Live data from Hacker News

Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

bloomberg.com

91–100 of 239 posts

Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

#91
post #87
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said it did? The article is behind a paywall and is based off this blog post which is not behind a paywall.

No, but saying look at all they're doing without addressing kind of the key part of the article does kind of miss the point, and makes your response seem more like a response from PR then a comment on the text.

I genuinely would like to make sure I'm not missing something: what's the "key part of the article" that's missing from the Amazon press release?

Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

#92
post #42
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Policies take time to develop as people develop understanding of the situation , then there’s availability and putting policy into practice.

Amazon has by now spent millions of man-hours on addressing COVID-19 -- meetings, designing splash banners, etc. They are a very big company who pays big money for top talent. Amazon is not the scrappy upstart it was 15 years ago. Let's hold them accountable according to what they are capable. Edit: it would seem obvious in retrospect that if most major governments have action plans in case of global pandemic, a glob…

Most major Governments have an ability to print money on will, and yet they were caught red handed in handling covid19. Not to mention that the entire mandate of government is to keep their country safe as first thing, and yet their incompetence was on fully display. I for one, am glad that private companies didn't copy the government.

Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a few avoidable deaths between friends, after all? There are multiple active outbreaks in crowded factories and other facilities, just like an Amazon fulfillment warehouse. They do not have necessary safety equipment and procedures in place yet. Forcing people to show up to work under these conditions is murder. They could fix it, though. A starting point would be Amazon providing tests and ensuring that every…

>A starting point would be Amazon providing tests and ensuring that everyone has been tested before returning to work Amazon can't win. If they did that, the newspaper headlines would read "Bezos demands DNA samples of workers as a prerequisite to being paid."

I don't know about that, but there'd definitely be newspaper headlines about the number of workers testing positive implying that it's somehow Amazon's fault. We've already seen this with one of Amazon's NYC warehouses (over numbers that seem very much in line with NYC in general), various food manufacturers, etc. Apparently some meat-packing companies are now reluctant to test any of their workers because of the bad publicity and the damage it does - they'd rather just close down the entire site.

Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

#94
post #87
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said it did? The article is behind a paywall and is based off this blog post which is not behind a paywall.

No, but saying look at all they're doing without addressing kind of the key part of the article does kind of miss the point, and makes your response seem more like a response from PR then a comment on the text.

What key part of the article?

Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

#95
> Amazon said earlier this month it had hired an additional 100,000 employees

Not the main point of the article, but can I just say that's huge. That's... the same size as Google's entire full-time workforce.

Granted they're low-skill warehouse positions, not highly paid engineering jobs, but still.

The ability of a company to hire one hundred thousand people in a month is absolutely insane.

Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

#96
post #81
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The United States hasn't even passed the first stage of Corona yet (in SF, daily number of deaths is still rising). It is too early to mandate come backs. That isn't true according to the numbers from https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en . Do you have a citation for that? Numbers for new deaths have been hovering between 0 and 5 for the last month in SF, SF has had a total of 22 people dead, due to successful lo…

Deaths is not a metric that can determine which stage of this pandemic we are in. Immunity is the figure you're looking for, which will not increase under a shelter-in-place order. Deaths are down, but will immediately shoot back up if the shelter-in-place is lifted. The only goal posts you should care about are herd immunity or vaccination. Nothing else matters when discussing how much longer this pandemic will last…

I downvoted because I'm not currently aware of a current usable metric for immunity and because you didn't link to one. It's obvious to me too that the pandemic isn't over but deaths is (to my knowledge) the best proxy for all the other metrics that we currently have, due to lack of consistent testing.

Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COVID tests aren't DNA tests. It's a swab of the back of your throat (through the nose, oof) to test for a specific virus. It's not hard to find the specific stuff used to perform the tests, it's out there on the internet, the CDC published it. Are we really descending into paranoia about Amazon trying to genetically profile employees?

There's a big population of people who just start from the premise that Amazon must be doing something wrong and search for facts to justify it. I lost my ability to assume good faith when people complained they should pay $15 an hour, they started paying $15 an hour, and then the controversy immediately restarted about how greedy they are to not pay more.

I'm right there with you... I don't like Trump, even if I agree on a lot of policy actions/choices, but the guy can't have a good day with a lot of people. So many are outright lying to push an agenda over truth, and you can't really rely on anyone to be informed anymore.

Right now, I'm much more concerned that we're on the brink of war with China and Iran... partly because China sees us as weakened over COVID, I'm not sure on Iran's motivations right now either... With how much of our tech comes from taiwan, it's really concerning... this could literally set the world back a decade for a decade.

Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

#98
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has by now spent millions of man-hours on addressing COVID-19 -- meetings, designing splash banners, etc. They are a very big company who pays big money for top talent. Amazon is not the scrappy upstart it was 15 years ago. Let's hold them accountable according to what they are capable. Edit: it would seem obvious in retrospect that if most major governments have action plans in case of global pandemic, a glob…

I'm so tired of this holier-than-thou "they should know better/be better prepared" bullshit. Once-in-a-century black swan event - yeah, every company should definitely have plans for something like this! Moving massive resources in an effort like this is no small feat, and trying to treat it like it's as simple as signing people up to Slack is silly. It's amazing how people think operations like just magically manife…

Even companies with “pandemic” plans have a kind of outline of cascading triggers but a lot of the resulting triggers are undefined and those are things which basically say ($leadership) convenes talks things over and develop emergent plans and offer to their lower managers who take that and develop their own plans accordingly. And then that has to be revised with feedback from staff , etc...

Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

#99

> Amazon said earlier this month it had hired an additional 100,000 employees Not the main point of the article, but can I just say that's huge . That's... the same size as Google's entire full-time workforce. Granted they're low-skill warehouse positions, not highly paid engineering jobs, but still. The ability of a company to hire one hundred thousand people in a month is absolutely insane.

Even crazier, they have already announced an additional 75,000 openings. Just nuts.

Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I am German. Assembly line worker generally earn similar to university graduates. It does not matter whether you are employed or not: your kids will get the same quality of schooling (almost no private schools), you get the same healthcare treatment everybody else gets, your kids will go to university for free - if they can’t afford living expenses the government will give them a free loan for that, you get 6 we…

> it’s not the “working classes” like Marx liked to predict but social/political systems What's the difference, exactly? the social/political systems create the group of under-paid, under-served people. Call them working class or not, the problem is still there. In the US, employers pay drastically less for physical labor than knowledge work, government does not offer a social safety net, and social services are offe…

Like you can actually vote? Like there are more than two parties with the same take on social security? So you are telling me that the system in the US is like how the majority of people want it or that people have no say in the system?
Post reply on HN