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Comment by cronix | Hacker News Reader

It might be high there, but Troutdale, OR is #1. What a horrible company to work for. "The most dangerous facility, according to the piece, is Amazon's warehouse in Troutdale, Ore., which had a serious injury rate of 26 per 100 workers, more than six times the industry average."

https://www.wweek.com/news/business/2019/11/27/amazon-wareho...

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> a serious injury rate of 26 per 100 workers

What? A worse than 1/4 chance you will be maimed? That seems absurdly high. Deep sea crab fishing off the Alaska coast is a safer profession!

I’m interested in the fact that “normal” is a 1 in 25 chance.

Have you ever worked in a large warehouse?

The last time an article on HN about Amazon's warehouses being dangerous came out, a number of folks tried to argue that it's no big deal because they weren't dying. Thus, it's a safe place to work. High accident rates are perfectly fine as long as they dont die...

What a boring dystopia we've come to inhabit.

Evil is banal.

What's sad, all fictional portrayals of dystopias are struggles and fights. Like, "the good guys died in battle from being killed by the bad guys".

Now, if you speak up against FAANG or some other company making bullshit promises to "save the world", it's the people that stomp out the "good guys".

Don't get me wrong, it's clever on them. But it's sad and makes the coming decades unnerving if these companies aren't lassoed into control. Apple is especially guilty of the whole cult following thing where they can do no wrong in the eyes of their zealots. Their continued growth and profiting is a symbol not of parasitic nature, but of their divinity to these people.

Goddamn it, and I'm a red blooded capitalist. How do we resurrect Teddy Roosevelt, the old Bull Moose himself? We need Teddy...

No, because they were dying but that someone picked up the corpse before the end of the day. So it's no biggie. It's not like someone didn't notice or anything.

I think it was Tennessee where a dude was dead on the floor for a good 20 minutes. But a week or two earlier, they noticed on the cameras he put an item in the wrong bin when stocking. They told him after about 90 seconds of him doing it.

That's the one!

Not maimed, it's any kind of injury (at least according to Amazon). They claim their number are so high because the fastidiously report any injury.

Well if it slows you down at all, you'd better report it, or else you're likely to be fired for missing your performance targets.

Would it then be reasonable to fabricate injuries in order to game performance assessments?

I actually work inside one of Amazon's FCs on the West Coast. The managers in my department, actually encourage us to notify them if anything starts to feel out of the ordinary, in an effort to keep a little thing (overreaching instead of using the ladder, can cause shoulder strain, not bending at the knees can cause back strain, knee strain, not grasping product correctly can cause finger/wrist strain, even any of the physical effects of not staying hydrated while working) from turning into a big thing.

Is there no such thing as a "minor injury" then? Scraped my finger on a blister pack, better report it like I would a shelf falling down and crushing my leg.

If there is such a thing where is the line. I'd draw the line at anything that requires more care than can be provided on-site, IE you had to go to the clinic/hospital due to the injury.

I don't know if I would draw the line @ "than can be provided on site"

https://theintercept.com/2019/12/02/amazon-warehouse-workers...

Injuries. Not necessary maimed. Could be a repeat it I’ve stress injury.

That sounds absurdly high. What constitutes a serious injury?

Apparently this is the definition used:

> Its rate of serious injuries—those requiring job restrictions or days off work—was more than four times the industry average

I'd like to see the set of job restrictions.

(Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/amazo...)

> serious injury rate of 26 per 100 workers

Do you know the time period for this stat, I couldn't find it in the linked article.

The OSHA incident rate is per 200,000 employee-hours, which is roughly 100 people, full-time, for a year.

So for every 100 people that Amazon employs full-time-equivalent in that warehouse, about 26 of them will have a serious OSHA-reported incident each year.

In the chemical laboratory this would be unacceptable.

It is unacceptable here as well.

How can anyone inside Amazon look at those numbers and think, "Meh."? Otherwise they'd fix it. Actually, they never would have let it get this high. To be this high, nobody with any ability to fix it cared. Period.

They look at the opposing political party and think "they are the real monsters, we're the Good People"; America's a helluva drug.

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