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.
Didn't Amazon "encourage" warehouse workers to post tweets praising their working conditions? (Who knows if they actually worked there though). Someone found them and saw that the accounts had a pattern, and the tweets were eerily similar as well.
With that in consideration, one has to ask whether they're also astroturfing HN...
I know in the twitter thread that went viral, most of the "Amazon workers" were actually satirical accounts, that kept ramping up the outrage.
The whole situation is shitty to be sure, and encouraging employees to defend you from Twitter mobs is stupid, but holy shit did a lot of people get baited hard during that whole ordeal.
No, I’m asking sincerely. They’re claiming knowledge of internal conversations at Amazon about these issues and then questioning whether the grandparent had supported warehouse workers in a protest action.
I don’t think it’s “flaming” to inquire more or less the same thing they did of the original poster, especially since they stake out public support around these issues as some kind of litmus test.
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.
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.
While it’s always a difficult moral quandary to sort out the ethics of a given employer, there are plenty of opportunities in the software world that won’t make you complicit in treating working class people the way that Amazon does:
> 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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
> "Also, do you work or are you paid for by Amazon?"
From the HN Guidelines:
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data."
Considering how many blind spots their warehouses must have, and how rarely many of the isles might be visited, I don’t think any special maleficence or irresponsibility is required for some down person to be missed for a while.
Not saying they shouldn’t be fixing this problem, just that it seems like a problem even the most perfectly humane company could easily have.
And you might want to check your paranoia. It doesn’t make you a reliable source of opinion to flat-out say you don’t believe anything made in defense of your predetermined villains.
Amazon barely makes any profit, you may have heard. It’s completely wrong to claim they could halve the work and double the wages. Such assertions make you come across as delusional and biased.
> “How can you not see a 6ft3in man laying on the ground and not help him within 20 minutes? A couple of days before, he put the wrong product in the wrong bin and within two minutes management saw it on camera and came down to talk to him about it,” Edward Foister said.
Amazon management was able to identify via a camera that the deceased individual previously put an item into the wrong bin and act within two minutes to speak to him about the mistake. Why can’t Amazon management use a security camera to detect the same individual laying on the ground and get to him in two minutes?
Yes, this quote is from that of the deceased individual’s brother, but Amazon could easily confirm, or refute this account.
It in no way excuses any negligence but the likely reason for that is frequency of events and how attention is structured in designs and processes. There are /far/ more cases of hurried workers misfiling items than having heart attacks. Algorithmic assistance would lack the events to recognize and humans would lack the attention to surveil everything.
They certainly should do better and make appropriate changes to practices but at that scale it would require something systemic by definition whether it is adding a tighter employee welfare patrols or say emergency fall detection gadgets that ask if they are okay and if not responded to within a certain time call for aid or similar.
>Amazon barely makes any profit, you may have heard.
Um... no. Accounting and tax wise, sure. But reality, no. If you dividend out all your "profit" before quarterlies to exec wages, you didn't make a profit. Amazon invested all profits into expansion. Thus, no profit. But they do make "a profit". These are the simple methods of not paying taxes. Tax dodging. It's a brand new thing. No one has ever done it before, let me tell ya'. There are better loopholes out there. I'd use the technical terms, but you're also under the illusion that Amazon is a non-profit. Might as well not bother.
>Considering how many blind spots their warehouses
He collapsed on camera. That's the opposite of a blind spot.
> the most perfectly humane company could easily have.
Misplaced item viewed on camera, 2 minute response time.
Collapse on camera, 20+ minute response time.
If they responded in the same amount of time as the item mistake, he literally could have survived the heart attack.
Amazon barely makes any profit because they invest nearly 100% of revenues back into new, non-revenue-generating initiatives, to avoid paying taxes and set themselves up for potential future revenue streams in new areas. They could have huge profits overnight if they wanted to, they'd just have to cut back on developing delivery drones and funding astroturfing campaigns on hacker news, and they'd also have to pay taxes.
> Considering how many blind spots their warehouses must have, and how rarely many of the isles might be visited, I don’t think any special maleficence or irresponsibility is required for some down person to be missed for a while.
You know, it just might be considered a little bit irresponsible to construct a physically demanding worksite where someone can have a major medical problem and not be noticed.
> Amazon barely makes any profit, you may have heard
And yet somehow Bezos has over a hundred billion dollars and a space program. Where did that come from if not profit? The fact that it doesn't go in the box marked "profit" on the accounts doesn't mean that it isn't the extraction of surplus value.
Amazon barely makes a profit.... you are just strengthening their paranoia by making such ludicrous claims! Such assertions you make come off across as delusional and biased. Jeff Bezos' net worth is billions and billions. Yet, no profit here. Give us a break and continue to collect your paycheck form Amazon.
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'm guessing most of those steps will be automated, or done in bulk, therefore only taking 1 or 2 seconds of actual human time.
For example, sticking labels on a box could be entirely automated, with the only time use being 30 minutes to replace the printer once every million labels when it wears out.
Sure, lots of it is automated. There has to be a fantastic level of automation to achieve that 1 minute per order.
Amazon is one of the most brutally efficient operations in world history. We read every week about workers afraid to take bathroom breaks, and according to the article here workers seem too busy to notice their coworkers dropping dead of heart attacks. The sentiment of us here at our keyboards saying "wow, I can't believe it takes more than 30 seconds to put my order in a box" seems really wrong.
>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.
Okay, then why aren't all these workers quitting their hated jobs in droves? Why would they care if they get fired, when they can just get another, even better job? If there were better jobs readily available to them, then Amazon would have no power over these workers.
"Why would they care if they get fired, when they can just get another, even better job?"
Have you considered... they cannot get an 'even better job'? I highly recommend reading "Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy". It details the lives of people working at TaskRabbit, Uber, AirBnB, and KitchenSurfing. It might also help explain the choices of why people are taking 'bad work' (that there isn't 'better work'.)
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.
It says "Six worker deaths in seven months; 13 deaths since 2013."
It doesn't go into any detail as to whether these workers actually died on the job. Six out of ~125,000 warehouse workers in one year would be double the average[1] (over all professions), but 13 out of ~100,000 over six years would be quite low.
> 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.
That sounds like medical malpractice, should be investigated on its own merits.
> Don't write this off as a series of unfortunate coincidences.
Yes, but also don't declare it a scandal before the facts are on the table.
> It says "Six worker deaths in seven months; 13 deaths since 2013." It doesn't go into any detail as to whether these workers actually died on the job.
One might reasonably assume that an article about workplace deaths isn't counting employees who slipped in the shower at home. But we don't have to assume: the linked Dirty Dozen list published in April 2019 says "Six workers have died at U.S. Amazon facilities or operations since November 2018." Six on-the-job deaths in six months, November to April. Not all of them were in warehouses, but all of them were preventable.
It also mentions (direct quotes):
* a high incidence of suicide attempts
* workers urinating in bottles because they are afraid to take breaks
* workers left without resources or income after on-the-job injuries
* the company treated illness as a “misdemeanor,” assigning a point that could have led to dismissal when [an undercover investigator] took a sick day
> One might reasonably assume that an article about workplace deaths isn't counting employees who slipped in the shower at home.
I disagree. With these kinds of sources, you can't reasonably assume this.
> But we don't have to assume: the linked Dirty Dozen list published in April 2019 says "Six workers have died at U.S. Amazon facilities or operations since November 2018." Six on-the-job deaths in six months, November to April. Not all of them were in warehouses, but all of them were preventable.
You're right, I should have paid more attention, because those deaths aren't Amazon employees at all and none of them are warehouse workers:
- Andrew Lindsayand Israel Espana Argote, contract workers, died when the wall of an Amazon warehouse collapsed during a severe storm in Baltimore in November 2018.
- Brien James Dauntfell to his death during construction of an Amazon warehouse in Oildale, CA in January 2019. Falls from a height are a well-known –and preventable –hazard in the construction industry, with long-established protocols to reduce risks. CalOSHA is investigating the incident.
- Aviators Ricky Blakely,Conrad Jules Askaand Sean Archuletadied in February when an Air Atlas plane, carrying cargo for Amazon, crashed into Trinity Bay, southeast of Texas. Blakely and Aska worked for Air Atlas and were members of the Airline Professional Association (APA), Teamsters Local 224. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating the incident.
None of these incidents hint at negligence on the part of Amazon.
This also explains why over the period of several years, Amazon workplace fatalities were well below average: They counted those properly. Working at Amazon is actually very safe, statistically speaking.
> None of these incidents hint at negligence on the part of Amazon.
Whether their paycheck is signed by Amazon directly or through a contracting service is irrelevant. Amazon is responsible for the firms it hires to run its operations, and the rules and standards it requires them to meet. If Amazon contractors are chronically negligent, then Amazon is negligent.
> Amazon is responsible for the firms it hires to run its operations, and the rules and standards it requires them to meet.
I don't disagree that Amazon has some responsibility here, but within reason. No evidence has been presented that Amazon has been neglectful. Accidents happen even in the safest of environments, but you also can't expect Amazon (or any other company) hiring a contractor to supervise them 100% of the time. It can't work that way.
> If Amazon contractors are chronically negligent, then Amazon is negligent.
Again, there is no known indicator that Amazon was being negligent in these cases, otherwise that would've been put forth. Whether or not such indicators will turn up during investigation, Amazon is already on that list. That's plain dishonesty.
>All six workers who died at Amazon facilities and operations during the past six months were employees of
other firms or contract workers, rather than full-time Amazon employees.
● Andrew Lindsay and Israel Espana Argote, contract workers, died when the wall of an Amazon
warehouse collapsed during a severe storm in Baltimore in November 2018.
● Brien James Daunt fell to his death during construction of an Amazon warehouse in Oildale, CA in
January 2019. Falls from a height are a well-known – and preventable – hazard in the construction
industry, with long-established protocols to reduce risks. CalOSHA is investigating the incident.
● Aviators Ricky Blakely, Conrad Jules Aska and Sean Archuleta died in February when an Air Atlas
plane, carrying cargo for Amazon, crashed into Trinity Bay, southeast of Texas. Blakely and Aska
worked for Air Atlas and were members of the Airline Professional Association (APA), Teamsters Local
224. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating the incident.
> All six workers who died at Amazon facilities and operations during the past six months were employees of other firms or contract workers, rather than full-time Amazon employees.
That changes nothing. They were working to Amazon's rules at Amazon operations. Amazon bears responsibility for the firms they choose to work with and the requirements they give them.
Okay, sure but contractors dying in accidents at a work site is a hugely different narrative than "Amazon is working their warehouse staff... to death" which is what is currently happening.
Given that Vermont's population includes children, elderly, infirm, etc, it doesn't seem logical to draw conclusions from comparing the death rate of the two populations.
There's probably an important demographic difference or two between Amazon employees and the entire population of Vermont. Like, how many 80-year-olds do you think work at Amazon?
The population of Vermont includes thousands of premature babies, bedridden elders, stage 4 cancer patients, and other vulnerable demographics that are not typically working at Amazon. Also, even at the worst rush times, Amazon employees are at work for maybe 60-70 hours a week out of 168 total. Dying off the clock isn't counted.
And you're ignoring the multiple specific instances of wrongdoing that I mentioned.
Yes, it goes without saying that people who are not physically able to either interview for, or be present at the location of the job, will not be able to perform the job.
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.
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.
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?
It's actually common enough in Japan that they have a word for it. And if you start to type "Japanese word for dying..." you get auto suggestions of "of overwork" and "at your desk," among others.
Around 45 to 50 years old, systems administrator, who had a heart attack. Did some work in the server room, but nothing strenuous as far as I know. I've worked in a number of buildings with 4 to 7 K employees, and with that large a population, heart attacks and strokes happen. People also have mental breakdowns, although they are usually not dangerous. Smaller locations with 50 to 100 young employees probably never experience it.
> 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.
That crosses into personal attack as well as breaking the site guideline against insinuations of astroturfing. It's not cool to do those things here, so please don't.
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'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.
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.