911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by tomnipotent » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 10:57 PM UTC

nikofeyn wrote: post #30

tomnipotent wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More reasons for me to stop using Amazon but 189 calls over 5 years from 600,000+ employees (and many more that have come & gone) and the article didn't even bother to compare that against the general population. Bad reporting and conclusions. There's no news here.

in what world is this no news? these aren't just statistics on employees who happen to work at amazon. these 911 calls were reported to be placed while at work. what other places of work is it common for employees, while working, to experience such emotional distress that they need to call external emergency services?

> in what world is this no news?

The real world, where people call 911 all the time. This isn't unique to Amazon, and I'm willing to wager that Costo & Walmart have similar statistics.

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

#62

Post by krapp » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 11:25 PM UTC

ken wrote: post #53

legitster wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've worked in warehouses. I've never worked in an Amazon warehouse, but I have worked with people who have, who've told me it's the worst warehouse they've ever worked in, and they refuse to buy anything from Amazon.com today because of that experience. I've also worked in offices, and while it can be stressful I've never seen anyone urinating in a garbage can because they weren't given time to go to the bathroom. I…

I work in an Amazon warehouse. The first two months I was in the worst pain of my life, after that, the worst problems were backaches and tedium and complaints about the bad UI with their stow app. I'm not going to lie, though, VTO is a hell of a drug if you can afford it.

Some people can deal with the stress, some people can't. I don't think it's a strength/weakness thing either. It's just one of those jobs where you're perfectly aware of the degree to which you're a cog in a machine, and everything you do has to meet metrics.

If you want a job where you feel as if you matter as a person, or a job that brings you a sense of meaning, satisfaction or long term security, L1 at an Amazon warehouse isn't for you.

I wouldn't consider the horror stories to be typical, given the size of the network. I also wouldn't dismiss them, given the culture and the incentives Amazon can create. If someone told me there was a warehouse somewhere where the AMs shocked the pickers with cattle prods, I'd believe that Amazon would try it at least once, if they could get away with it, just to see how many seconds they could shave off their time.

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

#63

Post by krapp » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 11:30 PM UTC

ken wrote: post #52

forthehorde wrote: post #17

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 t…

There's a couple different ways to interpret "feel like robots". This article specifically says: > feeling like "robots" due to intense surveillance in the warehouses, while others described how their coworkers would urinate in trash cans because they didn't have enough time to rush to the bathroom I'm of two minds. I can see the need for surveillance at a warehouse full of consumer goods, but excessive surveillance…

It doesn't help that Amazon's mascot is a robot (Danbo), some of the facilities are full of robots, and the acronym stowers need to remember for their process is ROBOTS. Working there it can feel like you're living in somebody's bad future.

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

#64

Post by KorematsuFred » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 11:35 PM UTC

andrekandre wrote: post #60

KorematsuFred wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I will trust market signals over journalists and experts any day. i think it’s a balance, market signals alone aren’t enough imo. it’s multitude of sources that are important, and then to correlate with data that indicates a trend in one direction or another... “market signals” don’t necessarily take into account morals or “human dignity” etc... if we just relied on “market signals” we would arguably still have chi…

I respectfully disagree. I know your opinions come from your good heart but they are actually wrong. Market is way better at ensuring dignity rather than experts and market eliminated child labour and not labour laws. If at all labour laws such as minimum wage have deeply hurt some of the most vulnerable young people like the black teenagers from poor neighborhoods. Personally even I had difficulty understanding these basic concepts when I lived in India but when I arrived in USA and wondered why this society has achieved so much I found the answers.

I am not a blind follower of market and I understand the need for an effective regulation but it should revolve more around people's negative rights rather than abstract concepts like morality or dignity. I do not think people in DC or Sacramento give two shits about real dignity or morality at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNj2g2_dfkI

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

#65

Post by Spooky23 » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 12:30 PM UTC

Mtinie wrote: post #25

Spooky23 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ho…

You're right. I was sticking with the numbers The Daily Beast included as an attempt at a comparison. I also challenged the numbers by stating the "1.4M" number appears to be only attempts; a narrower definition vs. the "calls about emotional distress or suicidal thoughts" referenced, re: Amazon. Do statistics exist which translate these 189 calls into a number of actual suicide attempts? Hopefully the answer is "0".…

No problem... lessons learned the hard way as a people manager.

Some companies forget the humans are more than work, and treating them like automatons has negative impacts on the business and the people. Just as zero tolerance is bad in other cases, it's almost always bad in employment scenarios.

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

#66

Post by jrnichols » Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 1:49 AM UTC

behringer wrote: post #37

ctrl-j wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I was one of those Amcare employees for a 6 month contract. The only first aid provider in a warehouse. I ended up placing 1 911 call for a seizure, and that was it. Zero mental health issues. Most everything was minor injuries, and many of those seemed like borderline workers comp fraud too.

Amazon has 8 or 9 warehouses in the Dallas Ft Worth area alone. I wonder how many 911 calls they've generated and what for.