Amazon is sued over warehouses after New York worker brings coronavirus home
reuters.com
reuters.com
Very sad all of this is happening, but Amazon should get a little slack.
They did spend a lot of money on a propaganda campaign encouraging workers to keep working and not take time off because they were "heroes" on the front lines saving lives. Gotta remember what Amazon's actual priorities are.
This should’ve been very clear when we talk about any shutdown — things were never going to work if we all insisted on the same level of sacrifice. Amazon workers must keep working, just as food and transportation workers had to keep going at any cost, and next will be the teachers inside closed rooms with 30 or 40 kids.
I'm generally anti-intervention but do strongly support the notion of driving diversity-of-business within markets. A common measure of market concentration is a sum of squares of market-share percentages (see: https://www.justice.gov/atr/herfindahl-hirschman-index). I'm not sure exactly what to do about this right now but I would suspect Amazon is a huge percentage of the distribution-to-the-home market so should be looked at closely. Their position could be good if they provide excellent Covid policies/procedures (and would be much worse to have a large diversity of participants with poor Covid P&Ps), but could be quite bad if people got scared of Amazon and effectively shutdown-by-virtue-of-disuse a large percentage of the distribution infrastructure in the US...
It's not actually true. I'm not aware of any lockdown or shelter in place orders which don't allow people to buy food or necessities, and plenty of essential businesses remain open, and also deliver.
Also, the vast majority of items being shipped by Amazon remain non-essential goods. Amazon may well be helping people, but their necessity in keeping the country running is overstated.
The company went out of their way to force workers not to get paid for the half-hour each day they wait for security checks, not to mention the peeing in bottles due to how they structure break time.
Given their track record, an employee hostile company like Amazon likely contributed to the situation and was not just a regular victim of circumstance.
If being a Warehouse Worker means risking your life or reduced lung capacity, how can we justify this as a %15 an hour job with poor health care benefits.
Obviously, I'm not a lawyer.
Far less than 10% of cases will ever go to trial, so odds are this will settle far before ever going to a jury and having to prove anything.
Otherwise I don’t think it is a very difficult case to win, as the other commenter mentioned it’s a civil case so the burden isn’t “beyond a reasonable doubt” rather “more likely than not.”
During discovery they would be able to swab and test Amazon for any traces of corona (which I’m sure they would find) and at which point amazon has a lot of exposure and potential liability, which may even include a temporary shutdown to clean all traces of the virus...amazon would never risk that or information getting out regarding their warehouse (thus goods they deliver) are spreading the virus.
They'd need solid actual evidence to even meet a "more likely than not" standard.
And despite your calculation of time, more time spent outside amazon warehouses does not mean employees are more likely to get the virus outside the warehouse, only that there was more time to get the virus somewhere else. there are “hotspots” after all. But let’s assume what you said was true, to even make that argument in court For a jury to consider you are at trial and need an expert witness to introduce the argument...that’s a lot of cost for a big risk, it settles.
This is probably even more true for an Amazon warehouse employee.
This statement that you've provided as fact is the crux of the complaint. There are multiple reports claiming that Amazon is not adequately protecting warehouse workers. There are reports of whistle-blowers being fired for speaking out about it.
I don't know which side is true. It's entirely plausible that both sides are true, and it could be variable between teams and/or facilities.
I don't think it's fair to make a blanket statement that Amazon is 100% doing right by their warehouse employees, especially considering the numerous reports prior to all this about said staff having limited timed bathroom breaks.
You can certainly argue that they aren't going far enough. I'm not debating that one way or the other. I'm only arguing that what they have done is far more than I would expect of any business for functions where employees cannot perform their job remotely.
FTA:
> Amazon is spending more than $800 million on coronavirus safety in this year’s first half, including cleaning, temperature checks and face masks.
$800 million is a significant amount and proportionally more than I would expect most businesses to spend, plus Amazon has the benefit at being a technology company that is good at automating/scaling solutions, so that amount of money will go further than what most businesses can pull off dollar for dollar.
1. Reopen the economy now, prevent further economic damage, but lose a lot of lives to coronavirus.
2. Reopen the economy later, and lose the exact same number of lives, but with a bunch of economic damage to go along with it.
The choice is easy, but nobody wants to be seen making it, because all of the options result in large numbers of deaths.
Why not? We have our own currency and have no qualms manipulating it to manipulate the stock market. We can communicate with other countries. By opening up our economy we’re pointing a gun at the world.
This just strikes me as a very naïve and dogmatic worldview. Where are you getting this from?
People are starting to go crazy. Personally I couldn't be happier with lockdown, I love staying inside. I'd be happy to do this for the rest of my life, but almost everyone else I know is losing it. And that's not even to speak of all the people who've lost their jobs and can't make money.
It seems like you are proposing that to fix the income issue we just print money indefinitely until a cure comes out, and then restart the economy. Doing something like that is not really comparable to the kind of QE that's being done in the stock market. It'd have to be done on an incredible scale, and nobody really knows what the effects of that would be on the economy.
> By opening up our economy we’re pointing a gun at the world.
Many countries are already open. Sweden, China, Japan, Korea. Reopening isn't pointing a gun at others, it's pointing a gun at ourselves.
My point isn't that the gun isn't there. It's that we're getting shot no matter what, the only choice we have is whether we also want to lose a few million more jobs and a few trillion more dollars of GDP.
> This just strikes me as a very naïve and dogmatic worldview. Where are you getting this from?
I'm just looking at the outcome potentials as I see them. A cure, optimistically, is 9-12 months away. Every month we keep the economy closed, more businesses blow up, because they aren't generating revenue to meet their fixed obligations. They are firing employees, and then those employees can't make rent, and then the landlords can't make their mortgage payments, and on and on. This stuff will cascade throughout the economy and destroy it, and it gets worse the longer we wait. You can fix some of this with cash transfers, but not all of it, and the long and medium term effects of large scale cash transfers of the kind that would be necessary are not well understood.
Originally the purpose of lockdown was supposed to be "flattening the curve" so as not to overwhelm the medical system with peak demand. That is and was a good goal, that we have more or less achieved. The goal of lockdown was never to just wait out the entire virus, because that's just not realistic.
> It seems like you are proposing that to fix the income issue we just print money indefinitely until a cure comes out, and then restart the economy. Doing something like that is not really comparable to the kind of QE that's being done in the stock market. It'd have to be done on an incredible scale, and nobody really knows what the effects of that would be on the economy.
At least people could know they have food and shelter. We live in a death cult.
I wonder why we don’t know how to make a basic plan for the economy, hmm... oh yea we jailed those folks and hunted them down and killed them around the globe, yay freedom to die on the job or starve while rich fucks nest up in cabins with personal servants and massive stores of resources.
Hell even in the last year we ran Evo Morales out of one of the greatest runs of poverty reduction in contemporary times and he was replaced with a fucking nazi.
Your attitude is mask-off homicidal.
For a little while. But things will start to break. There are all sorts of things that can be done for a bit, that cannot be extended indefinitely.
> I wonder why we don’t know how to make a basic plan for the economy, hmm... oh yea we jailed those folks and hunted them down and killed them around the globe, yay freedom to die on the job or starve while rich fucks nest up in cabins.
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. This isn't an issue of planning, and it doesn't have much to do with inequality either. A major economic depression is going to hurt the poor more than the rich.
> it doesn't have much to do with inequality either
> hurt the poor more than the rich.
...seems like the poor and rich, are quite inequal. Possibly the rich could have rigged the rules in their favor using their wealth. One could then say, that is an issue of planning, as the rich should not hold greater political sway than the majority.
> Doctors at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek say they have seen more deaths by suicide during this quarantine period than deaths from the COVID-19 virus.
> "We've never seen numbers like this, in such a short period of time," he said. "I mean we've seen a year's worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks."
https://abc7news.com/suicide-covid-19-coronavirus-rates-duri...
https://csimarket.com/stocks/suppliers_glance.php?code=DE#mo...
If there's a material interruption in this network, including suppliers of all of those suppliers, John Deere can't put out equipment or new parts. No equipment and no parts? You start impacting food security.
You think shits popping off now?
This is in direct contrast to the advice of the epidemiologists. Reopen the economy later has the effect of saving more lives - at least the lives of those who wouldn't have otherwise caught coronavirus.
The point may be moot in the US, however, as coronavirus is so widespread already. That's almost the only justification for re-opening I can think of: the damage is already mostly done so continuing the lockdown effort isn't going to have anywhere near the effect it would have if it was done earlier.
Which is a sad indictment on the leadership.
I think you are misreading the advice. The advice of epidemiologists was that we need to flatten the curve, to avoid overwhelming our medical system. The absolute number of infections is going to be the same in the end regardless. There's not much we can do about that.
There are only two ways to change the absolute number of infections:
1. A vaccine, which is way too long away to wait for.
2. A vigorous and comprehensive test and trace program, which Americans are totally unwilling to accept. This is what has worked in China and Korea.
Whether or not you flatten the curve, the absolute number of infections is the same. So what you want to do is keep the infection count at a level just below where it overwhelms your medical system. The goal is not zero infections. The goal is suppressing infections just enough that the medical system can cope, so that the death rate is as low as possible.
We have already kept the economy closed long enough that the curve has flattened. We should be slowly reopening it, while monitoring the infection curve so that it doesn't get too steep.
We've seen "normal" social distancing (w/o lockdown) keep r0 between .8 and 1.
Look at German, French and netherland numbers and their evolution since the reopening and before the reopening.
even if we had an average r0 of one, the time needed to reach 60% infected in the nation is superior to 100 000 days (i'm taking a population of 60M to exclude kids and a high average of 300case/day when official numbers put this average closer to 50). We have no idea if natural immunity run that long, and i think everybody hope a vaccine will be found before that. So it's not just flattening the curve, its also preventing infections (unless no vaccine are found and the immunity last forever. But those two should be exclusive)
If I look at those, I see that the curve remains flattened after reopening, despite the fact that people are going out more often again. Doesn't this strengthen OP's case against a total economical lockdown?
I was not clear, i was speaking against the idea that lockdown did not save lives. Here is my case:
P1: We seems to be able to keep R0 around one (a bit under actually) when everyone is following social distancing.
C1: Following P1 if a country have 50 case a day, it will stay at 50 case until a vaccine is found as long as those social distancing rules are followed.
C1': Following P1 if a country have around 3000 case a day, it will stay at 3000 cases a day until a vaccine is found as long as those social distancing rules are followed.
P2: If natural immunity is achievable, then a vaccine will be found (this is a weak point, i have no argument for that, it is my poor understanding of immunobiology that tell me this as a correct premise, but my confidence index is barely 60%)
P2 corollary: If we can't find any vaccine, then no long-term natural immunity exist
P3: 50 cases a day is better than 3000 cases a day
C2: C1 + P2 Corollary + P3: In any case, having less cases when taking "normal" (aka no-lockdown) social distancing mesure will save lives. This number of cases is arbitrary and will change depending on the population and density of a country.
I'm not deciding policies here. I'm just saying that initial lockdown make sense before appropriate measure that will keep R0 low are taken (case tracking, quarantining, social distancing), and that "flatten the curve" is a good slogan but is not only to help the NHS, it will also decrease the number of total cases.
Epidemiologists are not the only experts that have a calculus to perform here as to how many lives will be lost since infectious disease is not the only way by which someone dies. You need a far more holistic picture here.
I think the ideal solution would have been a quick lockdown to stop the exponential growth of the spread, and once that's under control, loosen up the restrictions one at a time while ensuring the spread doesn't increase again.
This is what Netherland has been doing, and it seems to be very effective. Schools have been partially open for 2.5 weeks now, and the numbers keep going down.
But in a country where half the population is determined to sabotage any attempt to prevent the spread of the disease, where leaders call it a hoax and spread misinformation, I can imagine that any attempt at lockdown is doomed to fail anyway. Might as well open up and let it run its course with all the damage that will do, because too many people insist on inflicting that damage anyway.
Quite the contrary. A few percents of elder dying might literally save many of the European pension systems that were on the hedge of collapse.
Besides there are way more people than jobs (double digit unemployment even before the lockdown). A calamity reducing the workforce would stimulate the economy and make it easier to get a job. That's quite the opposite of economic damages.
Excerpts:
> GONZALEZ: Valuing people differently was kind of tried once in 2003. The EPA, under the George W. Bush administration, was considering a new clean air standard. How clean the air should be. And the EPA was like, well, people over age 70 have fewer years to breathe clean air. They should count less. And a lower value on some lives would essentially mean looser clean air standards.
> MALONE: The EPA suggested that, perhaps, older people should be worth 37% less money.
> STEVENSON: It became known as the senior discount.
> GONZALEZ: The senior death discount, actually. People protested. They held up signs that said granny for sale. It did not go over well.
> STEVENSON: The backlash was so intense they, very immediately, walked away from that, and you haven't seen any kind of similar proposal since.
But being nice shouldn't imply being naive. Every single person in a medium-large organization is replaceable, no exception. I used to not believe it too but it's been shown time and again in my career.
Even if executives/managers understand that treating their employees well has benefits, they will not blink an eye when it's time to take managing decisions or let employees go.
No, the same is not true of people.
My family and close friends cannot be replaced. Not quickly, not easily, not without lasting damage.
Yes, there may be some economic benefits in the long term to "letting people die."
No, there will definitely be severe short term shocks to the economy to following that strategy. 1-5% of the population dying (even when skewed towards particular demographics) means that almost everyone will know someone that's died, several someones that have ended up in ICU, several someones that have suffered badly, and several someones that just had nothing happen at all.
If you ignore the second order effects of that ("I don't want to go to work because I don't want to end up in ICU like my buddy Dave"), the economic damage in the short term then becomes even more severe. The loss of confidence in the government becomes more severe. The willingness to return to the workforce reduces significantly.
In this physical universe, humans have a non-zero possibility of dying from coming in contact with other human beings directly or indirectly. You have to agree on some level of danger because trying to avoid all danger would itself cause death, by boredom and likely starvation.
Now if we're going to agree that some people should have more resources than others and if we're going to agree on trading using currencies and if we agree that lack of resources may cause someone to die, we've just put a price on human life.
I'm sorry that realities of life are upsetting to people who've been given a children's view of the world where all life is precious, but at some point, we have to grow up :)
Here is a sample nonsense reply I can give you based on the first part of your sentence: lowering the speed limit of a car to 0 would mean it is no longer a car, because a car is something that moves.
See how my reply makes sense if I ignore the rest of your reply and yet doesn't make any sense when your reply is seen as a whole? That's not a good conversation strategy.
A serious case of COVID-19 can take months, possibly years to recover from. It's quite likely it will leave people with permanent health problems. Nothing about that is good for the economy.
But even if it was, I'd object to "let's kill people because it's good for the economy" in a strongest possible way. Any government that thinks about the people in those terms deserved to be overthrown in a revolution.
As a Dutch person living abroad, I find it amazing how my fellow Dutch citizens keep finding ways of justifying their government's handling of the Covid crisis.
Dutch schools were closed pretty quickly in the beginning of March, despite the advice of virus experts to keep them open: there were strong signs that children were not affected much by the virus. Now that the schools are reopening, as you are saying, it turns out that having the schools open does not increase spreading of the virus. I would say that this proves that the experts were right and the Dutch government wrong, and that the closing of the schools was a mistake. A costly mistake, both for the sake of the education of the children, and for their parents, many of which had big problems with combining their work and the daycare of their children.
This is obvious, right?
Most kids show no symptoms when they are infected. AFAIK there is no proof yet that asymptomatic carriers of the COVID virus can contaminate others. And if they do, it might be much less than carriers with symptoms. This is not only my opinion, it was the opinion of Dutch virus experts as well at the time the decision was taken to close schools. That was a political decision, based on the fear that lived among people to send their kids to school.
But instead of opinions it is better to talk about facts, and now that schools are reopening everywhere we have plenty of those. And the facts are showing that reopening the schools does not significantly increase the number infections.
I think erring on the side of caution was absolutely warranted. But I also think it's good that kids are going to school again. Compared to many other countries, I'm pretty happy with how the Dutch government is handling this.
By metrics of economic loss The Netherlands are not doing great either. Germany, Switzerland, Denmark are amongst the countries that were able to reopen their economies before us. And Sweden left it pretty open all the time.
First thing is the whole "flattening the curve" thing. The less cases on a given time, the better treatment is. So even if the number of cases will ultimately be the same, it is better if happens over a long period of time.
There is also a simple mathematical argument. Let's take this simplistic model :
- Start with 1024 cases
- The pandemic will last for 6 months until a treatment is found
- Every "open" (O) month will cause the number of cases to double
- Every "lockdown" (L) month will cause the number of cases to halve
- To avoid overwhelming the health care system, we automatically go into lockdown when the number of cases reach 4096
Open early model: O(2048) O(4096) L(2048) O(4096) L(2048) O(4096) Cumulative cases: 18432
Open late model: L(512) L(256) O(512) O(1024) O(2048) O(4096) Cumulative cases: 8448
In both cases we have the same number of lockdown months and the same number of cases in the end (that's a property of multiplication), but the cumulative number of cases is lower when we open later.
The parameters are wrong, but the logic is the same no matter the values you choose. For example I used a very optimistic 6 months for the time before we have a cure, that's just to make the calculation shorter, you will get the same kind of result by making it 4 years.
The only case where the two strategies give out the same result is if you expect no cure will be found and go for herd immunity. I hope we won't get to that because it will mean millions of death in the US alone.
Not everything is binary.
our collective psyche reached the stage of negotiation. We've been through denial, anger (total lockdown), and now we're into negotiation (opening with specific rules).
Slow down the consumption. Grow our own food. Barter with each other for services.
We can reverse some of the damage. Let's do it.
Everyone used to have "Victory" gardens or whatever they were called....why did we fuck that up? Postmates? Another 5 hours of overtime? To pay for the Maserati and Postmates?
Lots of places in America mandate that your visible garden be grass. Even if the climate is really unsuitable.
I don't have any retro-agricultural nostalgia beyond growing tomatos for fun, but that is something you can and should change either way.
Lots of places in America mandate you don't do over 55MPH, but yet....
They can't stop us all. Just grow.
Don't forget, things were more than livable a hundred years ago.
We don't need multinationals to feed us. It's a sham. We're just not making proper use of our available space/resources as individuals.
Well, you're writing off ~75% of the world population right there. So that's not a strong argument.
There was quite a lot of growing your own food at the time, true, but not barter.
For one thing, I'm not offering a solution here, but an analysis. But if you want a solution, mine would be to save as many lives and reorganize the economy so less lives will be risked in the name of short-term profits.
We also didn't have so many people a hundred years ago. Population increased but the land remained the same.
Yes, I'll go first, if it comes to that.
Anything that's not essential can still be done if it can be done from home or with other serious restrictions that minimize the risk of spreading the disease.
Anything that involves a lot of people getting together should really be prevented. Luxuries are not essential. Festivals will need to be cancelled.
It's not an all-or-nothing thing; you need to look at what's essential, and what poses too great a risk.