911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats
businessinsider.com
911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats
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Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats
#2189 calls over a 5 year period across 46 different facilities, and the original article even notes that many of those were not work related at all.
It seems to try to lean towards "Amazon warehouse jobs are causing people to think about killing themselves" but the opposite could also be said - Amazon was able to engage these same employees with suicidal ideations and get them help. Only one seems to have actually killed himself, and that's after a bipolar diagnosis.
What is the suicide rate in other similar positions? How about call centers or other jobs with strict adherence to clock in/out or task time? It's easy to blame Apple or Amazon or Flextronics, but how does it compare to the rest of society?
Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats
#3More reasons for me to stop using Amazon but.... this is pretty interesting for me and I am not sure how to feel about it. On one hand I feel like they exploit the least educated and relatively poor people. On the other hand I think the only reason they are getting bad press is because they are a large corp.
I have worked at many small businesses over the years and did physical work. I was treated like garbage by most bosses, didn't have any insurance at all and worked 16 hour days when needed. No paid time off, 0 benefits, some jobs paid cash. Nobody would care if complained because it is a small business and nobody would read an article about it. This is happening to many many people in the US. If they didn't push to get out of those jobs they may be stuck there for life. Now, I am an SE, get good benefits, less stress, more respect, everyone is more lenient and polite. Yet, deep down I still have PTSD of walking on eggshells because of shit employers.
Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats
#4According to the media bias check website[1], the original reporter (The Daily Beast) has a high Factual score, meaning its literal statements are likely true, and a left-leaning bias, meaning the topics it covers will be of more interest to the leftist politics.
(This post is mostly because I personally don't think business insider is particularly factual, and so did some research to validate its claims.)
Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats
#5According to the media bias check website[1], the original reporter (The Daily Beast) has a high Factual score, meaning its literal statements are likely true, and a left-leaning bias, meaning the topics it covers will be of more interest to the leftist politics. (This post is mostly because I personally don't think business insider is particularly factual, and so did some research to validate its claims.) 1. https:/…
> According to the media bias check website[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Bias/Fact_Check:
> The Columbia Journalism Review describes Media Bias/Fact Check as an amateur attempt at categorizing media bias and the owner of the site, Dave Van Zandt, as an "armchair media analyst."[3] Van Zandt describes himself as someone with "more than 20 years as an arm chair researcher on media bias and its role in political influence."[4] The Poynter Institute notes, "Media Bias/Fact Check is a widely cited source for news stories and even studies about misinformation, despite the fact that its method is in no way scientific."[5]
Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats
#6According to the media bias check website[1], the original reporter (The Daily Beast) has a high Factual score, meaning its literal statements are likely true, and a left-leaning bias, meaning the topics it covers will be of more interest to the leftist politics. (This post is mostly because I personally don't think business insider is particularly factual, and so did some research to validate its claims.) 1. https:/…
Who checks the purported bias checkers?
Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats
#7More reasons for me to stop using Amazon but.... this is pretty interesting for me and I am not sure how to feel about it. On one hand I feel like they exploit the least educated and relatively poor people. On the other hand I think the only reason they are getting bad press is because they are a large corp. I have worked at many small businesses over the years and did physical work. I was treated like garbage by mos…
> On the other hand I think the only reason they are getting bad press is because they are a large corp.
I think that's true, but understandable. Amazon is widely known and extremely successful, so stories about it will attract more interest, and its scope justifies the expenditure of significant resources. Also, pervasive problems at large company are harder to dismiss as being merely the result of "one bad boss" or something like that.
Hopefully negative coverage of large companies like Amazon will lead to work protection reforms that can also be used to help small business employees.
Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats
#8Of course, 911 calls from businessinsider.com offices only come from happy people having a great day.
Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats
#9More reasons for me to stop using Amazon but.... this is pretty interesting for me and I am not sure how to feel about it. On one hand I feel like they exploit the least educated and relatively poor people. On the other hand I think the only reason they are getting bad press is because they are a large corp. I have worked at many small businesses over the years and did physical work. I was treated like garbage by mos…
> 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.
Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats
#10> The Daily Beast noted that its report was "not evidence that Amazon staffers experience suicidal episodes more often than other American workers, in or out of a warehouse." And the rate of suicide in the United States is on the rise — the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention estimated that there were 1.4 million suicide attempts in the US in 2017.
I wish BI (or better yet, The Daily Beast when they ran the original story) had included actual statistics to put the reported rate of 911 contacts into context. Where does 189 times in five years (~38/yr, ~3/mo averaged) within an employee population of between 400k and 600k, plus seasonal temporary employees, fall into the overall incident count for similar or proportional corporate populations?
If estimates of suicide attempts (and not just ideation) within the general US population in 2017 are 1.4M (out of ~200M working-age people[0]), we're looking at a rate of 0.7%. Just back of napikin'ing the rate for Amazon (using 500k employees for simplicity) I get ~0.007%/yr. Mind you, this does not mean that Amazon is doing anything right, it simply means it does not appear to represent an outlier against the overall population.
Warehouse jobs are likely high stress and physically challenging. I would expect they'd have a higher instance of emotional distress and suicidal thoughts/threats than non-warehouse jobs simply by virtue of the (broadly generalized) socio-economic positions a lot of their employees find themselves in.
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