The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by lonelappde » Fri, Oct 18, 2019, 1:58 PM UTC

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

Vermont has only 12 workplace deaths per year. Yes, being able and working at Amazon is better for your health than being 90years old with cancer.

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

#32

Post by ilikepi » Fri, Oct 18, 2019, 1:58 PM UTC

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

Given that Vermont's population includes children, elderly, infirm, etc, it doesn't seem logical to draw conclusions from comparing the death rate of the two populations.

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

#33

Post by zepto » Fri, Oct 18, 2019, 1:59 PM UTC

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

I didn’t realize Amazon hires the elderly and people in hospital.

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

#34

Post by Cthulhu_ » Fri, Oct 18, 2019, 1:59 PM UTC

gridlockd wrote: post #24

> The incident is among the latest in a series of accidents and fatalities that have led to Amazon’s inclusion on the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health’s 2019 Dirty Dozen list of the most dangerous employers in the United States. Completely ridiculous. Look at the list: http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dir... In five out of these twelve, nobody actually died. Those may be shi…

I'll repeat my question I did to another one - are you employed by or paid by Amazon?

"nobody died" is not good enough. Whataboutism is not a good counter-argument.

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

#35

Post by Cthulhu_ » Fri, Oct 18, 2019, 2:01 PM UTC

makomk wrote: post #18

x3ro wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So basically it's about people dying like the guy described above, except that the Amazon employees didn't even technically die on the job because they were found relatively promptly and received medical care?

20 minutes is not "relatively promptly".

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

#36

Post by theguppydream » Fri, Oct 18, 2019, 2:02 PM UTC

James Bloodworth's book Hired is a good companion piece. It covers what it's like to work in an Amazon warehouse in the UK, among other low paid jobs. I'm not sure if it was the tagline, but I think 'the last thing you'll buy on Amazon' would be a decent slogan for the book.

He has a tendency to get a little purple with his prose, but if you can get past that it's a good precis of low pay jobs.

Here's a link to the Goodreads page. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/37780792-hired

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

#37

Post by midgetjones » Fri, Oct 18, 2019, 2:02 PM UTC

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

a lot of 70-90 year-olds working in amazon warehouses you think?

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

#38

Post by stakecounter » Fri, Oct 18, 2019, 2:02 PM UTC

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…

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/@amazonemployeesclimatejustice/quotes-of-...

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

#39

Post by londons_explore » Fri, Oct 18, 2019, 2:04 PM UTC

Amazon 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 serve everyone with 130k employees.

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

#40

Post by kube-system » Fri, Oct 18, 2019, 2:06 PM UTC

mapcars wrote: post #3

What is strange to me is that after a series of such incidents workers don't go out on protest or something, given this is happening in the US.

Amazon get a lot of attention due to their size. Similar workplaces with less media and regulatory scrutiny often pay less and have more safety issues.

Anecdotally, the people I know who work at an Amazon warehouse tell me that the safety protections there are better (and pay higher) than the other options they had.