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Comment by jrnichols | Hacker News Reader

189 calls over a 5 year period across 46 different facilities, and the original article even notes that many of those were not work related at all.

It seems to try to lean towards "Amazon warehouse jobs are causing people to think about killing themselves" but the opposite could also be said - Amazon was able to engage these same employees with suicidal ideations and get them help. Only one seems to have actually killed himself, and that's after a bipolar diagnosis.

What is the suicide rate in other similar positions? How about call centers or other jobs with strict adherence to clock in/out or task time? It's easy to blame Apple or Amazon or Flextronics, but how does it compare to the rest of society?

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«The Daily Beast noted that its report was "not evidence that Amazon staffers experience suicidal episodes more often than other American workers, in or out of a warehouse."»

This articles is just click bait and slander.

A written defamatory statement is libel. Spoken defamatory statements are slander.

Part of the problem with organizations publishing stories like this and calling it “news” is that there is a higher bar for proving defamation against a news origination;

Where the defamatory comments are made by the media or where they are directed towards a public figure, the First Amendment requires that the defamed person must prove the offender published a defamatory statement with knowledge that the statement was false or with a reckless disregard of its falsity.

[1] - https://rtdna.org/article/a_closer_look_at_defamation_in_the...

I wonder if the 911 call rate is any higher than the general non working population as a whole, sitting in private residences on couches.

189 calls / 5 years = 37.8 calls per year

37.8 calls / 46 warehouses = 0.82 calls per year, per warehouse

Now assume for a moment, this is probably a low estimate, that a single warehouse has a peak day shift population of 75 persons...

One of the things I have learned first hand, doing VoIP E911 and site address registration for E911 purposes, if you have a sufficiently large number of people (or in my case, live / on-net individual VoIP service circuits), there will be a certain statistically "normal" volume of 911 calls no matter what those people are doing.

Whether they're in a office of a company that rents two floors of a 350,000 square foot office tower in a downtown of a major city, sitting on their couches in a single family home in a suburb playing videos games on their xbox, attending a music festival, literally any imaginable human activity.

I am not trying to say that the Amazon warehouse jobs are not borderline abusive and a staff turnover meat-grinder, they probably are. Have read numerous reports from journalists that have gone "undercover" with the temp/staffing agencies Amazon uses to hire workers for their warehouses. It doesn't paint a pretty picture.

> Whether they're in a office of a company that rents two floors of a 350,000 square foot office tower in a downtown of a major city, sitting on their couches in a single family home in a suburb playing videos games on their xbox, attending a music festival, literally any imaginable human activity.

This is not 189 total 911 calls - this is 189 calls for emotional distress.

Personal experience dictates that on-the-job suicidal thoughts are vastly diminished compared to netflix/xbox suicidal thoughts. When you are actively engaged and distracted, you are less likely to be wrapped up in self-destructive thoughts.

The best comparison would be do find numbers of on-the-job emotional distress calls from Walmart, McDonalds, UPS, or other large employers. I have no idea how Amazon compares, but 189 over 5 years intuitively seems high.

Compare apples to apples if you want to compare.

On top of that, remember Amazon has its own emergency staff on hand so they probably don't call 911 when their own emergency staff resolves the situation.

I was one of those Amcare employees for a 6 month contract. The only first aid provider in a warehouse. I ended up placing 1 911 call for a seizure, and that was it. Zero mental health issues. Most everything was minor injuries, and many of those seemed like borderline workers comp fraud too.

Amazon has 8 or 9 warehouses in the Dallas Ft Worth area alone. I wonder how many 911 calls they've generated and what for.

"It's this isolating colony of hell where people having breakdowns is a regular occurrence," former Amazon employee Jace Crouch told the Daily Beast. An anonymous employee told the Daily Beast that the company treated its workers like "robots."

They have 200,000 employees. I bet I could find at least one in the warehouse up the street who believes Bezos is an alien lizard lord from another planet. The (anonymous) beliefs and observations of one person aren't even close to relevant.

Instead of mentioning 911 calls the article ought to have been about the working conditions and have more in depth interviews with people like Jace. The reporter probably didn’t have time to do such a piece and Business Insider probably doesn’t think it’ll be worth the investment to do such a piece. Instead we get an article that detractors can embrace and supporters can point out its obvious flaws.

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