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Amazon hired private detectives to spy on injured worker
- usaphp 8y agoI don’t get this complains about amazon warehouse work. When I was a teenager I used to work in alaska fish factory, with much much much stricter and harder schedules and rules that the article describes. If you plan to work in a warehouse - why are you surprized that you are required to lift heavy boxes and work long hours. Maybe someone can enlighten me why is this so blown out of proportion
- Waterluvian 8y agoI don't get it either. In a past life I was sold to work in a factory in London for basically no pay at 80 hours a week. It's like human standards of living go up over time or something. Joking aside, it's probably a good sign that what once was normal isn't. Eventually robots will be doing all the lifting and we will look back and shake our heads at how much intellectual capacity we had tied up lifting boxes.
- microcolonel 8y agoBecause they don't like Amazon, the same facts mean something else. Same bizarre idea upper middle class people seem to have about small businesses in the service industry, which arguably tend to treat workers considerably worse than "big mean megacorps".
- darpa_escapee 8y agoI know a few people who worked in frozen food packing, where workers are expected to be in a freezer for 10+ hours a day lifting, moving and sorting heavy loads. Repetitive stress injuries were so common that it was a factor of when, not if, someone would become injured and be unable to do physical labor for a living again. Each of them has done a stint with Amazon and left citing conditions, expectations and compensation.
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- mapmeld 8y agoBecause Amazon makes many billions more than your Alaskan fish factory. There's no reason that Amazon couldn't improve conditions of their buildings, or allow more bathroom breaks, or notify workers in advance if they have a shift (it's common to dismiss workers when they arrive in the morning, denying them access to any other job). These are such small changes to their bottom line, but would humanize the process a lot more.
- ekianjo 8y ago> These are such small changes to their bottom line, but would humanize the process a lot more. Is Amazon breaking the Law? (honest question). If not, I don't see why expectations should be different for Amazon vs every other company out there.
- danso 8y agoBreaking the law isn't the only standard for workers to judge their company by.
- ekianjo 8y agoSure. And workers are free to choose where they work. Nobody has a gun on every Amazon's employee's head to force them to work there. We are not in the Middle-Ages anymore.
- danso 8y agoAnd workers are free to protest in the hopes of improving conditions and policies. We’ve seen this st other big tech companies recently, such as Google employees walking out to protest how sexual harassment complaints were handled, or Facebook CSO’s telling the board (against the COO’s wishes) about concerns over disinformation campaigns.
- ekianjo 8y agoSure. They are free to try to influence things but they can always vote with their feet and go for a different employer. In no world is a company obliged to listen to their workers demands, unless the company is clearly breaking the Law. Freedom goes both ways.
- cristoperb 8y agoWhat you were willing to put up with as a teenager doesn't have much of a bearing on the standards of treatment and payment everyone else who has to work a warehouse job should demand.
- danso 8y agoWhat was the market cap of that fish factory, and how rich was your CEO? It's not a surprise that one of the world's most dominant companies, led by the world's richest man, evokes more scrutiny and questions about whether its practices are harmful. Its policies affect far more workers, and of course, are far more noticeable than any single small business workplace.
- EpicEng 8y agoBecause some people feel entitled to a larger share of their employer's profits regardless of their position in the company.
- fzeroracer 8y agoRising standards are, in general, a good thing I would imagine. My parents worked in an incredibly taxing physical environment and their reward was ruining their body.
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- adetrest 8y agoI know, right? Isn't racing to the bottom just great? Why should we try and stop it, it's such a nice thing to aspire to.
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- tcarn 8y agoFormer Workers Comp claim examiner here. Every Workers' compensation insurance company hires private investigators to make sure the person is really injured and not working another job while collecting. Sounds like the private investigative company overstepped their bounds by physically assaulting the worker, but otherwise this is SOP. Worth noting - Amazon has nothing to do with this. They simply pay premiums for Sedgewick to administer the claims. The employer typically doesn't tell the insurer to go after the workers, since in this case it is Sedgewick who's footing the bill.
- microcolonel 8y ago> Worth noting - Amazon has nothing to do with this. They simply pay premiums for Sedgewick to administer the claims. The employer typically doesn't tell the insurer to go after the workers, since in this case it is Sedgewick who's footing the bill. The most anyone can really expect of them is that they consider other providers, or hold their existing providers to a higher standard; and that is almost certainly what they are going to do.
- tcarn 8y agoI mean with all this publicity they will probably be switching providers or sending in a complaint to Sedgewick, but they aren't micromanaging carpal tunnel workers comp claims that make up 1/100000th of their revenue.
- PavlovsCat 8y agoAre there incentives for discovering a claim as fraudulent -- or do they just get paid by the hour, with certain standards that must be met, and that's it?
- shawnz 8y agoWhen they were choosing a claims management provider, they surely took care to choose one that aligns with their values. So this at least reflects poorly on Amazon's choices at that time.
- stickfigure 8y agoWhile the optics aren't great, I think this is the kind of thing we just have to accept as a society without single-payer healthcare. There's a huge amount of worker's comp fraud. Without some pushback in the system, there would be a lot more. And worker's comp insurance is already very expensive (at least, here in CA). Also: We're getting just one side of the story here.
- rpeden 8y agoFor what it's worth, this happens where there's single payer health care too: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014/06/16/workplace_safety_insurance_board_steps_up_spying_on_clients_documents_show.html https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014/06/16/workplace_safety... For context, WSIB is a government agency here in Ontario: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_Safety_%26_Insurance_Board https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_Safety_%26_Insuran... Hiring PIs to prevent workers' comp fraud seems like a very normal and expected thing to do. It seems like the ones in this case might have overstepped their bounds, though.
- cperciva 8y agoCanada really doesn't have a single-payer system though. If you're injured at work you'll receive far better care than if you sustain the same injuries at home.
- astura 8y agoEven the government investigates disability fraud. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robinseatonjefferson/2018/09/27/social-security-opens-more-offices-to-fight-fraud-we-will-find-you-we-will-prosecute-you/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/robinseatonjefferson/2018/09/27...
- fzeroracer 8y agoCan you cite your claim that there is a huge amount of worker's comp fraud? I'd like to see the data. Specifically the amount of claims that end up fradulent.
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- crescentfresh 8y ago> you are moving up and down the ladder picking 380 items per hour for 10 hours A picker is expected to pick an item every 9-10 seconds for 10 hours?
- new_guy 8y agoPretty much, one of the things about working at a place like that is you have ZERO value as a human, your prior experience, educational level, none of that matters. You're expected to be a literal human robot, a mindless cog in a machine and the picking rates reflect that. It's basically a living nightmare.
- darkhorn 8y agoNowadays even donkeys don't work that much.
- adrianmonk 8y agoThis seems pretty believable. A lot of picking systems have a light that tells you which position to grab something off of. (This is called "pick to light".) So you're just reaching and grabbing something off a shelf and throwing it on a conveyor. It's a pretty simple operation that won't take all that long. If your algorithm is any good, you should be about to group them together so that a picker can grab several nearby things one right after another. (It wouldn't be good for efficiency or the worker to make them move around more than necessary.) It is manual labor, so it's going to be physically demanding. I'm sure they probably push people as hard as they feel they can get away with, but this rate seems like something most able bodied people could achieve. But I'm sure they're very tired and sore after their shift is over.
- whoisjuan 8y agoNot saying that this is not true, but "World Socialist Website" is a website with content created to promote socialist agenda on behalf of a group of socialist parties. Again, I'm not discrediting them, but it's good to know that there's an implicit bias and agenda on this type of content. Same goes for the majority of the mainstream media. I wish someone would build a Chrome Extension that could reveal potential biases based on political donations, affiliations, and known shareholders, in relation to the media website you're visiting. It would add a lot of context and allow people to have more criteria to evaluate the media they consume.
- pizzazzaro 8y agoThats interesting. Most non-mainstream media makes you dive through the 501-C##'s papers, ICANN whois records, etc to find out whose voice you're hearing. And then you gotta dig like a shameless conspiracy theorist to find out what that means about what you're reading. Socialist media tells you who/what it is. Right there in the title. Why the distrust for Workers' Rights?
- smsm42 8y ago> Why the distrust for Workers' Rights? As somebody who spent part of my life in a socialist country, there are millions of reasons to distrust socialists. The Party's (under socialism, you always know which one is The Party because all others are banned) press is usually a non-ending stream of lies. Of course, the fact that all socialist press I've had experience with were complete liars does not mean that this one, which I never read before, is, but at least there's a cause for caution. Especially as we didn't hear the other side at all - once, in the press, there was a rule to try and get opposite's site take on the matter, but of course the revolutionaries don't have much need for rules, do they?
- cperciva 8y agoWhy is it that every single article about abused Amazon warehouse workers includes a GoFundMe link?
- HarryHirsch 8y agoBecause America. In some other countries it would be perceived as government failure that needs fixing when an individual has to go beg for charity.
- stefan_ 8y agoThis article has mysteriously vanished from the front page in record time. Vouch for articles?
- mnm1 8y agoAnother entire class of issues that would not exist if we had proper healthcare in this country. I bet Amazon loves its home state of Washington where the state does this dirty work for them at the expense of taxpayers, leaving workers with no care unless they are willing to spend thousands and years on worker's comp cases. That's despite being required by law to pay into a fund that cannot be used. These entities should be ashamed of themselves and we should be ashamed as a country for treating our hard working citizens this way. Just goes to show you, hard work for others is far from a virtue but only something to be done to keep from starving. In America anyway, hard work mostly does not pay off.