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911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

businessinsider.com

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Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

#41

Post by tracker1 »

sykic wrote: post #23
tomnipotent wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You are right that there isn’t much of a story with regards to suicide at Amazon warehouses but there is a story with regard to the general working conditions at its warehouses. I guess mentioning suicide is good business from an entertainment/news aspect but this article is not helpful in terms of helping bring to attention the bad working conditions at Amazon’s warehouses.

What's the rate of suicide calls to 911 in the general population? If it's around 0.1%, I wouldn't be surprised... Most people hit that point at least once in their lifetime.

Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

#42

Post by School-Cotton »

avgDev wrote: post #3

More 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…

How are they exploiting anyone? Are they forcing people to work there against their will?

Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

#43

Post by Inconel »

legitster wrote: post #24

I have a friend who works in an Amazon warehouse and asked him about it: "It's fine. Pay is decent. I get to do a lot of walking, which is nice. I'll probably look for something more long term." I asked him about all of the horror stories and stress I've read about: "You work in an office. Are you saying there isn't any stress or bad bosses or horror stories?" Point taken. They have 200,000 warehouse employees. On av…

I've worked a number of warehouse jobs, including at Amazon, I didn't find them particularly stressful and I'd say from a physical standpoint they ranged from moderate to maybe slightly higher at the worst. Amazon I would describe as better than most similar lines of work in terms of pay and overall environment.

I don't doubt that there are problematic Amazon locations out there but I never experienced any of the really negative stories I read online despite moving between different locations and building types.

Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

#44

Post by legitster »

elicash wrote: post #32
legitster wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you sure? Talk to someone in HR and you may be surprised how many ways that people can lash out or cry out for help.

Fair, but still a matter of degree regardless.

It's more likely that the type of people working in Amazon warehouses have less access to resources (friends, therapists, etc), so 911 is the only place to call.

Which is a much bigger issue than just Amazon.

Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

#45

Post by avgDev »

School-Cotton wrote: post #42
avgDev wrote: post #3

More 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…

How are they exploiting anyone? Are they forcing people to work there against their will?

In my opinion, you can exploit people even if they willfully do something for you. For example, in some poor nations people do work that is very harmful, they do it to survive. People put up with amazons policies because they need the job to survive.

What if Amazon kills all the local business and becomes the only employer of people from few villages? They can exploit and use the same logic that you describe.

Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

#46

Post by degenerate »

BurningFrog wrote: post #8

Of course, 911 calls from businessinsider.com offices only come from happy people having a great day.

The original dailybeast article also keeps pointing fingers at Amazon but fails to mention (in context) how night shift workers are at a higher risk of depression and related factors:

> On the other hand, 5 studies on nighttime shift work in occupations outside the health sector, with observation periods of two or more years, yielded evidence of an elevated risk of depression after several years of nighttime shift work, but not in any uniform pattern. A supplementary meta-analysis of 5 of the studies revealed a 42% increase of the risk of depression among persons working the night shift (95% confidence interval [0.92; 2.19]). [0]

That's important context here, and conveniently omitted.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5499504/

Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

#47

Post by elicash »

legitster wrote: post #44
elicash wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, but still a matter of degree regardless.

It's more likely that the type of people working in Amazon warehouses have less access to resources (friends, therapists, etc), so 911 is the only place to call. Which is a much bigger issue than just Amazon.

There's zero evidence to support any one theory. What we know is what's in the article -- that Amazon had 189 incidents in five years.

Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

#48

Post by colejohnson66 »

wlesieutre wrote: post #38
legitster wrote: post #24

I have a friend who works in an Amazon warehouse and asked him about it: "It's fine. Pay is decent. I get to do a lot of walking, which is nice. I'll probably look for something more long term." I asked him about all of the horror stories and stress I've read about: "You work in an office. Are you saying there isn't any stress or bad bosses or horror stories?" Point taken. They have 200,000 warehouse employees. On av…

I'm reminded of the articles a few years ago calling out Apple for Foxconn employee suicides. When you looked at the numbers it turned out that the suicide rate for Foxconn employees was substantially lower than normal for China. > According to a 2011 Centre for Disease Control and Prevention report, the country has a high suicide rate with approximately 22.23 deaths per 100,000 persons. In 2010, the worst year for w…

> But it didn’t stop a whole lot of news stories picking up the "Employees at Apple's factories are killing themselves" angle.

Conveniently leaving out that Apple isn’t the only American tech company using Foxconn

Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

#49

Post by colejohnson66 »

simonsarris wrote: post #39
legitster wrote: post #24

I have a friend who works in an Amazon warehouse and asked him about it: "It's fine. Pay is decent. I get to do a lot of walking, which is nice. I'll probably look for something more long term." I asked him about all of the horror stories and stress I've read about: "You work in an office. Are you saying there isn't any stress or bad bosses or horror stories?" Point taken. They have 200,000 warehouse employees. On av…

Yeah it's silly. Generally its helpful in most headlines about [any large org] to substitute [Public Schools] and see if someone would bother to bat an eye at the headline. > 911 calls from [Public Schools] show emotional distress and suicide threats Nobody would care. (Maybe partly because people are already resigned to public schools being CAFOs, though) 189 calls over a 5 year period across 46 different facilities…

> Generally its helpful in most headlines about [any large org] to substitute [Public Schools] and see if someone would bother to bat an eye at the headline.

Just because nobody would care doesn’t mean people shouldn’t care

Re: 911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats

#50

Post by chriselles »

Disclosure: I worked at Amazon 97-01 in Operations.

Amazon’s culture, when I worked there was firm but fair.

It was largely manual labour with a veneer of technology on top that has grown thicker over time.

I hired and fired countless people.

In my opinion, the bifurcated culture at Amazon found on Glassdoor contrasts Amazon Operations with Amazon Corporate white collar jobs.

I believe it stems from the early days of the company.

Priorities were: 1)Customer ecstasy, get the orders out the door accurately. 2)”Average Up” with every single new hire.

Those two priories left little(read none) capacity for coaching, development, or even diplomatic warnings/terminations.

There would be a large pool of ex-Amazon folks who were involuntarily terminated for being unable, unwilling to meet a minimum standard.

And there would be an even larger pool of general population who look at Amazon, and Jeff in particular, as a money machine.

The reality is that Amazon is far more like McDonalds than Google from the perspective of Amazon workers in Operations.

Profit per Amazon Operations employee is exceptionally low.

I think it’s more accurate to describe and view Amazon as a basket of companies.

Working AWS or Alexa is a completely different beast from working as a picker in an Amazon warehouse.

But they are conveniently, and intentionally, confused and conflated to portray Amazon poorly when comparing Amazon Operations to a peer like UPS, DHL, or FedEx would probably be more fair and relevant.

However, it would appear that the unintended consequences of focusing only on the customer and “averaging up” with hiring at the expense of all else has had lasting effects on culture and perception.

Just my 0.02c

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