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I don’t understand a few things, as they aren’t covered in the article, that I saw. Were there no warnings for the severe weather storm that would have prevent

by bmitc 5y ago

I don’t understand a few things, as they aren’t covered in the article, that I saw. Were there no warnings for the severe weather storm that would have prevented people coming in to work or allowed them to leave work early? When I was working in the office, we were usually forced (literally security swept the building) to leave when severe winter weather was coming in a few times. Why doesn’t Amazon, in the middle of Tornado Alley, have tornado shelters for its employees? Employees should not be having to run around finding places to hide. There should be designated shelters.

floatingatoll 5y ago
Amazon penalizes their workers for bathroom breaks and replaced their HR team with a chatbot. This is allowed by federal labor laws, and Amazon’s primary source of retail revenue is externalizing human costs. Our tech and business communities believe regulations are harmful, and American politicians are inept. So I don’t see how we can prevent their abuse unless something changes; yet, no one wants to be the one that changes. A startup seems unlikely to help, but I remain optimistic that someone will change.
- asteroidbelt 5y ago
  > unless something changes People will be replaced by robots, this is what will change. It is already happening. McDonalds is canonical example of that.
  - Hokusai 5y ago
    That is there best argument to fight now for good conditions, the more robots in the future the less leverage to negotiate. On a second note, if robots replace humans. Who is going to buy products? Because humans without jobs do not have money. Why have warehouses if nobody can but anything? That hypothetical future were robots replace workers is way more complicated that many people thinks.
    - asteroidbelt 5y ago
      > That is there best argument to fight now for good conditions, the more robots in the future the less leverage to negotiate. Humans in warehouse don’t have leverage and will have even less leverage in the future regardless of what they would be able to negotiate now. > Who is going to buy products? People making robots (designing, configuring, installing, fixing etc). Or people doing service work like nannies, teachers, massage therapists, waiters, diving instructors, receptionists etc. All the work which can be automated, but humans are still preferable than robots.
    - floatingatoll 5y ago
      Science fiction has been making about universal basic income, zero cost basic living goods and housing, and comprehensive social support services. They also suffer a lot of wealth stratification and “we don’t talk about how we load cash into the money pump” blind spots. It’s the right question to ask; isn’t all revenue eventually deprecated by robotics? Thankfully, the reality is that we can’t create safe and resilient automatons, so we don’t have to worry about humans being replaced any time soon, if not for centuries. For example, we have landed zero fully autonomous rovers on Mars, and we have no autonomous rover repair bot, even if we did, so it would break down because we’re terrible at producing technology that works for a decade or more between failures. The wealthy humans who don’t like paying humans are thrilled to let us think that the wealth gaps are due to automation and globalization, because otherwise there’d be pitchfork mobs at their doors. But it’s not robots we need to be afraid of. It’s greed we need to be afraid of. That’s what drives Amazon to externalize humanity as a cost to be paid by anyone else but them. That’s what drives Uber to destroy taxis and then try to harvest automaton driver training data. There are no robotic taxis that can survive human beings who realize that the taxis are so risk-averse that they can be taken advantage of, cut off in traffic, trapped and damaged or harvested for parts, etc. We seriously are like fifty or a hundred years away from automation being able to do a single job for a year without human maintenance. Everyone’s afraid of robots replacing us (beep beep boop boop) but in reality we can’t even advance past VCRs that flash 12:00, and it’s been one week since Tesla locked their entire worldwide customer base out of their cars with a 500 Server Error. Automatons are not a relevant big bad. Here’s a simple litmus test for whether you should worry about automation at a macroeconomic level: How long has it been since your production web server responded with a single unhandled exception to a user? Not 404s, not “your cookie is defective, bounty hunter”, but like 429 Too Many or 500 Proxy time-out or whatever. Everyone will say “well, it’s really difficult to have such effective HA that you trap outbound errors and try to resolve them, and POST requests aren’t repeatable, and you can’t control the Internet”. If we can’t deliver static HTML without blips and outages, then we certainly don’t need to be afraid of a human-facing, human-serving automaton. It’s a great litmus test. I call it “zero nines”, because there’s no 9s in 100% uptime.
  - cronix 5y ago
    Tesla Bot enters the chat. https://youtu.be/HUP6Z5voiS8?t=87 https://youtu.be/HUP6Z5voiS8?t=87
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    Given how often I have to reboot my car stereo — Subaru stereos are all powered by a decades-old Windows CE platform — I’m not thinking that McDonalds will successfully overcome the traumas of unattended automation to the degree that their reputation requires. Apparently something like a tenth or a quarter (I forget) of their automatic soft serve machines are down nationwide at any given second of the day. If a tenth of McDonalds were closed worldwide at any given open-hours time due to removing human workers and replacing them with current-grade automation, their reputation would be forever destroyed.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > Our tech and business communities believe regulations are harmful, and American politicians are inept. Perhaps the latter is a convenient way to take action on the former?
pacerwpg 5y ago
Those things all sound like they might decrease profits.
- authed 5y ago
  6 deaths will reduce profits and something else.
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    Not by nearly as much as proper severe weather planning nationwide would.
romwell 5y ago
>Were there no warnings for the severe weather storm that would have prevented people coming in to work or allowed them to leave work early? There were warnings. Warnings that skipping work would get one fired[1]. And since the warehouse was not closed that day, the warning was: clock in on time, or else, weather be damned. >When I was working in the office... Well there's a difference between how office employees are treated, and how warehouse employees are treated. >Why doesn’t Amazon.... Because they can. And that, because their workforce isn't unionized and doesn't have the collective bargaining power to get what Amazon should give them. [1]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/24/technology/amazon-employee-leave-errors.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/24/technology/amazon-employe...
- camhart 5y ago
  Your article is over a month old...
  - Sebguer 5y ago
    Do you think Amazon has changed its labor practices in the last month? The OP's point is that warehouse employees don't have the option to not show up.
    - camhart 5y ago
      With tornados you don't have a long heads up. You normally know there's a bad storm coming and that's it. It's not until the sirens go off that everyone stops what they're doing. Everybody in that town most likely went to work that day.
      - truculent 5y ago
        Is it commonplace in such areas for workplaces to have plans for such an event? Tornado shelters?
        camhart 5y ago
unpolloloco 5y ago
I've never been called off for the threat of severe non-winter weather anywhere. And the risk of being in a house hit by this tornado was probably higher than in the warehouse. The lack of tornado shelter is the problem here - or more likely, they probably had one but weren't instructed to use it...
KingMachiavelli 5y ago
The article says employees were notified to go to the shelter-in-place area? It's phrased a bit strangely so I don't know if it means 'our policy is to do X' or if it means 'we actually did X'. > Amazon said all employees were normally notified and directed to move to a designated, marked shelter-in-place location when a site was made aware of a tornado warning in the area. I have had to shelter in place for tornadoes a few times in school but that really meant getting every person in a single room so you could evacuate if needed. It sounds like either the tornado that hit the warehouse either formed too quickly and close by for them to respond or perhaps there was some process/training issue where someone forgot they needed to be watching the weather closely. It would also be easy to accidentally be getting weather news for a nearby but different location.
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  Having worked in an Amazon warehouse (as a contractor, but my wife was a direct Amazon employee in the same warehouse at a time), I can tell you that if they had any severe weather plans, none of the employees were aware of them. By "employees were notified" they likely mean "the MOD shit his pants and screamed 'RUUUUUUUUN' "
axiolite 5y ago
Tornadoes aren't hurricanes... There aren't hours and days of advanced notice. Only a few minutes. You can't shut down for every thunder storm on the astronomical chance it'll turn into a tornado and head in your direction. The article did somewhat address your questions: "Amazon said all employees were normally notified and directed to move to a designated, marked shelter-in-place location when a site was made aware of a tornado warning in the area. Emergency response training is provided to new employees and reinforced throughout the year, the company said." I hope they find out why their systems were inadequate and make sure it doesn't happen again.
- bryans 5y ago
  > There aren't hours and days of advanced notice. Only a few minutes. Every major weather and news organization was warning about "a very high likelihood of nocturnal tornadoes in the area" 12+ hours before they happened.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    Tornados are still very localized even with advance warning. The buildings across the street from the warehouse might well have been undamaged (I don't know, but certainly possible).
  - dave78 5y ago
    Are you aware though that those kinds of warnings are relatively common in the Midwest? We receive those kinds of advisories at least a few dozen times a year. It would be impractical for everyone to stay home from work every time the conditions are favorable for tornado formation. Plus, in this part of the country most people operate under the assumption that whatever building they're in at the time of a tornado warning will have an appropriate shelter. I don't know anything about this Amazon building and if they had appropriate shelters and if people had time to get there or what, but my point is more generally in this region of the country, "tornados possible today" is just not something people stay home from work for. And yes, that goes for office workers too. I've had to move to a storm shelter at my office many times due to a tornado warning during the work day. Furthermore, there's no guarantee that anyone would have been safer at home anyway. An EF3 tornado (what this supposedly was) will absolutely obliterate homes if they are in the direct path. (edit) Can't reply anymore, but you quoted this: "There aren't hours and days of advanced notice. Only a few minutes." and responded that there was plenty of notice of a possibility of tornados. The sentence after your quote said "You can't shut down for every thunder storm on the astronomical chance it'll turn into a tornado and head in your direction.", so it seemed to me like you were offering a rebuttal to the idea of "you can't shut down...". Sorry if I misunderstood what you were trying to say.
jfrunyon 5y ago
> Were there no warnings for the severe weather storm that would have prevented people coming in to work or allowed them to leave work early Bahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahaha The cost of them sending employees home during forecast severe weather would exceed the cost of a few of their employees dying, so yes there were warnings but no, the employees and contractors did NOT have the choice of not going in or of leaving early. I doubt they have any kind of severe weather plan as well. I know the Amazon warehouse I used to work out of didn't have any (here in tornado alley).
Tagbert 5y ago
Weather reports will callout serious weather conditions predicted in the next 48-24 hours. There are Tornado Watches that are issued when conditions are favorable for tornados to form. That will cover a several hour period where you should be aware and alert for threat notices. Then there are Tornado Alerts. These are issues when either someone has reported seeing a funnel cloud or the radar systems show a funnel type formation. These alerts usually cover a county sized area. When you see an alert you should seek shelter. This means ideally underground like a basement or storm shelter. Otherwise the most secure part of a building. Bathrooms are good because they are small with lots of walls but if the building comes down they offer limited protection. A large structure like a warehouse should have a designated storm shelter where extra protection is built into an area. This may be an office or bathroom with concrete or metal cladding that is securely anchored in the ground.

by bmitc 5y ago

floatingatoll 5y ago

Amazon penalizes their workers for bathroom breaks and replaced their HR team with a chatbot. This is allowed by federal labor laws, and Amazon’s primary source of retail revenue is externalizing human costs. Our tech and business communities believe regulations are harmful, and American politicians are inept. So I don’t see how we can prevent their abuse unless something changes; yet, no one wants to be the one that changes. A startup seems unlikely to help, but I remain optimistic that someone will change.

asteroidbelt 5y ago
> unless something changes People will be replaced by robots, this is what will change. It is already happening. McDonalds is canonical example of that.
- Hokusai 5y ago
  That is there best argument to fight now for good conditions, the more robots in the future the less leverage to negotiate. On a second note, if robots replace humans. Who is going to buy products? Because humans without jobs do not have money. Why have warehouses if nobody can but anything? That hypothetical future were robots replace workers is way more complicated that many people thinks.
  - asteroidbelt 5y ago
    > That is there best argument to fight now for good conditions, the more robots in the future the less leverage to negotiate. Humans in warehouse don’t have leverage and will have even less leverage in the future regardless of what they would be able to negotiate now. > Who is going to buy products? People making robots (designing, configuring, installing, fixing etc). Or people doing service work like nannies, teachers, massage therapists, waiters, diving instructors, receptionists etc. All the work which can be automated, but humans are still preferable than robots.
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    Science fiction has been making about universal basic income, zero cost basic living goods and housing, and comprehensive social support services. They also suffer a lot of wealth stratification and “we don’t talk about how we load cash into the money pump” blind spots. It’s the right question to ask; isn’t all revenue eventually deprecated by robotics? Thankfully, the reality is that we can’t create safe and resilient automatons, so we don’t have to worry about humans being replaced any time soon, if not for centuries. For example, we have landed zero fully autonomous rovers on Mars, and we have no autonomous rover repair bot, even if we did, so it would break down because we’re terrible at producing technology that works for a decade or more between failures. The wealthy humans who don’t like paying humans are thrilled to let us think that the wealth gaps are due to automation and globalization, because otherwise there’d be pitchfork mobs at their doors. But it’s not robots we need to be afraid of. It’s greed we need to be afraid of. That’s what drives Amazon to externalize humanity as a cost to be paid by anyone else but them. That’s what drives Uber to destroy taxis and then try to harvest automaton driver training data. There are no robotic taxis that can survive human beings who realize that the taxis are so risk-averse that they can be taken advantage of, cut off in traffic, trapped and damaged or harvested for parts, etc. We seriously are like fifty or a hundred years away from automation being able to do a single job for a year without human maintenance. Everyone’s afraid of robots replacing us (beep beep boop boop) but in reality we can’t even advance past VCRs that flash 12:00, and it’s been one week since Tesla locked their entire worldwide customer base out of their cars with a 500 Server Error. Automatons are not a relevant big bad. Here’s a simple litmus test for whether you should worry about automation at a macroeconomic level: How long has it been since your production web server responded with a single unhandled exception to a user? Not 404s, not “your cookie is defective, bounty hunter”, but like 429 Too Many or 500 Proxy time-out or whatever. Everyone will say “well, it’s really difficult to have such effective HA that you trap outbound errors and try to resolve them, and POST requests aren’t repeatable, and you can’t control the Internet”. If we can’t deliver static HTML without blips and outages, then we certainly don’t need to be afraid of a human-facing, human-serving automaton. It’s a great litmus test. I call it “zero nines”, because there’s no 9s in 100% uptime.
- cronix 5y ago
  Tesla Bot enters the chat. https://youtu.be/HUP6Z5voiS8?t=87 https://youtu.be/HUP6Z5voiS8?t=87
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  Given how often I have to reboot my car stereo — Subaru stereos are all powered by a decades-old Windows CE platform — I’m not thinking that McDonalds will successfully overcome the traumas of unattended automation to the degree that their reputation requires. Apparently something like a tenth or a quarter (I forget) of their automatic soft serve machines are down nationwide at any given second of the day. If a tenth of McDonalds were closed worldwide at any given open-hours time due to removing human workers and replacing them with current-grade automation, their reputation would be forever destroyed.
wolverine876 5y ago
> Our tech and business communities believe regulations are harmful, and American politicians are inept. Perhaps the latter is a convenient way to take action on the former?

pacerwpg 5y ago

Those things all sound like they might decrease profits.

authed 5y ago
6 deaths will reduce profits and something else.
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  Not by nearly as much as proper severe weather planning nationwide would.

romwell 5y ago

>Were there no warnings for the severe weather storm that would have prevented people coming in to work or allowed them to leave work early? There were warnings. Warnings that skipping work would get one fired[1]. And since the warehouse was not closed that day, the warning was: clock in on time, or else, weather be damned. >When I was working in the office... Well there's a difference between how office employees are treated, and how warehouse employees are treated. >Why doesn’t Amazon.... Because they can. And that, because their workforce isn't unionized and doesn't have the collective bargaining power to get what Amazon should give them. [1]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/24/technology/amazon-employee-leave-errors.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/24/technology/amazon-employe...

camhart 5y ago
Your article is over a month old...
- Sebguer 5y ago
  Do you think Amazon has changed its labor practices in the last month? The OP's point is that warehouse employees don't have the option to not show up.
  - camhart 5y ago
    With tornados you don't have a long heads up. You normally know there's a bad storm coming and that's it. It's not until the sirens go off that everyone stops what they're doing. Everybody in that town most likely went to work that day.
    - truculent 5y ago
      Is it commonplace in such areas for workplaces to have plans for such an event? Tornado shelters?
      - camhart 5y ago

unpolloloco 5y ago

I've never been called off for the threat of severe non-winter weather anywhere. And the risk of being in a house hit by this tornado was probably higher than in the warehouse. The lack of tornado shelter is the problem here - or more likely, they probably had one but weren't instructed to use it...

KingMachiavelli 5y ago

The article says employees were notified to go to the shelter-in-place area? It's phrased a bit strangely so I don't know if it means 'our policy is to do X' or if it means 'we actually did X'. > Amazon said all employees were normally notified and directed to move to a designated, marked shelter-in-place location when a site was made aware of a tornado warning in the area. I have had to shelter in place for tornadoes a few times in school but that really meant getting every person in a single room so you could evacuate if needed. It sounds like either the tornado that hit the warehouse either formed too quickly and close by for them to respond or perhaps there was some process/training issue where someone forgot they needed to be watching the weather closely. It would also be easy to accidentally be getting weather news for a nearby but different location.

jfrunyon 5y ago
Having worked in an Amazon warehouse (as a contractor, but my wife was a direct Amazon employee in the same warehouse at a time), I can tell you that if they had any severe weather plans, none of the employees were aware of them. By "employees were notified" they likely mean "the MOD shit his pants and screamed 'RUUUUUUUUN' "

axiolite 5y ago

Tornadoes aren't hurricanes... There aren't hours and days of advanced notice. Only a few minutes. You can't shut down for every thunder storm on the astronomical chance it'll turn into a tornado and head in your direction. The article did somewhat address your questions: "Amazon said all employees were normally notified and directed to move to a designated, marked shelter-in-place location when a site was made aware of a tornado warning in the area. Emergency response training is provided to new employees and reinforced throughout the year, the company said." I hope they find out why their systems were inadequate and make sure it doesn't happen again.

bryans 5y ago
> There aren't hours and days of advanced notice. Only a few minutes. Every major weather and news organization was warning about "a very high likelihood of nocturnal tornadoes in the area" 12+ hours before they happened.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  Tornados are still very localized even with advance warning. The buildings across the street from the warehouse might well have been undamaged (I don't know, but certainly possible).
- dave78 5y ago
  Are you aware though that those kinds of warnings are relatively common in the Midwest? We receive those kinds of advisories at least a few dozen times a year. It would be impractical for everyone to stay home from work every time the conditions are favorable for tornado formation. Plus, in this part of the country most people operate under the assumption that whatever building they're in at the time of a tornado warning will have an appropriate shelter. I don't know anything about this Amazon building and if they had appropriate shelters and if people had time to get there or what, but my point is more generally in this region of the country, "tornados possible today" is just not something people stay home from work for. And yes, that goes for office workers too. I've had to move to a storm shelter at my office many times due to a tornado warning during the work day. Furthermore, there's no guarantee that anyone would have been safer at home anyway. An EF3 tornado (what this supposedly was) will absolutely obliterate homes if they are in the direct path. (edit) Can't reply anymore, but you quoted this: "There aren't hours and days of advanced notice. Only a few minutes." and responded that there was plenty of notice of a possibility of tornados. The sentence after your quote said "You can't shut down for every thunder storm on the astronomical chance it'll turn into a tornado and head in your direction.", so it seemed to me like you were offering a rebuttal to the idea of "you can't shut down...". Sorry if I misunderstood what you were trying to say.

jfrunyon 5y ago

> Were there no warnings for the severe weather storm that would have prevented people coming in to work or allowed them to leave work early Bahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahaha The cost of them sending employees home during forecast severe weather would exceed the cost of a few of their employees dying, so yes there were warnings but no, the employees and contractors did NOT have the choice of not going in or of leaving early. I doubt they have any kind of severe weather plan as well. I know the Amazon warehouse I used to work out of didn't have any (here in tornado alley).

Tagbert 5y ago

Weather reports will callout serious weather conditions predicted in the next 48-24 hours. There are Tornado Watches that are issued when conditions are favorable for tornados to form. That will cover a several hour period where you should be aware and alert for threat notices. Then there are Tornado Alerts. These are issues when either someone has reported seeing a funnel cloud or the radar systems show a funnel type formation. These alerts usually cover a county sized area. When you see an alert you should seek shelter. This means ideally underground like a basement or storm shelter. Otherwise the most secure part of a building. Bathrooms are good because they are small with lots of walls but if the building comes down they offer limited protection. A large structure like a warehouse should have a designated storm shelter where extra protection is built into an area. This may be an office or bathroom with concrete or metal cladding that is securely anchored in the ground.