The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor

I work in a corp office where the coffee is far worse than many FCs I've been to.

They do at least get the coffee, and it's awful as expected.

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.

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.

> “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.

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.

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 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.

Yes, it's possible to sustain a person in a technically animated state for a few minutes after vital systems have crashed.

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

This is not a few bad apples. This is systematic.

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.