meaning the topics it covers will be of more interest to the leftist politics. (This post is mostly because I personally don't think business insider is particularly factual, and so did some research to validate its claims.) 1. https:/…

You can choose correct facts selectively to paint a false picture.

Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

#19

Post by titanomachy »

BurningFrog wrote: post #8

Of course, 911 calls from businessinsider.com offices only come from happy people having a great day.

Do they even have offices, or is it just a bunch of temp bloggers working from home?

The quality of their journalism is several notches below the sources I try to get my news from.

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