The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor

The story has a link to the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health’s 2019 Dirty Dozen list of the most dangerous employers in the United States. Facebook is on that list, which surprised me at first, but then I guess it made sense:

● Facebook contracts with outside companies for low-paid moderators who remove objectionable content from its global social network

● “Every day, every minute… heads being cut off” Moderators review hundreds of posts during a shift – including hate speech, pornography, and images of suicides, murders and beheadings

● A former employee says: “I don’t think it’s possible to do the job and not come out of it with some acute stress disorder or PTSD.”

I know nothing at all about this org:

http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dir...

That list is totally farcical.

There are all sorts of companies (most of them small because you can't do this kind of thing at scale without being sued) that put their employees in actually dangerous situations. There are nursing homes and hospitals that make the untrained janitor clean up bodily fluids (more than just your normal crap on the bathroom wall). There are construction operations where all sorts of safety corners are cut in the name of time. Industrial facilities where the maintenance and repair staff put themselves in danger in order to minimize downtime. Examples like that abound. And then there's all the wage theft (that I'm ignoring because we're talking physical danger here).

I'm not saying Amazon et al don't run their employees as hard as they can get away with but if you're gonna pick a dozen companies that are the worst the ones that are at least in the gray area of complying with the law shouldn't make the list.

Edit "totally" is probably too strong of a word by the general point I'm making stands.

Do any of the down-voters care to explain why they disagree? I'm genuinely curious as to why this is such an unacceptable opinion around here.

The article makes it quite clear that this is not about people dying like you mentioned, but about delayed medical attention in large Amazon facilities that result in potentially preventable fatalities.

I agree that the actual list is not purely based on risk of serious injuries. It’s a list to cover the scope of OSHA issues which means it’s less arbitrary than you might think.

Anyway, it has some interesting info. “903 Latinx workers died on the job in 2017 representing a 15 percent increase since 2012, and 17 percent of all U.S. fatalities from workplace trauma.”

Amazon actively, proactively, and reactively busts all forms of labor organization, including unions.

Hourly wage workers do not have the time, or runway to protest.

The deaths are only witnessed by a handful of workers, as their zones are spread very far out in these enormous warehouses. Word of mouth flows very slowly as a result.

During their shifts, workers are lonely and interact with more robots than other humans.