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The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor

theguardian.com

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Re: The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor

#91

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #28
2rsf wrote: post #13

Totally 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…

> "Also, do you work or are you paid for by Amazon?"

From the HN Guidelines:

"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data."

Re: The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor

#92

Post by Nasrudith »

tareqak wrote: post #77
GarrisonPrime wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 doe…

From the article: > “How can you not see a 6ft3in man laying on the ground and not help him within 20 minutes? A couple of days before, he put the wrong product in the wrong bin and within two minutes management saw it on camera and came down to talk to him about it,” Edward Foister said. Amazon management was able to identify via a camera that the deceased individual previously put an item into the wrong bin and act…

It in no way excuses any negligence but the likely reason for that is frequency of events and how attention is structured in designs and processes. There are /far/ more cases of hurried workers misfiling items than having heart attacks. Algorithmic assistance would lack the events to recognize and humans would lack the attention to surveil everything.

They certainly should do better and make appropriate changes to practices but at that scale it would require something systemic by definition whether it is adding a tighter employee welfare patrols or say emergency fall detection gadgets that ask if they are okay and if not responded to within a certain time call for aid or similar.

Re: The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor

#93

Post by netsharc »

slowdog wrote: post #84
claudeganon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How did you come to this conclusion... this is just flaming

Didn't Amazon "encourage" warehouse workers to post tweets praising their working conditions? (Who knows if they actually worked there though). Someone found them and saw that the accounts had a pattern, and the tweets were eerily similar as well.

With that in consideration, one has to ask whether they're also astroturfing HN...

Re: The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor

#94

Post by mrfredward »

londons_explore wrote: post #85
mrfredward wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 seconds to grab an item off a shelf in a huge warehouse, wrap it, put put in a box, tape the box shut, print and attach a label, load it on a truck, and complete all the required tracking steps? And we still haven't accounted for managing all these people, cleaning the warehouse, or even stocking the shelves. Edit: CNN says it takes a minute of human labor as of 2016 ( https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/06/technology/a…

I'm guessing most of those steps will be automated, or done in bulk, therefore only taking 1 or 2 seconds of actual human time. For example, sticking labels on a box could be entirely automated, with the only time use being 30 minutes to replace the printer once every million labels when it wears out.

Sure, lots of it is automated. There has to be a fantastic level of automation to achieve that 1 minute per order.

Amazon is one of the most brutally efficient operations in world history. We read every week about workers afraid to take bathroom breaks, and according to the article here workers seem too busy to notice their coworkers dropping dead of heart attacks. The sentiment of us here at our keyboards saying "wow, I can't believe it takes more than 30 seconds to put my order in a box" seems really wrong.

Re: The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor

#95

Post by colinyoung »

watt3rpig wrote: post #55
theguppydream wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Verge had a long read on life of Facebook moderators that is worth a read if you have the time. https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...

I read it a while ago and wish I hadn’t. It was quite disturbing. Read at your own risk.

I read it too. Made me think how ethical it is to continue using Facebook (and its other major product, Instagram).

Re: The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor

#96

Post by Spivak »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #82
Merrill wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re the 6 deaths in as many months: http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dir... >All six workers who died at Amazon facilities and operations during the past six months were employees of other firms or contract workers, rather than full-time Amazon employees. ● Andrew Lindsay and Israel Espana Argote, contract workers, died when the wall of an Amazon warehouse collapsed during a severe storm in Bal…

> All six workers who died at Amazon facilities and operations during the past six months were employees of other firms or contract workers, rather than full-time Amazon employees. That changes nothing. They were working to Amazon's rules at Amazon operations. Amazon bears responsibility for the firms they choose to work with and the requirements they give them.

Okay, sure but contractors dying in accidents at a work site is a hugely different narrative than "Amazon is working their warehouse staff... to death" which is what is currently happening.

Re: The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor

#97

Post by victords »

burger_moon wrote: post #14

You 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…

> 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.

I've been here for about three years, never saw any of that.

Re: The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor

#98

Post by rebuilder »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #17
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #11

Earlier 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

There's probably an important demographic difference or two between Amazon employees and the entire population of Vermont. Like, how many 80-year-olds do you think work at Amazon?

Re: The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor

#99

Post by DuskStar »

corodra wrote: post #54
2rsf wrote: post #13

Totally 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…

The biggest issue is that every single incident is met with some extremely poor response. How would you feel if your spouse or sibling was lying on the floor for 20 minutes before anyone noticed? But holy shit, they put an item in the wrong place, 60 second response on an ass chewing. Seriously, the "personal medical issue", if dealt with just as fast as the misplaced item, could have actually saved his life. Timelin…

> The biggest issue is that every single incident is met with some extremely poor response.

Do we actually know this? My impression is that only the poor responses would be reported on for us to see.

Re: The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor

#100

Post by viridian »

netsharc wrote: post #93
slowdog wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you come to this conclusion... this is just flaming

Didn't Amazon "encourage" warehouse workers to post tweets praising their working conditions? (Who knows if they actually worked there though). Someone found them and saw that the accounts had a pattern, and the tweets were eerily similar as well. With that in consideration, one has to ask whether they're also astroturfing HN...

I know in the twitter thread that went viral, most of the "Amazon workers" were actually satirical accounts, that kept ramping up the outrage.

The whole situation is shitty to be sure, and encouraging employees to defend you from Twitter mobs is stupid, but holy shit did a lot of people get baited hard during that whole ordeal.

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