After deaths, Amazon lands on list of most dangerous employers • Hacker News Board

Re: After deaths, Amazon lands on list of most dangerous employers

#11

Post by jcims » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 4:24 PM UTC

cpncrunch wrote: post #4

Terrible article devoid of useful facts. Not that I'm defending amazon...it sounds like a terrible place to work. However, none of these deaths seems to be Amazon's fault. From the "dirty dozen": ● Andrew Lindsay and Israel Espana Argote, contract workers, died when the wall of an Amazon warehouse collapsed during a severe storm in Baltimore in November 2018. ● Brien James Daunt fell to his death during construction…

Agree. Curious how having their own delivery trucks is going to move that needle.

Re: After deaths, Amazon lands on list of most dangerous employers

#12

Post by sct202 » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 4:43 PM UTC

GhostVII wrote: post #5

I think this is one of the most misleading articles I have seen on the front page of hacker news. First of all, being on OSHA's "dirty dozen" does not imply you are one of the most dangerous workplaces. And the report this article is based on cited 6 deaths in the past year - 3 from an airplane accident, 1 from construction, and 2 when a warehouse wall collapsed. 6 deaths in a year is very few at Amazon scale, especi…

It's not even OSHA's list it's just a nonprofit with a name that is strikingly similar to ones run by the government.

Re: After deaths, Amazon lands on list of most dangerous employers

#13

Post by cactus2093 » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

cpncrunch wrote: post #4

Terrible article devoid of useful facts. Not that I'm defending amazon...it sounds like a terrible place to work. However, none of these deaths seems to be Amazon's fault. From the "dirty dozen": ● Andrew Lindsay and Israel Espana Argote, contract workers, died when the wall of an Amazon warehouse collapsed during a severe storm in Baltimore in November 2018. ● Brien James Daunt fell to his death during construction…

Out of curiousity I looked up some rough numbers (which is clearly far beyond what either this article or this dirty dozen organization were willing to do). They name 7 deaths related to amazon, but 3 were in a plane crash and one was during construction on a warehouse, both of which Amazon would have very little to do with and were almost certainly not employees of AMazon. So really it's 3 deaths, out of a workforce of about 650,000 which is about 0.375% of the entire US workforce. The list highlights that there were 5,100 workplaces deaths total in 2018, so if they matched the averages then Amazon would have 19 deaths per year. Instead they have 3 deaths over the past 2 years (since November 2018).

Obviously any such deaths are a tragedy, but by the numbers there are clearly much more dangerous jobs in the US than being an Amazon worker.