Comment by Ginden | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ginden | Hacker News Reader

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I know it sounds horrible, but people die during work, and it doesn't indicate any wrongdoing on any part. Highlighting individual cases is click baiting.

For example, Amazon has 950k employees in USA. Among Americans aged 45-54, 80 people per 100k die each year due to cardiac reasons. If 10% of Amazon workers are 45-54, and Amazon doesn't employ anyone over 54, at least 76 Amazon workers will die due to cardiac reasons.

1/3 of cardiac deaths occur suddenly.

If average worker spends 40 hours per week in work (23% of time), 75 * 1/3 * 23% = around 6 Amazon employees in US will die in work each year, without any wrongdoing on any side.

Moreover, poor people are at significantly increases risk of sudden cardiac arrest - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3193117/ This may or may not be related to work conditions (though, I suspect rather combination lifestyle and healthcare access).

Though, physical labor is associated with increased early mortality in men, but causes aren't clear (I suspect it's lifestyle, because women doesn't display such correlation). https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/52/20/1320

It does sound horrible, especially when you (clearly didn't) read that the entire incident was likely avoidable had his line manager taken his visible symptoms seriously and not told him to continue the manual labour until it was too late.

Your desensitised hot take of 'well this stuff just happens' is appalling in a number of ways and is exactly the attitude that trickles down through businesses when it's someone else that's stuck at the thin edge of the wedge.

> It does sound horrible, especially when you (clearly didn't) read that the entire incident was likely avoidable had his line manager taken his visible symptoms seriously and not told him to continue the manual labour until it was too late.

I can't see that in article (and I'm native Polish speaker). Article says that man told manager about his symptoms and manager instantly walked with him to paramedical team, instead of calling them. People in article say that it was "culpable mistake".

Yes, it was a mistake, but it's unlikely that it resulted in death of that man.

It's not, his manager isn't a doctor. I've never asked to take a sick day / leave early for medical reasons, you just take one.

Exactly this. I had so many colleagues that were always complaining to me about how they think our boss treated them unfair, and I always said "Don't tell me, just talk to the boss." There were two different managers who thought they need to scream at me, and both times I waited until they were finished screaming, and I just told them that if they would ever scream at me again I just turn around and go home immediately. They never screamed at me again but were continuing to treat some of my colleagues like shit and were still screaming at them for trivial reasons. People just need to understand that they need to stand up for themselves, and stop complaining to your colleagues or friends on how unfair life is, and that soon you will quit your job, this time for sure. :)

Yup. I got the you never come in on time talk after 5 years of not coming in on time and mentioning that it’s not my jam during the interview. Was told I’d be fired if I didn’t fix it.

2 weeks later after not coming in on time I handed in my notice, got yelled at. They asked for more notice, gave it to them, last day, they said it was alright to not come in on time.

As you're speaking from your own experience, have you already worked in an Amazon warehouse ?

I haven't worked in one owned by Amazon, but I've worked in a warehouse. As far as I know most of them are about 50C warmer than the ones I worked in, as far as I know, there's no 80kg amazon packages frozen at -25C so I'd say they have it pretty easy.

That warehouse certainly didn't have robots to bring us our packages for scanning by laser gun either.

> so I'd say they have it pretty easy.

Did any of your colleagues die of overworking?

When I was there the only death was at another warehouse, dude ended up with a fork lift fork through his chest.

Friend of the family mopped of a colleague after a barrel of acid dropped from the top rack and split at the top of the forklift cab.

People in Czechia say Amazon offers the best wage and working conditions of all other warehouse businesses. I imagine it's similar in Poland.

> People in Czechia say Amazon offers the best wage and working conditions of all other warehouse businesses. I imagine it's similar in Poland.

I heard similar opinions about Amazon warehouses in Poland, but it's anecdotal evidence and shouldn't be used instead of statistics.

Yeah, real statistics must be made. However this opinion is so universal and frequently voiced by the workers that not sharing it would be just as wrong as relying purely on anecdata.

Name five.

I am not a warehouse worker.

I mean who is saying this?

The society here is not too divided. It's normal to meet, talk and drink beer with people of other occupations. Every time someone at a bar tells me they work at a warehouse, they will soon be raving about how much better things are thanks to Amazon. You can overhear these conversations at bus stops, at the doctor, etc.

I'd like to visit that part of the world some day.

> I've never asked to take a sick day / leave early for medical reasons, you just take one.

It's naive to think your priviledged situation applies to everyone, especially to amazon warehouse workers.

Same for the other way around

An excellent example of missing the forest for the trees. The abominable working conditions in Amazon distribution centers is well documented. It is absolutely to be expected that they'll a) not be transparent about the number of such incidents and b) those conditions are (strongly) correlated with an increased rate of such conditions.

These jobs are not good for your health.

I know it sounds horrible, but people die during work, and it doesn't indicate any wrongdoing on any part. Highlighting individual cases is click baiting.

People do die at work quite often, but in this case there appears there'll be an inquest and investigation in to whether or not Amazon is at fault (From the article via Google Translate "Amazon is waiting for information from the prosecutor's office and the results of the investigation.").

We shouldn't assume Amazon aren't negligent just yet, just as we shouldn't assume they are. We don't know. Citing statistics on how many hours there are in a day isn't helpful.

From the article (first line, translated via Google Translate)[1]:

> This man had trouble catching his breath. The leader told him to go a long distance on his own. This is a culpable mistake.

[1]: https://gloswielkopolski-pl.translate.goog/smierc-w-amazonie...

He was experiencing shortness of breath with chest pain and his manager told him he has to walk long distance by himself to get help. Manager didn't have sympathy for him likely due to argument they had the previous day related to overworking – he was asking manager for getting more people to help as he complained it's physically impossible to do this job. His manager refused to help and he wanted to escalate it, he was supposed to talk to his manager's manager but didn't make it.

In general I consider HN to be a true cultural treasure and probably the richest forum on the Internet.

But as a person with a fair dose of the autism spectrum in the woodpile, I am nonetheless consistently unsettled by the inevitable nitpick argument that whatever dystopian trans-meta-corporate optimization that happened to wander into the spotlight today is in fact supported by such and such figures, and obviously we’re doing rigorous work here because we have links to web servers that send a little textual prose as an amuse bouche for the megabyte of JavaScript actively trying to defeat the already feeble attempts of our browser to send something less than our genome to some IP address somewhere.

Amazon fulfillment centers are what Dickens was talking about when Scrooge asked if there were any workhouses.

I’m not a financial accountant, but I gather that a balance sheet has a line on it called “goodwill”, that it is important to a company like Amazon, and likely something shareholders care about.

So being in the news for literally working people to death is quite possibly suboptimal for the shareholders.

Kinda sucks for the dead guy’s family too.

>Amazon fulfillment centers are what Dickens was talking about when Scrooge asked if there were any workhouses.

sorry about the inevitable nitpick but no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workhouse

on edit: evidently pointing out an egregious factual error which actually downplays the horrors of Victorian poverty by supposing a workhouse was something like a bad warehouse job gets the downvotes.

on edit 2: probably shouldn't have complained but was annoyed at the quick slapping I received.

What part of

“a total institution where those unable to support themselves financially were offered accommodation and employment.”

is not the direct superclass of an Amazon fulfillment center?

One click off the one you provided is Wikipedia’s take on a “total institution”:

“A total institution is a place of work and residence where a great number of similarly situated people, cut off from the wider community for a considerable time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life.”

So as Futurama’s writers would say you are technically correct, the best kind of correct: even the fucking villains who ran Edwardian and Victorian Britain at least gave you lodging for your slavery-like labor that you were basically born into.

Retro is perpetual, what’s old is new again at all times. Bell bottoms here, feeding the poor to each other there. Pretty soon we’re vacationing on Mars.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2012/nov/27/h...

>the infamous Victorian workhouse, an institution that the editor of the medical journal the Lancet claimed could kill 145,000 people every year

I'm pretty sure the workhouse was significantly worse than being employed at Amazon.

>gave you lodging for your slavery-like labor that you were basically born into.

this was in Poland, a country that being in Europe I suppose has a functioning welfare system. The workhouse was in effect the Victorian welfare system.

conditions in Amazon's warehouses are bad enough that hyperbole does not help in the fight against it.

Hiring the kind of people who hang out here to deploy heavy math and legal expertise to squeeze every last drop out of the vulnerable is exactly what Dickens was barking about.

Rich people have gotten a lot of mileage out of convincing everyone that they’re a temporarily impoverished millionaire. The body politic is starting to get wise to this hustle (again) and the last bastion of dumbass Ayn Rand “socialism for me, but not for thee” tripe seems to be the temporarily impoverished tech billionaires on HN.

What was worse about that poorly-lit box perfumed by long-chain polymers where you have to hold it until your assigned bathroom break and you’re timed down to the minute on repetitive, physically stressful tasks?

The fucking WiFi?

I don't know what denigrating web-devs has to do with whether or not "such and such figures" aka statistics is nit-picking or not. Maybe argue the point instead of lording over all of HN with vague insights.

I’ve probably written a million lines of code in my career, possibly several.

For better or worse most of it was JS, so I have a deeper grasp of what “.prototype” means than the average hacker.

I’m not dissing web devs. I’m calling out all hackers, myself included, who looked the other way.

Reading the translation, at no point did the guy ask to simply take sick leave. I mean a good manager should tell him to do that but at the end of the day you should look out for your own health.

People in Poland avoid sick leave due to cultural (downplaying illness), legal (sick leave is paid 80%) and financial reasons (certain employers will cut your bonus if take sick leave).

>So being in the news for literally working people to death is quite possibly suboptimal for the shareholders.

I mean, history and AMZN's share price would suggest otherwise.

> people die during work, and it doesn't indicate any wrongdoing on any part.

Yes this may be true, but it is not relevant to the article content, where clearly it seems the working environment is at play.

And given the history of Amazon mistreating its workers, it is very hard to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Go fuck yourself.

Breaking the site guidelines like this will get you banned here, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is. Maybe you don't feel you owe the other person better, but you certainly owe this community much better if you're participating in it. No more of this, please.

We've had to ask you this kind of thing several times before. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

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