- On 5 Sep, 2021 he asked his team lead to assign extra help because he and his colleagues couldn't keep up with the amount of work. An argument between them ensued but some help was assigned at the end of the day.
- In the morning of 6 Sep, 2021 he felt stabbing in his chest and had difficulties breathing. He asked the team lead to call a medic (there were medical care worked employed by Amazon) but he refused and offered to walk him to the medic instead.
- He passed out on his way to the medic and never regained consciousness.
>Grzegorz (name changed) works in Amazon's warehouse in Sady near Poznań, who agreed to anonymously tell about the events of the beginning of September. - I remember that the day before, on September 5, this man asked the leader to assign someone to help, because he was not working anymore - he says. - The leader refused. The man who died later was to go on the next day with a complaint to the OPS manager, i.e. the main manager of a given department. He did not make it anymore. He was a very hardworking man. I wouldn't be able to refuse him anything. When he had breaks, he ate a sandwich and quickly returned to work. Look for such people with a candle. It really turned out what kind of insurance we have. We are meaningless pawns.
>According to Grzegorz, one piece of information has not been made public.
>- The very beginning of this event was not treated as an approach of man to man. The man, who reported the problem with catching his breath, was walking to the rescuer on his own quite a long distance, from point A to point B. It was a culpable mistake. In case of shortness of breath, he should not go there. The leader was walking beside him, but he was not helping him, not even as a support. Due to the safety rules related to COVID-19. It was the same leader who had refused to help the man the day before. They treated you like garbage, like typical waste
My friend is a very hard-working person. So, he was working in a Amazon warehouse in Scotland. In two years, he never missed a day or was late.
Then, he got this terrible thing when you get high temperature, nausea etc. He still went to work, commute taking hour. He was barely able to sit in a bus, because his face was green and his head was heavy and he was almost puking.
He gets to work and explains this. Manager tells him: "You can either start work, or you can go now, but then, don't come tomorrow". So, he did exactly that.
It's not the first case of work-related death in an Amazon warehouse in Poland; nor it is the first such case in Amazon globally. Most of those deaths happen because of appalling work conditions or management incompetence.
In normal companies, an accident like this leads to an overhaul of the working systems, internal audits, conversations with employees, and so on. So many IT companies have post-mortems for what can objectively be called the silliest stuff (compared to an actual death of an actual person). But here is Amazon, with its history of endangering its workforce, that once again will do nothing.
How do you diagnose this as death from overwork? This seems a convenient view of the incident for those who want to push particular narrative against a popular boogeyman.
Of course Amazon has a duty of care to those suffering medical problems at work, but how do you jump from that to "death of overworking"?
For those who can't read Polish: apparently what happened was that he passed out and became unconscious while working on the morning shift in the warehouse. He never recovered.
For many of us this is going to be the future, die at work. I think it is unfair to make people work over 50 given that you likely to be dead by the age 70, making the retirement age 65+ is crazy. It would be much better to split 20+ - 20-30 - 20+ (childhood, working, retired) our life especially for warehouse workers. Please do not tell me we do not have the money for this when most of the wealth is owned by the top 1% who horde it, hide it and not paying any tax on it. We blow money on wars(on terror, on drugs and so on) and yet we do not have money for people to retire and enjoy life? I do not think so.
I would love to work part-time
in a few years, but the US benefits and labor structure disincentivizes this.
The biggest trap of all is health insurance, where good benefits are impossible for the average person to afford; yet nationalized healthcare is out of reach until 65.
Instead of this all-or-nothing approach; I wish Medicare phased-in gradually, with supplemental insurance covering the gaps.
How does someone die of overworking? At what point does one decide "fuck my health, I'll die for BigCorp"? And, where I'm going: a company will always ask as much work as possible from as few employees at possible. Up to what point is this the personal responsibility of the employee?
How much would you be willing to work if you'd have to pay rent, credits, take care that your wife and children get enough to eat? Also there's some bills because your wifes' car broke down and needed repair, the children need new clothes and there's this school trip coming up and also the roof is leaky and needs to be fixed which you can't do by yourself.
Long term short: While it's easy to judge from the outside, people will put their health in second place a lot of times if there are other problems.
In general, it works like this: you notice a company is fucked up, and you leave. In theory, you could go to a competitor who offers better work conditions.
You don't go working in an Amazon warehouse if you have other options in life. It's for people who lost hope, in a way. According to the article, the family was very poor and the wife feels guilty he died trying to provide for her meds.
In Poland, there is a strong mentality of overworking yourself, especially when it comes to physical work. Sometimes colloquially referred to as "kultura zapierdolu". Basically, especially for older generations, if you don't come home from work exhausted you didn't work hard enough. And if you didn't work hard enough, you don't deserve to get paid.
Amazon is certainly worse than the average company domiciled in the US, but it is quantitatively and not qualitatively different. Capitalism requires employers to extract as much work out of employees as possible, lest competition overtake them.
These kind of problems are invisible from stratosphere.
Safety of employers should be a priority for employers, spending a time at work should be less risky for health than being at home. Even for potentially more dangerous tasks, the safety has to scale accordingly.
I can hear quite often that work conditions at warehouses are terrible. How it's on the the IT side? Do they have the same culture? Is the IT part somehow supporting all workers on Amazon? Because if people are not consolidated - the secondary treatment of other jobs will continue.
I feel sorry for his family and it shouldn't happen. Maybe Amazon conditions and procedures aren't good enough, but people should pay attention to their bodies telling them something is off. When you're 49 it's no longer rinse-repeat, you can't just continuously run your engine at 120%…
But you need to make money. Not everyone is in a position where they can afford taking unpaid time off or quit a job because it's unhealthy. It's the employers responsibility to make sure workers can handle the workload.
I wish Amazon employs 50% more workforce and then force cut working hours for workers to 8 hours / day. Aka, you can't do overtime even if you want to.
But may be they did it. Or the workers don't want it. Or something else. It's not like Amazon didn't think of it themselves.
I worked a string of temp jobs throughout college - usually via temp agencies. I too, did some similar gigs to Amazon warehouse.
Usually, both employee and employer want the overtime - more so for the employee, if the OT pay is attractive. When I worked night shifts in a mail sorting facility (11PM to 11AM), the OT pay was almost 100%
Employees want it because they can make more money without having to balance multiple gigs/jobs, employers because less employees = less paperwork and less people to manage.
Sadly, the titans of industry have become very focused on short time horizons.
Giving employees reasonable working hours, reasonable working conditions, and reasonable pay for the cost of living is trivially the right move if your ambition is to build a lasting monument of human accomplishment and a lasting legacy of human kinship and solidarity.
The last thing I wanted at 18 was not being able to earn 50 to 100% more an hour.
Also what your proposing is what the company did to everyone who didn’t work overtime but instead focused on working more than part time hours, so they would qualify for full time hours and thus benefits.
Work 2 months at 40 hrs per week? Great, have a month with no hours. Voila, now after 3 months your average hours per week is part time.
Yeah this was a union shop too, so don’t want to hear any nonsense from anyone about how great things would be if a union was skimming an additional 10% off the workers pay.
I wish people who weren’t doing the work would fuck right off with interfering with other peoples working relationships. Unions, mgmt, govt, workers comp, it’s all fucked and skims massively off people doing the work and towards the lifers.
Sorry if this comes off as a personal attack, but it brings me back to that life and the struggles everyone is going through. You feel fucked from every direction at a warehouse.
I think big corporations like Amazon should be more tightly regulated. They could easily afford cutting hours by 50% and quadrupling the pay at the same time, so workers wouldn't have to do overtime, but this is a exploitative and greed driven business. They also don't pay right amount of tax and because of that all workers are taxed more to make up for it.
The world has chosen to increasingly kneel to Billionaire CEO's who think pursuit of profit through over-working people is completely fine & dandy. This death can be directly attributed to Bezos who I believe is a well-adjusted sociopath.
It's so sad that only few hundreds kilometers west in Germany relatively interesting and high paid tech jobs at Amazon are available, and over here they advertise in city centers their warehouse jobs... happy, fulfilling, rewarding, young! Become a warehouse-kapo so consumers in Germany can receive their packages!
I'm from Poland and few years ago as a student I was working one night serving dinners in Wroclaw Amazon warehouse as a side job. Besides the fact that some people in night shifts were clearly under the influence and most were either really old, or really young, the whole thing looks like a prison. Motivational texts on the walls, bland colors, everyone was sad and depressed, metal detectors and security checks everywhere. I genuinely felt bad for people working there. There were a lot of stories that they count your steps to force you to work more but I don't know how much of these were true. Generally Amazon(warehouse) here attracts really the people who have nowhere else to go and is considered 'last resort' kind of job around here.
I get the vibe that you think Amazon treats Germany better. Amazon has warehouses in basically every country and treats their warehouse employees like crap in every country. Amazon as far as I know treats all of their employees like crap.
You do know, that there are 24 fulfillment centers in Germany alone and each one of them needs the same type of work, that is being done in each of 7 centers in Poland? Because your comment suggests that the hard work is being done only in Poland.
It does sound horrible, especially when you (clearly didn't) read that the entire incident was likely avoidable had his line manager taken his visible symptoms seriously and not told him to continue the manual labour until it was too late.
Your desensitised hot take of 'well this stuff just happens' is appalling in a number of ways and is exactly the attitude that trickles down through businesses when it's someone else that's stuck at the thin edge of the wedge.
An excellent example of missing the forest for the trees. The abominable working conditions in Amazon distribution centers is well documented. It is absolutely to be expected that they'll a) not be transparent about the number of such incidents and b) those conditions are (strongly) correlated with an increased rate of such conditions.
I know it sounds horrible, but people die during work, and it doesn't indicate any wrongdoing on any part. Highlighting individual cases is click baiting.
People do die at work quite often, but in this case there appears there'll be an inquest and investigation in to whether or not Amazon is at fault (From the article via Google Translate "Amazon is waiting for information from the prosecutor's office and the results of the investigation.").
We shouldn't assume Amazon aren't negligent just yet, just as we shouldn't assume they are. We don't know. Citing statistics on how many hours there are in a day isn't helpful.
[+] [-] gregnavis|4 years ago|reply
- He was a water spider in an Amazon warehouse.
- On 5 Sep, 2021 he asked his team lead to assign extra help because he and his colleagues couldn't keep up with the amount of work. An argument between them ensued but some help was assigned at the end of the day.
- In the morning of 6 Sep, 2021 he felt stabbing in his chest and had difficulties breathing. He asked the team lead to call a medic (there were medical care worked employed by Amazon) but he refused and offered to walk him to the medic instead.
- He passed out on his way to the medic and never regained consciousness.
- An investigation was opened on 7 Sep, 2021.
[+] [-] tester34|4 years ago|reply
>Grzegorz (name changed) works in Amazon's warehouse in Sady near Poznań, who agreed to anonymously tell about the events of the beginning of September. - I remember that the day before, on September 5, this man asked the leader to assign someone to help, because he was not working anymore - he says. - The leader refused. The man who died later was to go on the next day with a complaint to the OPS manager, i.e. the main manager of a given department. He did not make it anymore. He was a very hardworking man. I wouldn't be able to refuse him anything. When he had breaks, he ate a sandwich and quickly returned to work. Look for such people with a candle. It really turned out what kind of insurance we have. We are meaningless pawns.
>According to Grzegorz, one piece of information has not been made public.
>- The very beginning of this event was not treated as an approach of man to man. The man, who reported the problem with catching his breath, was walking to the rescuer on his own quite a long distance, from point A to point B. It was a culpable mistake. In case of shortness of breath, he should not go there. The leader was walking beside him, but he was not helping him, not even as a support. Due to the safety rules related to COVID-19. It was the same leader who had refused to help the man the day before. They treated you like garbage, like typical waste
[+] [-] theragra|4 years ago|reply
My friend is a very hard-working person. So, he was working in a Amazon warehouse in Scotland. In two years, he never missed a day or was late.
Then, he got this terrible thing when you get high temperature, nausea etc. He still went to work, commute taking hour. He was barely able to sit in a bus, because his face was green and his head was heavy and he was almost puking.
He gets to work and explains this. Manager tells him: "You can either start work, or you can go now, but then, don't come tomorrow". So, he did exactly that.
[+] [-] marchewkowa|4 years ago|reply
A similar case from Amazon, where the worker was lying unconscious for 20 minutes before receiving help (he died): https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/17/amazon-wa...
In normal companies, an accident like this leads to an overhaul of the working systems, internal audits, conversations with employees, and so on. So many IT companies have post-mortems for what can objectively be called the silliest stuff (compared to an actual death of an actual person). But here is Amazon, with its history of endangering its workforce, that once again will do nothing.
[+] [-] hehetrthrthrjn|4 years ago|reply
Of course Amazon has a duty of care to those suffering medical problems at work, but how do you jump from that to "death of overworking"?
[+] [-] wyclif|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StreamBright|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nobodyandproud|4 years ago|reply
The biggest trap of all is health insurance, where good benefits are impossible for the average person to afford; yet nationalized healthcare is out of reach until 65.
Instead of this all-or-nothing approach; I wish Medicare phased-in gradually, with supplemental insurance covering the gaps.
[+] [-] vadfa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martin_a|4 years ago|reply
Long term short: While it's easy to judge from the outside, people will put their health in second place a lot of times if there are other problems.
[+] [-] hdjjhhvvhga|4 years ago|reply
You don't go working in an Amazon warehouse if you have other options in life. It's for people who lost hope, in a way. According to the article, the family was very poor and the wife feels guilty he died trying to provide for her meds.
[+] [-] skocznymroczny|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] praptak|4 years ago|reply
Predators select vulnerable people and gradually accustom them to worse and worse conditions.
[+] [-] Fckd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alimbada|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asteroidbelt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beaconstudios|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Emma_Goldman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trzeci|4 years ago|reply
Safety of employers should be a priority for employers, spending a time at work should be less risky for health than being at home. Even for potentially more dangerous tasks, the safety has to scale accordingly.
I can hear quite often that work conditions at warehouses are terrible. How it's on the the IT side? Do they have the same culture? Is the IT part somehow supporting all workers on Amazon? Because if people are not consolidated - the secondary treatment of other jobs will continue.
[+] [-] rightbyte|4 years ago|reply
Are they? I'd say it is common knowledge Amazon treat their workers really bad.
[+] [-] wtk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dx034|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] habibur|4 years ago|reply
But may be they did it. Or the workers don't want it. Or something else. It's not like Amazon didn't think of it themselves.
[+] [-] TrackerFF|4 years ago|reply
Usually, both employee and employer want the overtime - more so for the employee, if the OT pay is attractive. When I worked night shifts in a mail sorting facility (11PM to 11AM), the OT pay was almost 100%
Employees want it because they can make more money without having to balance multiple gigs/jobs, employers because less employees = less paperwork and less people to manage.
[+] [-] benreesman|4 years ago|reply
Giving employees reasonable working hours, reasonable working conditions, and reasonable pay for the cost of living is trivially the right move if your ambition is to build a lasting monument of human accomplishment and a lasting legacy of human kinship and solidarity.
[+] [-] _3u10|4 years ago|reply
The last thing I wanted at 18 was not being able to earn 50 to 100% more an hour.
Also what your proposing is what the company did to everyone who didn’t work overtime but instead focused on working more than part time hours, so they would qualify for full time hours and thus benefits.
Work 2 months at 40 hrs per week? Great, have a month with no hours. Voila, now after 3 months your average hours per week is part time.
Yeah this was a union shop too, so don’t want to hear any nonsense from anyone about how great things would be if a union was skimming an additional 10% off the workers pay.
I wish people who weren’t doing the work would fuck right off with interfering with other peoples working relationships. Unions, mgmt, govt, workers comp, it’s all fucked and skims massively off people doing the work and towards the lifers.
Sorry if this comes off as a personal attack, but it brings me back to that life and the struggles everyone is going through. You feel fucked from every direction at a warehouse.
[+] [-] varispeed|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pietrovismara|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unityByFreedom|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j7ake|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lenkite|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FrankZappa42|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YounesDz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] durnygbur|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atraac|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] that_guy_iain|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tom_code|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] insidedivision|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] siva7|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KptMarchewa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omgwtfusb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianleeclark|4 years ago|reply
Some casual holocaust trivialization on a Wednesday.
[+] [-] bserge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thriftwy|4 years ago|reply
Which really vacuum cleans all lands easy of Germany but that's another point.
[+] [-] charbonneau|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ginden|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] weego|4 years ago|reply
Your desensitised hot take of 'well this stuff just happens' is appalling in a number of ways and is exactly the attitude that trickles down through businesses when it's someone else that's stuck at the thin edge of the wedge.
[+] [-] brnt|4 years ago|reply
These jobs are not good for your health.
[+] [-] onion2k|4 years ago|reply
People do die at work quite often, but in this case there appears there'll be an inquest and investigation in to whether or not Amazon is at fault (From the article via Google Translate "Amazon is waiting for information from the prosecutor's office and the results of the investigation.").
We shouldn't assume Amazon aren't negligent just yet, just as we shouldn't assume they are. We don't know. Citing statistics on how many hours there are in a day isn't helpful.
[+] [-] aylmao|4 years ago|reply
> This man had trouble catching his breath. The leader told him to go a long distance on his own. This is a culpable mistake.
[1]: https://gloswielkopolski-pl.translate.goog/smierc-w-amazonie...