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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

#31

Post by KorematsuFred »

legitster wrote: post #24

I have a friend who works in an Amazon warehouse and asked him about it: "It's fine. Pay is decent. I get to do a lot of walking, which is nice. I'll probably look for something more long term." I asked him about all of the horror stories and stress I've read about: "You work in an office. Are you saying there isn't any stress or bad bosses or horror stories?" Point taken. They have 200,000 warehouse employees. On av…

It all depends on how many people work there. A job at a restaurant will be 10x more stressful and will face people issues than a job as a coder in downtown San Francisco. I think people need to adjust their expectations. All this bad press has not hurt people willing to work in Amazon's warehouses even in one of the best job markets so I think Amazon warehouses are at par with their industry standards compared to Walmart, Costco or Target.

I will trust market signals over journalists and experts any day.

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

#32

Post by elicash »

legitster wrote: post #28
elicash wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is about degree. Nobody in my office has ever called 911 due to something like this. I have no idea where this rates in comparison to other warehouses. But also it's hard to measure because maybe Amazon calls 911 to report this where other companies wouldn't -- similar to Apple calling an ambulance over people walking into glass doors just to protect themselves.

How are you sure? Talk to someone in HR and you may be surprised how many ways that people can lash out or cry out for help.

Fair, but still a matter of degree regardless.

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

#33

Post by 013a »

bantunes wrote: post #12
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."

They have 200,000 employees. I bet I could find at least one in the warehouse up the street who believes Bezos is an alien lizard lord from another planet. The (anonymous) beliefs and observations of one person aren't even close to relevant.

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

#34

Post by tracker1 »

legitster wrote: post #24

I have a friend who works in an Amazon warehouse and asked him about it: "It's fine. Pay is decent. I get to do a lot of walking, which is nice. I'll probably look for something more long term." I asked him about all of the horror stories and stress I've read about: "You work in an office. Are you saying there isn't any stress or bad bosses or horror stories?" Point taken. They have 200,000 warehouse employees. On av…

I think that considering it's a baseline pay job for what it is. I would only guess that a significant portion of the workforce is also very young, and it's their first experience actually doing any kind of physical work for money. That around 0.1% might be depressed enough to call for help under those circumstances, I'm surprised the number isn't higher.

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

#35

Post by [deleted] »

KorematsuFred wrote: post #31
legitster wrote: post #24

I have a friend who works in an Amazon warehouse and asked him about it: "It's fine. Pay is decent. I get to do a lot of walking, which is nice. I'll probably look for something more long term." I asked him about all of the horror stories and stress I've read about: "You work in an office. Are you saying there isn't any stress or bad bosses or horror stories?" Point taken. They have 200,000 warehouse employees. On av…

It all depends on how many people work there. A job at a restaurant will be 10x more stressful and will face people issues than a job as a coder in downtown San Francisco. I think people need to adjust their expectations. All this bad press has not hurt people willing to work in Amazon's warehouses even in one of the best job markets so I think Amazon warehouses are at par with their industry standards compared to Wa…

[deleted]

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

#36

Post by tracker1 »

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…

[flagged]

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

#37

Post by behringer »

ctrl-j wrote: post #22
walrus01 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> 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. This is not 189 total 911 calls - this is 189 calls for emotional distress. Personal experience dictates that on-the-job…

On top of that, remember Amazon has its own emergency staff on hand so they probably don't call 911 when their own emergency staff resolves the situation.

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

#38

Post by wlesieutre »

legitster wrote: post #24

I have a friend who works in an Amazon warehouse and asked him about it: "It's fine. Pay is decent. I get to do a lot of walking, which is nice. I'll probably look for something more long term." I asked him about all of the horror stories and stress I've read about: "You work in an office. Are you saying there isn't any stress or bad bosses or horror stories?" Point taken. They have 200,000 warehouse employees. On av…

I'm reminded of the articles a few years ago calling out Apple for Foxconn employee suicides. When you looked at the numbers it turned out that the suicide rate for Foxconn employees was substantially lower than normal for China.

> According to a 2011 Centre for Disease Control and Prevention report, the country has a high suicide rate with approximately 22.23 deaths per 100,000 persons. In 2010, the worst year for workplace suicides at Foxconn with a total of 14 deaths, its employee count was a reported 930,000 people. [1]

That's 0.0015% at Foxconn, 0.0222% overall. In other words, Foxconn employees committed suicide at only 7% the normal rate. And that was the worst year for Foxconn.

But it didn't stop a whole lot of news stories picking up the "Employees at Apple's factories are killing themselves" angle.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides#Analysis

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

#39

Post by simonsarris »

legitster wrote: post #24

I have a friend who works in an Amazon warehouse and asked him about it: "It's fine. Pay is decent. I get to do a lot of walking, which is nice. I'll probably look for something more long term." I asked him about all of the horror stories and stress I've read about: "You work in an office. Are you saying there isn't any stress or bad bosses or horror stories?" Point taken. They have 200,000 warehouse employees. On av…

Yeah it's silly. Generally its helpful in most headlines about [any large org] to substitute [Public Schools] and see if someone would bother to bat an eye at the headline.

> 911 calls from [Public Schools] show emotional distress and suicide threats

Nobody would care. (Maybe partly because people are already resigned to public schools being CAFOs, though)

189 calls over a 5 year period across 46 different facilities for Amazon. For schools in NYC its like, 300 a year per school iirc? (for behavior problems, not for physical health emergencies)

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

#40

Post by behringer »

avgDev wrote: post #3

More reasons for me to stop using Amazon but.... this is pretty interesting for me and I am not sure how to feel about it. On one hand I feel like they exploit the least educated and relatively poor people. On the other hand I think the only reason they are getting bad press is because they are a large corp. I have worked at many small businesses over the years and did physical work. I was treated like garbage by mos…

None of those bosses that treated you like shit were the richest man in the world.
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