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.
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.
I left corporate for similar reasons. Got tired of people cracking jokes about crying at their desks, poor treatment of workers, and an especially terrible policy restricting your side projects.
It's a shame, because there was so much I loved about the culture in AWS.
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.
> 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.
I've been here for about three years, never saw any of that.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
>I was sort of hoping that every item I order on amazon has only perhaps 30 seconds of human time going into it
Oh sweet summer child, no. Humans drive the truck to the FC, humans unload the truck and stack the pallets, humans move the pallets, humans unstack the pallets for the stowers, humans stow the goods, humans pick the goods, humans pack the goods, humans deliver the goods. Actual automation is limited only to what is cost-effective, and human labor is more cost effective than automation in most cases.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 sick and injured employees. http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dir...
Don't write this off as a series of unfortunate coincidences.
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.
> 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.
[+] [-] burger_moon|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] stakecounter|6 years ago|reply
Also, some people care enough to sign their names next to quotes in support of warehouse worker strikes: https://medium.com/@amazonemployeesclimatejustice/quotes-of-...
[+] [-] Pfhreak|6 years ago|reply
It's a shame, because there was so much I loved about the culture in AWS.
[+] [-] ct0|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] victords|6 years ago|reply
I've been here for about three years, never saw any of that.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] blakesterz|6 years ago|reply
● 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_Dir...
[+] [-] theguppydream|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lonelappde|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsfyu404ed|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] theguppydream|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] mr_tristan|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] watt3rpig|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kiterunner2346|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 2rsf|6 years ago|reply
> 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...
[+] [-] corodra|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] londons_explore|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mrfredward|6 years ago|reply
Edit: CNN says it takes a minute of human labor as of 2016 (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.
[+] [-] krapp|6 years ago|reply
Oh sweet summer child, no. Humans drive the truck to the FC, humans unload the truck and stack the pallets, humans move the pallets, humans unstack the pallets for the stowers, humans stow the goods, humans pick the goods, humans pack the goods, humans deliver the goods. Actual automation is limited only to what is cost-effective, and human labor is more cost effective than automation in most cases.
[+] [-] ceejayoz|6 years ago|reply
Which means you'll want 260k so you can make them all half-time and keep benefits to a minimum.
[+] [-] pardavis|6 years ago|reply
Also, keep in mind that there are truck drivers, vending supply stockers, safety specialists, IT folks, etc supporting the whole operation.
[+] [-] kube-system|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ovi256|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mapcars|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foxhop|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kube-system|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] macintux|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrowley|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onetimemanytime|6 years ago|reply
Yeah, in just 45784512 minutes. Actually less, but 20 minutes is not minutes when it comes to heart attacks.
[+] [-] chriscappuccio|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] stevespang|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Merrill|6 years ago|reply
Any large employer will have people die on the job.
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|6 years ago|reply
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 sick and injured employees. http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dir...
Don't write this off as a series of unfortunate coincidences.
[+] [-] x3ro|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corodra|6 years ago|reply
He collapsed on camera. 20+ minute response.
[+] [-] geogra4|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gridlockd|6 years ago|reply
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 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-dangerou...
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|6 years ago|reply
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