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The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor

78 points by xigency 7y ago

blakesterz 7y ago
The story has a link to the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health’s 2019 Dirty Dozen list of the most dangerous employers in the United States. Facebook is on that list, which surprised me at first, but then I guess it made sense: ● Facebook contracts with outside companies for low-paid moderators who remove objectionable content from its global social network ● “Every day, every minute… heads being cut off” Moderators review hundreds of posts during a shift – including hate speech, pornography, and images of suicides, murders and beheadings ● A former employee says: “I don’t think it’s possible to do the job and not come out of it with some acute stress disorder or PTSD.” I know nothing at all about this org: http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dirty_Dozen.pdf http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dir...
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  That list is totally farcical. There are all sorts of companies (most of them small because you can't do this kind of thing at scale without being sued) that put their employees in actually dangerous situations. There are nursing homes and hospitals that make the untrained janitor clean up bodily fluids (more than just your normal crap on the bathroom wall). There are construction operations where all sorts of safety corners are cut in the name of time. Industrial facilities where the maintenance and repair staff put themselves in danger in order to minimize downtime. Examples like that abound. And then there's all the wage theft (that I'm ignoring because we're talking physical danger here). I'm not saying Amazon et al don't run their employees as hard as they can get away with but if you're gonna pick a dozen companies that are the worst the ones that are at least in the gray area of complying with the law shouldn't make the list. Edit "totally" is probably too strong of a word by the general point I'm making stands. Do any of the down-voters care to explain why they disagree? I'm genuinely curious as to why this is such an unacceptable opinion around here.
  - Retric 7y ago
    I agree that the actual list is not purely based on risk of serious injuries. It’s a list to cover the scope of OSHA issues which means it’s less arbitrary than you might think. Anyway, it has some interesting info. “903 Latinx workers died on the job in 2017 representing a 15 percent increase since 2012, and 17 percent of all U.S. fatalities from workplace trauma.”
    - kube-system 7y ago
      I think that supports the above point. The dozen companies on the list only account for a few of that 903. As the linked document mentions, there are very few OSHA inspectors. You’re very unlikely to have any sort of real OSHA enforcement at a small business in the US. At a large employer, they often at least recognize and attempt to follow safety regulations. At a small business it is not at all uncommon for management to not care or even be aware that regulations exist. Looking back at my years at a warehouse run by a small business, I didn’t realize how dangerous the things were that I was doing at the time, but pretty much every task I had involved an OSHA violation. It was just the way things worked, and it wasn’t any different than any other nearby businesses.
      - kube-system 7y ago
        Replying to myself just to add -- I'm not saying that large companies aren't significant offenders. They employ a lot of people and certainly have the means to implement compliance mechanisms, so they should do better. I'm simply pointing out that smaller businesses get away with much more (many operating without any compliance mechanisms whatsoever), and are able to continue to do so with almost zero scrutiny.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  That's an activist group, not a scientific group. Which is fine, but it means that "most dangerous" means "most politically interesting", not most likely to cause harm or death by some particular statistical measure.
- theguppydream 7y ago
  The Verge had a long read on life of Facebook moderators that is worth a read if you have the time. https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...
  - watt3rpig 7y ago
    I read it a while ago and wish I hadn’t. It was quite disturbing. Read at your own risk.
    - colinyoung 7y ago
      I read it too. Made me think how ethical it is to continue using Facebook (and its other major product, Instagram).
mapcars 7y ago
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.
- foxhop 7y ago
  Amazon actively, proactively, and reactively busts all forms of labor organization, including unions. Hourly wage workers do not have the time, or runway to protest. The deaths are only witnessed by a handful of workers, as their zones are spread very far out in these enormous warehouses. Word of mouth flows very slowly as a result. During their shifts, workers are lonely and interact with more robots than other humans.
  - krapp 7y ago
    >During their shifts, workers are lonely and interact with more robots than other humans. To be fair, some of us prefer it that way.
- macintux 7y ago
  Between the costs of health care and the general indebtedness of many, risking your job in that way is a tough sell, especially since it would only be effective in large numbers. I also suspect that if you’re working in a hellish warehouse, it’s probably more of act of desperation than a career choice.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  Despite all the bad press, an Amazon warehouse worker job is still one of the better jobs you can get, at that level of employability.
  - thedaemon 7y ago
    No.
    - gridlockd 7y ago
Merrill 7y ago
A few cubes away from me one of our guys put his head down on his arms on his work surface. No one noticed, but he died. The guys holding a meeting in the cube across the aisle from him felt bad about it, but they thought he was taking a nap. Any large employer will have people die on the job.
- x3ro 7y ago
  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.
  - makomk 7y ago
    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?
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      "fatalities" means "die". Yes, it's possible to sustain a person in a technically animated state for a few minutes after vital systems have crashed.
    - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
      20 minutes is not "relatively promptly".
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    In a massive warehouse, I can completely imagine there are lots of places you could collapse and nobody find you for a while. Right now, in my home office, if I were to collapse, it would probably be a few hours till my wife or children found me. Presumably, the times when medical attention was given immediately aren't reported.
- geogra4 7y ago
2rsf 7y ago
Totally coincidental collection of cases about > delayed medical attention to a warehouse worker during a cardiac arrest I'm not trying to say that Amazon warehouses are a good place to work for, but if you want to be taken seriously make an effort to bring meaningful numbers. How many workers work at Amazon's warehouses ? 6 out of 125,000 [0] seems like a rather low rate Were there any laws or regulations broken ? What is expected from a nominal workplace before and when a worker suffers from a heart condition ? [0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516004/amazon-warehouse-fulfillment-centers-productivity-firing-terminations https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516004/amazon-warehouse...
- corodra 7y ago
  The biggest issue is that every single incident is met with some extremely poor response. How would you feel if your spouse or sibling was lying on the floor for 20 minutes before anyone noticed? But holy shit, they put an item in the wrong place, 60 second response on an ass chewing. Seriously, the "personal medical issue", if dealt with just as fast as the misplaced item, could have actually saved his life. Timeliness and telling other people to just ignore what's going on and keep working... other companies give people the day off or quarantine the area. It's a pretty fucked up situation for a lot of people. This isn't the military. It's a warehouse fulfilling movies and other useless junk that half the customers don't even remember ordering. There's no real mission to trudge through other than making sure Bezos can buy something else shiny.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    > The biggest issue is that every single incident is met with some extremely poor response. Do we actually know this? My impression is that only the poor responses would be reported on for us to see.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  What is expected from a nominal workplace is that they spot someone collapsing on the floor and give that top priority - I mean the article mentions a 20 minute response time, that's not normal for a busy warehouse. Vs a 2 minute response time for making a mistake. Also, do you work or are you paid for by Amazon? It's known they pay people to say how great it is to work at Amazon on e.g. twitter - not dystopian at all. I get really paranoid whenever someone jumps to the defense (or in your case sows doubt about an accusation towards) of a major corporation which can afford to both halve workload and double wages of all of their employees without having to worry about their bottom line too much.
burger_moon 7y ago
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 breaks loose. Quitting that company was such a relief to myself, and cutting ties with everything Amazon was at least important to me. I cannot morally support a company that treats their employees in such a way.
- ct0 7y ago
  Did you quit an amazon corporate position or a warehouse position? I'm sure the two are very very different so I would be impressed if you left the corporate position because of warehouse chatter. More recently I have been considering applying to a corporate position but would hate to feel the same way in a couple of years there.
  - jrockway 7y ago
    I am guessing that the warehouse workers don't read "seattle-chatter" mailing lists or have lunch-area coffee to complain about.
    - pardavis 7y ago
      Actually, pretty much every Amazon FC (at least in North America) has free coffee machines in the breakrooms. Some FCs have really bad coffee, but it is there and it is free. It used to cost money at some sites (to pay for the vending machine) but based on associate feedback it is now broad policy to be free. I work in a corp office where the coffee is far worse than many FCs I've been to.
    - krapp 7y ago
      >I am guessing that the warehouse workers don't read "seattle-chatter" mailing lists or have lunch-area coffee to complain about. They do at least get the coffee, and it's awful as expected.
stevespang 7y ago
Employee Billy Foister suffers a heart attack, is left laying on the floor 20 minutes before Amazon personnel respond ? and it's all on video ? I smell the lawyers and a jury trial, but the settlement will just be a mere "write off" for Bezos . . . .
gridlockd 7y ago
> 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_Dirty_Dozen.pdf http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dir... In five out of these twelve, nobody actually died. Those may be shitty jobs/companies, but they're not exceptionally dangerous - especially not Amazon. This is spitting in the face of people who actually have dangerous jobs with exceptional risks: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/01/08/most-dangerous-jobs-us-where-fatal-injuries-happen-most-often/38832907/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/01/08/most-dangerou...
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  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.
  - gridlockd 7y ago
    > I'll repeat my question I did to another one - are you employed by or paid by Amazon? No. > "nobody died" is not good enough. Whataboutism is not a good counter-argument. I can guarantee you, there are 12 employers in the US which had multiple fatalities in the past year, most of them in construction. Therefore, on a list of "12 most dangerous employers", every single item should include a fatality. Otherwise, your list is bullshit.
  - curryst 7y ago
    This is not whataboutism. Whataboutism involves failing to address the argument, and instead redirecting to a supposedly worse situation. The parent comment has addressed the argument; in 5 of the 12 no one died. That makes the list farcical for a supposed "top most dangerous" list. The rest of the article may be valid. Personally, I don't know. I don't know anything about the layout of the inside of those warehouses, or how common it would be for a worker to go 20 minutes without seeing someone else. I don't fully understand putting the blame on Amazon. If someone saw him collapse and ignored it, sure. I'm fairly doubtful that's what occurred, it would take an extreme level of callousness from several people to have done that. There's no info around what he was doing when he collapsed; everyone seems to assume he was in the exact same spot as that anecdote where management noticed a mistake in 2 minutes. Does it seem impossible that he felt light headed and was heading towards that AmCare facility when he lost consciousness? Or between stations or something? This just doesn't seem that foreign to me. Lots of people work in jobs where they could conceivably pass out for 20 minutes without anyone noticing. Security workers on patrol, bartenders during slow shifts, home lawncare people, home cleaning people (if they clean while you're gone). I'm not arguing that the working conditions at Amazon are anything other than abysmal, but this doesn't seem like a legitimate reason to be angry at Amazon. The bit about AmCare not sending him to the hospital when he complained of chest pains and a headache is very damning, though. I'm curious if that opens them up to liability. I was under the impression that as soon as someone says the words "chest pain" you're supposed to call 911 and get them an ambulance. I am not employed by or paid by Amazon.
theguppydream 7y ago
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 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/37780792-hired
londons_explore 7y ago
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.
- ovi256 7y ago
  Test your insight by starting an Amazon competitor and becoming the richest man in the world. Get some skin in that game!
- kube-system 7y ago
  They might have 0.1% of the workforce, but don’t forget that they’re 5% of the entire retail market and 49% of e-commerce.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  > Assuming I order 3 items/week, and am typical of US citizens, amazon ought to be able to serve everyone with 130k employees. Which means you'll want 260k so you can make them all half-time and keep benefits to a minimum.
- mrfredward 7y ago
  30 seconds to grab an item off a shelf in a huge warehouse, wrap it, put put in a box, tape the box shut, print and attach a label, load it on a truck, and complete all the required tracking steps? And we still haven't accounted for managing all these people, cleaning the warehouse, or even stocking the shelves. Edit: CNN says it takes a minute of human labor as of 2016 (https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/06/technology/amazon-warehouse-robots/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/06/technology/amazon-warehouse...). And that's shelf to delivery truck, so there is plenty more in that process that it leaves out.
  - londons_explore 7y ago
watt3rpig 7y ago
I had a friend who worked as a software engineer at a big retail company that wasn’t Amazon. They had a tour at a distribution center. The place was a death trap. He got a bad concussion by walking into a low ceiling. No hard hats, no warning about it nothing.
jrowley 7y ago
Amazon is the Foxconn of America (although Foxconn now has operations in the US too)
kiterunner2346 7y ago
I've taken Amazon's warehouse guided tours several times The surprise was that there is NO surprise: the entire process is merely the application of current technologies in warehousing and distribution, with humans in the few niches where machines are not quite "there" yet. in the places where humans are involved, there's just enough workspace so that, say, once Amazon develops a proper "binning" robot, the human can be fired and a machine rolled in to replace him/her. Place was nicely put together though: all the screws and bolts tight, racks and tracks level and properly aligned, sensors everywhere on the production line ready to alert of any problem. So kudos to the guys and gals who put it together and lined it up! Looks like the U.S. Army put it together (well, actually, if the Army did it, it would be use better parts and be more sturdily constructed). As for what it does, nothing there of interest to high tech.
chriscappuccio 7y ago
Seems stupid that Amazon offers in-house care and when this guy was complaining about chest pains, only to die a week later of a heart attack, that Amazon didn't provide proper care at this point. If they are going to offer an in-house clinic, they need to staff it and run it like a real clinic. That, or don't fucking offer it and make people go off-site to a real clinic when they have problems. This is pretty simple and it's the most vulnerable angle for Amazon here, not "poor treatment of workers" which is very subjective.
mr_tristan 7y ago
The weird thing to me was not just the delayed response by 20 minutes (reportedly), but that everyone was forced to get back to work. It just illuminates this very impersonal atmosphere bordering on the inhumane. I'm wondering if this opens up Amazon to more regulatory scrutiny, or even punitive settlements in the future. Something like this seems like actual evidence for very negative patterns of behavior. This seems like a new kind of "hostile workplace environment" - one where your workplace will ignore your medical needs if an accident occurs. I just wonder if this is just some older pattern that's repeating itself, it's just not widely known.
onetimemanytime 7y ago
>>Amazon said it had responded to Foister’s collapse “within minutes”. Yeah, in just 45784512 minutes. Actually less, but 20 minutes is not minutes when it comes to heart attacks.

78 points by xigency 7y ago

The story has a link to the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health’s 2019 Dirty Dozen list of the most dangerous employers in the United States. Facebook is on that list, which surprised me at first, but then I guess it made sense: ● Facebook contracts with outside companies for low-paid moderators who remove objectionable content from its global social network ● “Every day, every minute… heads being cut off” Moderators review hundreds of posts during a shift – including hate speech, pornography, and images of suicides, murders and beheadings ● A former employee says: “I don’t think it’s possible to do the job and not come out of it with some acute stress disorder or PTSD.” I know nothing at all about this org: http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dirty_Dozen.pdf http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dir...

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
That list is totally farcical. There are all sorts of companies (most of them small because you can't do this kind of thing at scale without being sued) that put their employees in actually dangerous situations. There are nursing homes and hospitals that make the untrained janitor clean up bodily fluids (more than just your normal crap on the bathroom wall). There are construction operations where all sorts of safety corners are cut in the name of time. Industrial facilities where the maintenance and repair staff put themselves in danger in order to minimize downtime. Examples like that abound. And then there's all the wage theft (that I'm ignoring because we're talking physical danger here). I'm not saying Amazon et al don't run their employees as hard as they can get away with but if you're gonna pick a dozen companies that are the worst the ones that are at least in the gray area of complying with the law shouldn't make the list. Edit "totally" is probably too strong of a word by the general point I'm making stands. Do any of the down-voters care to explain why they disagree? I'm genuinely curious as to why this is such an unacceptable opinion around here.
- Retric 7y ago
  I agree that the actual list is not purely based on risk of serious injuries. It’s a list to cover the scope of OSHA issues which means it’s less arbitrary than you might think. Anyway, it has some interesting info. “903 Latinx workers died on the job in 2017 representing a 15 percent increase since 2012, and 17 percent of all U.S. fatalities from workplace trauma.”
  - kube-system 7y ago
    I think that supports the above point. The dozen companies on the list only account for a few of that 903. As the linked document mentions, there are very few OSHA inspectors. You’re very unlikely to have any sort of real OSHA enforcement at a small business in the US. At a large employer, they often at least recognize and attempt to follow safety regulations. At a small business it is not at all uncommon for management to not care or even be aware that regulations exist. Looking back at my years at a warehouse run by a small business, I didn’t realize how dangerous the things were that I was doing at the time, but pretty much every task I had involved an OSHA violation. It was just the way things worked, and it wasn’t any different than any other nearby businesses.
    - kube-system 7y ago
      Replying to myself just to add -- I'm not saying that large companies aren't significant offenders. They employ a lot of people and certainly have the means to implement compliance mechanisms, so they should do better. I'm simply pointing out that smaller businesses get away with much more (many operating without any compliance mechanisms whatsoever), and are able to continue to do so with almost zero scrutiny.
lonelappde 7y ago
That's an activist group, not a scientific group. Which is fine, but it means that "most dangerous" means "most politically interesting", not most likely to cause harm or death by some particular statistical measure.
theguppydream 7y ago
The Verge had a long read on life of Facebook moderators that is worth a read if you have the time. https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...
- watt3rpig 7y ago
  I read it a while ago and wish I hadn’t. It was quite disturbing. Read at your own risk.
  - colinyoung 7y ago
    I read it too. Made me think how ethical it is to continue using Facebook (and its other major product, Instagram).

mapcars 7y ago

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.

foxhop 7y ago
Amazon actively, proactively, and reactively busts all forms of labor organization, including unions. Hourly wage workers do not have the time, or runway to protest. The deaths are only witnessed by a handful of workers, as their zones are spread very far out in these enormous warehouses. Word of mouth flows very slowly as a result. During their shifts, workers are lonely and interact with more robots than other humans.
- krapp 7y ago
  >During their shifts, workers are lonely and interact with more robots than other humans. To be fair, some of us prefer it that way.
macintux 7y ago
Between the costs of health care and the general indebtedness of many, risking your job in that way is a tough sell, especially since it would only be effective in large numbers. I also suspect that if you’re working in a hellish warehouse, it’s probably more of act of desperation than a career choice.
gridlockd 7y ago
Despite all the bad press, an Amazon warehouse worker job is still one of the better jobs you can get, at that level of employability.
- thedaemon 7y ago
  No.
  - gridlockd 7y ago

Merrill 7y ago

A few cubes away from me one of our guys put his head down on his arms on his work surface. No one noticed, but he died. The guys holding a meeting in the cube across the aisle from him felt bad about it, but they thought he was taking a nap. Any large employer will have people die on the job.

x3ro 7y ago
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.
- makomk 7y ago
  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?
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    "fatalities" means "die". Yes, it's possible to sustain a person in a technically animated state for a few minutes after vital systems have crashed.
  - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    20 minutes is not "relatively promptly".
- londons_explore 7y ago
  In a massive warehouse, I can completely imagine there are lots of places you could collapse and nobody find you for a while. Right now, in my home office, if I were to collapse, it would probably be a few hours till my wife or children found me. Presumably, the times when medical attention was given immediately aren't reported.
geogra4 7y ago

2rsf 7y ago

Totally coincidental collection of cases about > delayed medical attention to a warehouse worker during a cardiac arrest I'm not trying to say that Amazon warehouses are a good place to work for, but if you want to be taken seriously make an effort to bring meaningful numbers. How many workers work at Amazon's warehouses ? 6 out of 125,000 [0] seems like a rather low rate Were there any laws or regulations broken ? What is expected from a nominal workplace before and when a worker suffers from a heart condition ? [0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516004/amazon-warehouse-fulfillment-centers-productivity-firing-terminations https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516004/amazon-warehouse...

corodra 7y ago
The biggest issue is that every single incident is met with some extremely poor response. How would you feel if your spouse or sibling was lying on the floor for 20 minutes before anyone noticed? But holy shit, they put an item in the wrong place, 60 second response on an ass chewing. Seriously, the "personal medical issue", if dealt with just as fast as the misplaced item, could have actually saved his life. Timeliness and telling other people to just ignore what's going on and keep working... other companies give people the day off or quarantine the area. It's a pretty fucked up situation for a lot of people. This isn't the military. It's a warehouse fulfilling movies and other useless junk that half the customers don't even remember ordering. There's no real mission to trudge through other than making sure Bezos can buy something else shiny.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  > The biggest issue is that every single incident is met with some extremely poor response. Do we actually know this? My impression is that only the poor responses would be reported on for us to see.
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
What is expected from a nominal workplace is that they spot someone collapsing on the floor and give that top priority - I mean the article mentions a 20 minute response time, that's not normal for a busy warehouse. Vs a 2 minute response time for making a mistake. Also, do you work or are you paid for by Amazon? It's known they pay people to say how great it is to work at Amazon on e.g. twitter - not dystopian at all. I get really paranoid whenever someone jumps to the defense (or in your case sows doubt about an accusation towards) of a major corporation which can afford to both halve workload and double wages of all of their employees without having to worry about their bottom line too much.

burger_moon 7y ago

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 breaks loose. Quitting that company was such a relief to myself, and cutting ties with everything Amazon was at least important to me. I cannot morally support a company that treats their employees in such a way.

ct0 7y ago
Did you quit an amazon corporate position or a warehouse position? I'm sure the two are very very different so I would be impressed if you left the corporate position because of warehouse chatter. More recently I have been considering applying to a corporate position but would hate to feel the same way in a couple of years there.
- jrockway 7y ago
  I am guessing that the warehouse workers don't read "seattle-chatter" mailing lists or have lunch-area coffee to complain about.
  - pardavis 7y ago
    Actually, pretty much every Amazon FC (at least in North America) has free coffee machines in the breakrooms. Some FCs have really bad coffee, but it is there and it is free. It used to cost money at some sites (to pay for the vending machine) but based on associate feedback it is now broad policy to be free. I work in a corp office where the coffee is far worse than many FCs I've been to.
  - krapp 7y ago
    >I am guessing that the warehouse workers don't read "seattle-chatter" mailing lists or have lunch-area coffee to complain about. They do at least get the coffee, and it's awful as expected.

stevespang 7y ago

Employee Billy Foister suffers a heart attack, is left laying on the floor 20 minutes before Amazon personnel respond ? and it's all on video ? I smell the lawyers and a jury trial, but the settlement will just be a mere "write off" for Bezos . . . .

gridlockd 7y ago

> 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_Dirty_Dozen.pdf http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dir... In five out of these twelve, nobody actually died. Those may be shitty jobs/companies, but they're not exceptionally dangerous - especially not Amazon. This is spitting in the face of people who actually have dangerous jobs with exceptional risks: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/01/08/most-dangerous-jobs-us-where-fatal-injuries-happen-most-often/38832907/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/01/08/most-dangerou...

Cthulhu_ 7y ago
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.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  > I'll repeat my question I did to another one - are you employed by or paid by Amazon? No. > "nobody died" is not good enough. Whataboutism is not a good counter-argument. I can guarantee you, there are 12 employers in the US which had multiple fatalities in the past year, most of them in construction. Therefore, on a list of "12 most dangerous employers", every single item should include a fatality. Otherwise, your list is bullshit.
- curryst 7y ago
  This is not whataboutism. Whataboutism involves failing to address the argument, and instead redirecting to a supposedly worse situation. The parent comment has addressed the argument; in 5 of the 12 no one died. That makes the list farcical for a supposed "top most dangerous" list. The rest of the article may be valid. Personally, I don't know. I don't know anything about the layout of the inside of those warehouses, or how common it would be for a worker to go 20 minutes without seeing someone else. I don't fully understand putting the blame on Amazon. If someone saw him collapse and ignored it, sure. I'm fairly doubtful that's what occurred, it would take an extreme level of callousness from several people to have done that. There's no info around what he was doing when he collapsed; everyone seems to assume he was in the exact same spot as that anecdote where management noticed a mistake in 2 minutes. Does it seem impossible that he felt light headed and was heading towards that AmCare facility when he lost consciousness? Or between stations or something? This just doesn't seem that foreign to me. Lots of people work in jobs where they could conceivably pass out for 20 minutes without anyone noticing. Security workers on patrol, bartenders during slow shifts, home lawncare people, home cleaning people (if they clean while you're gone). I'm not arguing that the working conditions at Amazon are anything other than abysmal, but this doesn't seem like a legitimate reason to be angry at Amazon. The bit about AmCare not sending him to the hospital when he complained of chest pains and a headache is very damning, though. I'm curious if that opens them up to liability. I was under the impression that as soon as someone says the words "chest pain" you're supposed to call 911 and get them an ambulance. I am not employed by or paid by Amazon.

theguppydream 7y ago

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 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/37780792-hired

londons_explore 7y ago

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.

ovi256 7y ago
Test your insight by starting an Amazon competitor and becoming the richest man in the world. Get some skin in that game!
kube-system 7y ago
They might have 0.1% of the workforce, but don’t forget that they’re 5% of the entire retail market and 49% of e-commerce.
ceejayoz 7y ago
> Assuming I order 3 items/week, and am typical of US citizens, amazon ought to be able to serve everyone with 130k employees. Which means you'll want 260k so you can make them all half-time and keep benefits to a minimum.
mrfredward 7y ago
30 seconds to grab an item off a shelf in a huge warehouse, wrap it, put put in a box, tape the box shut, print and attach a label, load it on a truck, and complete all the required tracking steps? And we still haven't accounted for managing all these people, cleaning the warehouse, or even stocking the shelves. Edit: CNN says it takes a minute of human labor as of 2016 (https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/06/technology/amazon-warehouse-robots/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/06/technology/amazon-warehouse...). And that's shelf to delivery truck, so there is plenty more in that process that it leaves out.
- londons_explore 7y ago

watt3rpig 7y ago

I had a friend who worked as a software engineer at a big retail company that wasn’t Amazon. They had a tour at a distribution center. The place was a death trap. He got a bad concussion by walking into a low ceiling. No hard hats, no warning about it nothing.

jrowley 7y ago

Amazon is the Foxconn of America (although Foxconn now has operations in the US too)

kiterunner2346 7y ago

I've taken Amazon's warehouse guided tours several times The surprise was that there is NO surprise: the entire process is merely the application of current technologies in warehousing and distribution, with humans in the few niches where machines are not quite "there" yet. in the places where humans are involved, there's just enough workspace so that, say, once Amazon develops a proper "binning" robot, the human can be fired and a machine rolled in to replace him/her. Place was nicely put together though: all the screws and bolts tight, racks and tracks level and properly aligned, sensors everywhere on the production line ready to alert of any problem. So kudos to the guys and gals who put it together and lined it up! Looks like the U.S. Army put it together (well, actually, if the Army did it, it would be use better parts and be more sturdily constructed). As for what it does, nothing there of interest to high tech.

chriscappuccio 7y ago

Seems stupid that Amazon offers in-house care and when this guy was complaining about chest pains, only to die a week later of a heart attack, that Amazon didn't provide proper care at this point. If they are going to offer an in-house clinic, they need to staff it and run it like a real clinic. That, or don't fucking offer it and make people go off-site to a real clinic when they have problems. This is pretty simple and it's the most vulnerable angle for Amazon here, not "poor treatment of workers" which is very subjective.

mr_tristan 7y ago

The weird thing to me was not just the delayed response by 20 minutes (reportedly), but that everyone was forced to get back to work. It just illuminates this very impersonal atmosphere bordering on the inhumane. I'm wondering if this opens up Amazon to more regulatory scrutiny, or even punitive settlements in the future. Something like this seems like actual evidence for very negative patterns of behavior. This seems like a new kind of "hostile workplace environment" - one where your workplace will ignore your medical needs if an accident occurs. I just wonder if this is just some older pattern that's repeating itself, it's just not widely known.

onetimemanytime 7y ago

>>Amazon said it had responded to Foister’s collapse “within minutes”. Yeah, in just 45784512 minutes. Actually less, but 20 minutes is not minutes when it comes to heart attacks.