The Life and Death of an Amazon Warehouse Temp | Hacker News Reader

The Life and Death of an Amazon Warehouse Temp

highline.huffingtonpost.com

40 pointsmayneack11 comments

The death was a tragedy. But not even the family blames Amazon for it. And the article does not really point to any evidence that the company was responsible. So I'm not sure why the its name is there in the headline. If Jeff had died while working at the building supply store would there have been an article about the life and time of workers at mom and pop stores?

The working conditions as described are appalling.

How so?

Most people in the US need to exercise more, right?

A very large fraction need to lose weight.

We weren't exactly designed to sit all day in a chair, were we?

I believe these bits from Amazon:

However, the company said it provides prospective employees with extensive information, including a video, so they understand the physically taxing nature of the work. “IT’S GOING TO BE HARD,” one brochure warns. “You will be on your FEET the entire shift and walking upwards of 12 MILES per shift. (yeah, that's really far!) ... YOU WILL HAVE TO: LIFT, BEND, SQUAT, REACH & MOVE (there are no sit-down positions.) DON'T BE AFRAID; YOU CAN DO IT.”

A former supervisor at Jeff’s warehouse described the safety culture as “very, very methodical,” with “exceptionally high standards.” Amazon, she said, required Amcare to call 911 in certain situations even when there was no obvious emergency —say, if a worker's blood pressure reached a certain level. Still, she said, some workers were clearly unprepared for the pace. “We had people who were bookkeepers or laid-off accountants or other desk-type jobs,” the supervisor said. “We tried to be very, very upfront. ... I said, ‘You are going to hurt after the first week. ... You are going to crawl into bed and pray you can get out in the morning.’”

And I believe that some people are just not going to be up to the requirements, and others, apparently including this poor fellow, are going to die like the student athletes we read about every once in a while.

Most people in the US need to exercise more, right?

Go try their challenging "workout" for a few weeks, and report back to us. At that point you can tell us if it feels like "exercise."

This is the very reason the US has workplace rights that were fought for by unions. The weekend, forty-hour weeks, vacation, sick leave - unions fought hard for every benefit. Without regulation and oversight, companies will gravitate towards just this kind of disregard for their employees in the name of profit. Unions have their own set of problems, but given one group that's allied with protecting employees and another group that's allied with profit, I'll pick the one on the side of the employees every time because the alternative benefits a much smaller group.

There's no evidence because no one bothered to investigate it to determine a cause. While Amazon didn't go to great lengths to cover up his death, I get the impression the company didn't expend a lot of energy into determining what happened. The basic story of this article is that Integrity employees who work at Amazon's warehouses are expendable, second class citizens.

If the owner of the "mom and pop" had a net worth of $48.7b[1], based on Jeff's toilings, I'd say his death would be very article-worthy.

[1] http://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/t...

It's there to server the narrative: What the future of low-wage work really looks like.

I think the point is more that the current system of temping is being used to game employees to provide work without the company doling out any sort of benefits.

Entitlements like sick pay, holidays, health etc. things we take for granted in the West are rapidly being eroded by effective micro management of temp hours to ensure low skilled jobs can be fulfilled by a rolling pool of labour.

We're seeing it in the US, in the UK and no doubt across other nations which previously provided low skilled workers some modicum of protection in the past before effective temp management became so prevalent.

Those benefits ultimately came out of higher prices for consumers. So if the public still wants the benefits to continue, it just has to campaign for public provision for those benefits through higher taxes or contribute to private income transfer programs. That would be fairer since who gets the benefits will be decided on a democratic basis and not on who was well-connected or lucky enough to land a job in a unionized industry.

I'm not in the US, but from the news it seems that higher taxes are very unpopular there. So demonizing corporations seems to be an easy way out where you can empathize with unskilled workers while at the same time enjoying the benefits that come from the cheapening of their labour.

Capitalism, the end game.

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