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I have a friend who works in an Amazon warehouse and asked him about it:

"It's fine. Pay is decent. I get to do a lot of walking, which is nice. I'll probably look for something more long term."

I asked him about all of the horror stories and stress I've read about:

"You work in an office. Are you saying there isn't any stress or bad bosses or horror stories?"

Point taken. They have 200,000 warehouse employees. On average, the experience will be 'meh'. Just like most jobs.

But I am more troubled about how this article conflates stress and mental health, and the thin insinuation that contemplating suicide is a normal response to a bad workplace. As if one can be a workplace upgrade or job transfer away from eliminating pain. Or that people in good jobs don't deserve to feel bad.

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It all depends on how many people work there. A job at a restaurant will be 10x more stressful and will face people issues than a job as a coder in downtown San Francisco. I think people need to adjust their expectations. All this bad press has not hurt people willing to work in Amazon's warehouses even in one of the best job markets so I think Amazon warehouses are at par with their industry standards compared to Walmart, Costco or Target.

I will trust market signals over journalists and experts any day.

> I will trust market signals over journalists and experts any day.

i think it’s a balance, market signals alone aren’t enough imo. it’s multitude of sources that are important, and then to correlate with data that indicates a trend in one direction or another... “market signals” don’t necessarily take into account morals or “human dignity” etc... if we just relied on “market signals” we would arguably still have child labor and (even more) lax labor laws because desperate people will fill any role they can get to “fit the market”

that being said “journalism” now a days is more and more clickbait and sensationalism (profit motive at work?) so i can totally understand the sentiment....

I respectfully disagree. I know your opinions come from your good heart but they are actually wrong. Market is way better at ensuring dignity rather than experts and market eliminated child labour and not labour laws. If at all labour laws such as minimum wage have deeply hurt some of the most vulnerable young people like the black teenagers from poor neighborhoods. Personally even I had difficulty understanding these basic concepts when I lived in India but when I arrived in USA and wondered why this society has achieved so much I found the answers.

I am not a blind follower of market and I understand the need for an effective regulation but it should revolve more around people's negative rights rather than abstract concepts like morality or dignity. I do not think people in DC or Sacramento give two shits about real dignity or morality at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNj2g2_dfkI

Everything is about degree. Nobody in my office has ever called 911 due to something like this. I have no idea where this rates in comparison to other warehouses. But also it's hard to measure because maybe Amazon calls 911 to report this where other companies wouldn't -- similar to Apple calling an ambulance over people walking into glass doors just to protect themselves.

How are you sure? Talk to someone in HR and you may be surprised how many ways that people can lash out or cry out for help.

I've worked in warehouses. I've never worked in an Amazon warehouse, but I have worked with people who have, who've told me it's the worst warehouse they've ever worked in, and they refuse to buy anything from Amazon.com today because of that experience.

I've also worked in offices, and while it can be stressful I've never seen anyone urinating in a garbage can because they weren't given time to go to the bathroom. I think I would have noticed that.

I work in an Amazon warehouse. The first two months I was in the worst pain of my life, after that, the worst problems were backaches and tedium and complaints about the bad UI with their stow app. I'm not going to lie, though, VTO is a hell of a drug if you can afford it.

Some people can deal with the stress, some people can't. I don't think it's a strength/weakness thing either. It's just one of those jobs where you're perfectly aware of the degree to which you're a cog in a machine, and everything you do has to meet metrics.

If you want a job where you feel as if you matter as a person, or a job that brings you a sense of meaning, satisfaction or long term security, L1 at an Amazon warehouse isn't for you.

I wouldn't consider the horror stories to be typical, given the size of the network. I also wouldn't dismiss them, given the culture and the incentives Amazon can create. If someone told me there was a warehouse somewhere where the AMs shocked the pickers with cattle prods, I'd believe that Amazon would try it at least once, if they could get away with it, just to see how many seconds they could shave off their time.

Fair, but still a matter of degree regardless.

It's more likely that the type of people working in Amazon warehouses have less access to resources (friends, therapists, etc), so 911 is the only place to call.

Which is a much bigger issue than just Amazon.

There's zero evidence to support any one theory. What we know is what's in the article -- that Amazon had 189 incidents in five years.

I'm reminded of the articles a few years ago calling out Apple for Foxconn employee suicides. When you looked at the numbers it turned out that the suicide rate for Foxconn employees was substantially lower than normal for China.

> According to a 2011 Centre for Disease Control and Prevention report, the country has a high suicide rate with approximately 22.23 deaths per 100,000 persons. In 2010, the worst year for workplace suicides at Foxconn with a total of 14 deaths, its employee count was a reported 930,000 people. [1]

That's 0.0015% at Foxconn, 0.0222% overall. In other words, Foxconn employees committed suicide at only 7% the normal rate. And that was the worst year for Foxconn.

But it didn't stop a whole lot of news stories picking up the "Employees at Apple's factories are killing themselves" angle.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides#Analysis

Comparing Foxconn employees to the general populace is not necessarily the right cohort for comparison. For starters, the natural prior for suicides is that you would expect unemployed people to have a higher suicide rate than employed people. Nevertheless, I think that Foxconn's suicide rate was shown to be in line with the typical suicide rate for Chinese manufacturers.

> But it didn’t stop a whole lot of news stories picking up the "Employees at Apple's factories are killing themselves" angle.

Conveniently leaving out that Apple isn’t the only American tech company using Foxconn

I've worked a number of warehouse jobs, including at Amazon, I didn't find them particularly stressful and I'd say from a physical standpoint they ranged from moderate to maybe slightly higher at the worst. Amazon I would describe as better than most similar lines of work in terms of pay and overall environment.

I don't doubt that there are problematic Amazon locations out there but I never experienced any of the really negative stories I read online despite moving between different locations and building types.

I think that considering it's a baseline pay job for what it is. I would only guess that a significant portion of the workforce is also very young, and it's their first experience actually doing any kind of physical work for money. That around 0.1% might be depressed enough to call for help under those circumstances, I'm surprised the number isn't higher.

It is hard for me to imagine that Amazon warehouse jobs are much worse than other warehouse jobs. This reminds me of Tom Wolfe's telling of the character Conrad Hensley (of Oakland, CA) in A Man in Full. His warehouse job was pretty bad and he was on the ropes.

Yeah it's silly. Generally its helpful in most headlines about [any large org] to substitute [Public Schools] and see if someone would bother to bat an eye at the headline.

> 911 calls from [Public Schools] show emotional distress and suicide threats

Nobody would care. (Maybe partly because people are already resigned to public schools being CAFOs, though)

189 calls over a 5 year period across 46 different facilities for Amazon. For schools in NYC its like, 300 a year per school iirc? (for behavior problems, not for physical health emergencies)

> Generally its helpful in most headlines about [any large org] to substitute [Public Schools] and see if someone would bother to bat an eye at the headline.

Just because nobody would care doesn’t mean people shouldn’t care

I think the point is not that people wouldn't care at all, but that most wouldn't jump straight to the assumption that this is entirely due to public schools doing something horrible to the children, but rather that this reflects a broader societal problem with mental illness and mental healthcare[1]. By contrast, there are plenty of people whose brains consist mostly of a soup of simplistic media tropes, who are primed to think of "tech company hiring low-wage workers" as combining the worst of Dickens and Black Mirror and thus jump uncritically on flawed data as evidence of horrific conditions.

I think previous reports of Amazon's warehouse policies are concerning, but I don't see the utility in being dishonest or sloppy with the facts of the situation.

[1] I'm aware that many do think of (some) public schools as hellholes, but they'd be correct not to assume that the problems describe all or mostly originate with the school's actions.

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