I had a friend who worked as a software engineer at a big retail company that wasn’t Amazon. They had a tour at a distribution center. The place was a death trap. He got a bad concussion by walking into a low ceiling. No hard hats, no warning about it nothing.
The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor
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Re: The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor
#42A few cubes away from me one of our guys put his head down on his arms on his work surface. No one noticed, but he died. The guys holding a meeting in the cube across the aisle from him felt bad about it, but they thought he was taking a nap. Any large employer will have people die on the job.
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.
In a massive warehouse, I can completely imagine there are lots of places you could collapse and nobody find you for a while. Right now, in my home office, if I were to collapse, it would probably be a few hours till my wife or children found me.
Presumably, the times when medical attention was given immediately aren't reported.
Re: The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
An occasional random death at work is statistically inevitable. Six deaths in as many months is something else. A week before Billy Foister died of a heart attack, he went to the onsite clinic complaining of chest pains. They said he was dehydrated and told him to drink some water and go back to work. The article links to the NCOSH Dirty Dozen report, which describes a well-documented history of Amazon mistreating si…
Amazon has more employees than the state of Vermont's population, which last year had an average death rate of 500 per month. If anything this shows that working for Amazon is good for your health
The population of Vermont includes thousands of premature babies, bedridden elders, stage 4 cancer patients, and other vulnerable demographics that are not typically working at Amazon. Also, even at the worst rush times, Amazon employees are at work for maybe 60-70 hours a week out of 168 total. Dying off the clock isn't counted.
And you're ignoring the multiple specific instances of wrongdoing that I mentioned.
Re: The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor
#44Totally coincidental collection of cases about > delayed medical attention to a warehouse worker during a cardiac arrest I'm not trying to say that Amazon warehouses are a good place to work for, but if you want to be taken seriously make an effort to bring meaningful numbers. How many workers work at Amazon's warehouses ? 6 out of 125,000 [0] seems like a rather low rate Were there any laws or regulations broken ? W…
What is expected from a nominal workplace is that they spot someone collapsing on the floor and give that top priority - I mean the article mentions a 20 minute response time, that's not normal for a busy warehouse. Vs a 2 minute response time for making a mistake. Also, do you work or are you paid for by Amazon? It's known they pay people to say how great it is to work at Amazon on e.g. twitter - not dystopian at al…
Considering how many blind spots their warehouses must have, and how rarely many of the isles might be visited, I don’t think any special maleficence or irresponsibility is required for some down person to be missed for a while.
Not saying they shouldn’t be fixing this problem, just that it seems like a problem even the most perfectly humane company could easily have.
And you might want to check your paranoia. It doesn’t make you a reliable source of opinion to flat-out say you don’t believe anything made in defense of your predetermined villains.
Amazon barely makes any profit, you may have heard. It’s completely wrong to claim they could halve the work and double the wages. Such assertions make you come across as delusional and biased.
Re: The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor
#45You know where there isn't outcry about this? In Seattle at the Amazon corp offices. There are regular company wide email threads (seattle-chatter@ among others) making jokes about the shitty working conditions of warehouse employees. Walking around the hallways and lunch areas you hear people making jokes about how awful it is. Nobody there cares. Change the type of free coffee in the lunch areas though and all hell…
I've been subscribed to that mailing list for about five years and I've never seen anybody making jokes about bad warehouse working conditions. Sometimes it gets brought up to let someone know that overcrowded bathrooms or "bad coffee" aren't so bad in relative terms. Also, some people care enough to sign their names next to quotes in support of warehouse worker strikes: https://medium.com/@amazonemployeesclimatejust…
Just to be clear - did you sign your name in support or are you a current Amazon employee defending the company’s reputation in light of these deaths?
Re: The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor
#46Amazon is the Foxconn of America (although Foxconn now has operations in the US too)
Re: The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor
#47A few cubes away from me one of our guys put his head down on his arms on his work surface. No one noticed, but he died. The guys holding a meeting in the cube across the aisle from him felt bad about it, but they thought he was taking a nap. Any large employer will have people die on the job.
An occasional random death at work is statistically inevitable. Six deaths in as many months is something else. A week before Billy Foister died of a heart attack, he went to the onsite clinic complaining of chest pains. They said he was dehydrated and told him to drink some water and go back to work. The article links to the NCOSH Dirty Dozen report, which describes a well-documented history of Amazon mistreating si…
> Six deaths in as many months is something else.
It says "Six worker deaths in seven months; 13 deaths since 2013."
It doesn't go into any detail as to whether these workers actually died on the job. Six out of ~125,000 warehouse workers in one year would be double the average[1] (over all professions), but 13 out of ~100,000 over six years would be quite low.
> A week before Billy Foister died of a heart attack, he went to the onsite clinic complaining of chest pains. They said he was dehydrated and told him to drink some water and go back to work.
That sounds like medical malpractice, should be investigated on its own merits.
> Don't write this off as a series of unfortunate coincidences.
Yes, but also don't declare it a scandal before the facts are on the table.
Re: The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
An occasional random death at work is statistically inevitable. Six deaths in as many months is something else. A week before Billy Foister died of a heart attack, he went to the onsite clinic complaining of chest pains. They said he was dehydrated and told him to drink some water and go back to work. The article links to the NCOSH Dirty Dozen report, which describes a well-documented history of Amazon mistreating si…
Amazon has more employees than the state of Vermont's population, which last year had an average death rate of 500 per month. If anything this shows that working for Amazon is good for your health
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Re: The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon has more employees than the state of Vermont's population, which last year had an average death rate of 500 per month. If anything this shows that working for Amazon is good for your health
a lot of 70-90 year-olds working in amazon warehouses you think?
Well the incidents seem to mostly be with workers aged 60+... And when you get to your 60's random sudden health incidents become much more likely.
Re: The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor
#50Amazon has 250,000 hourly employees in the USA? Can it really take nearly 0.1% of the US workforce just to deliver online goods? And presumably that's an under-estimate, because it doesn't include most courier work. I was sort of hoping that every item I order on amazon has only perhaps 30 seconds of human time going into it... Assuming I order 3 items/week, and am typical of US citizens, amazon ought to be able to s…
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