Amazon employee in Ontario collapses, dies after fire alarm sent staff into cold
globalnews.ca
globalnews.ca
Claims of insufficient "warming packs" for employees. Claims management prevented employees from warming in their automobiles.
GoFund me https://www.gofundme.com/f/paulo-bezerra $17k so far. 50 year old man, with baby & spouse.
100 years and some stuff hasn't changed a bit.
If you don't know the answer, it's okay. This isn't ChatGPT where when there is no good answer you have to hallucinate something to not break the UX. You don't have to dream up something unrelated to the discussion just to reply. Users here are fine with and expect no response when something cannot be answered.
Journalists make great sacrifices to bring us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Instead of thinking unhelpful thoughts like "people lie all the time, why should I trust some two-bit reporter from a newspaper that nobody has ever heard of?", why not take off the tin-foil hat and join the rest of us in assuming that all people--especially those anonymous few who are completely shielded from the consequences of lying--are telling the truth at all times.
Like, when is the last time that a journalist misled anyone? It's just not in their nature.
The story simply fails to compute. You're not talking about weird kingly bosses who live on Elysium and think that the poors should eat bugs, you're talking about light-blue collar management.
Also the source is dogshit. Not really a fan of Amazon but perfectly capable of recognising a hitpiece.
I would think the angry mob of people without vehicles to warm in would provide a pretty good incentive. "Why do they get to stay in their warm cars while we're stuck out in the cold?" can escalate pretty quickly.
I don't envy the supervisors. What do you do? You don't want to see your brethren exit the shelter they found, but you also don't want to get lynched by those who couldn't find shelter.
You know that humans in stressful situations don't immediately go all lord-of-the-flies, what actually happens is that people help each other. So people would let other people share their cars.
I swear to god sometimes it's like nobody here has ever met a person.
This exactly. This sub is wild sometimes.
I have no dog in this fight. I believe the truth is (as always) somewhere in the middle of “Amazon was unanimously shitty” and “the people are lying about what happened”. I just continue to not understand how much binary thinking is happening in these comments.
Isn't that just a natural consequence of the fact that people will only post about things they don't know about in order to explore things that they haven't fully considered?
Naturally, if you are certain you've got it figured out there wouldn't be any value in posting anything. What could anyone add? But when you don't know, you can explore different ideas and see where they go. As such, the ideas shared will always be incomplete.
No, I think the entire premise of "people will only post about___" is yet more binary thinking. People post about all kinds of things.
> Naturally, if you are certain you've got it figured out there wouldn't be any value in posting anything.
Again, no.
> What could anyone add?
I'll quote the person above in response to this thinking:
> I swear to god sometimes it's like nobody here has ever met a person.
So the people turned in the opposite direction by helping each other brave the cold. The people with cars could have gone all “I got mine”, but once made aware that others were suffering chose to act to the benefit of the group instead.
It’s interesting how you managed to write an entire comment about just that, yet don’t seem to understand it.
It's pretty standard that in a fire you leave the building and assemble in some safe location. The only fire drills I've done have been in school, in clement weather, and we assembled in the parking lot away enough from the buildings that the fire wouldn't affect us, we wouldn't be in the way of firefighters and away from the road.
But when it's cold: what provisions should be made to ensure the assembly point is a "safe location"? It's reasonable to assume people will evacuate without jackets or anything.
I don't know the answer, but perhaps someone who's been in a fire drill in a cold climate can explain.
-30 C is really incredibly cold. You just can't stand around in that without proper clothes.
I think the problem is that a lot of Americans are incredibly servile and will obey employers, authorities etc., even when it's harmful or dangerous. I especially remember a case where a woman was in court and was sexually assaulted by a marshal, right there with the judge ignoring it. But what I found very curious was how he was obeyed, and how the judge was obeyed.
Here in Sweden, neither judge nor marshal would have been obeyed.
I think the servility is probably caused by the experience that employers and authorities can get away with anything, and a fear that they will do worse if challenged or attacked.
Environment Canada shows that it was -19ºC (ambient) at the time. The article asserts it was -22ºC with the windchill. Still very cold, but I find it interesting that -30ºC has shown up in the comments more than once. Where does that come from?
I agree with this observation but will temper it somewhat: I know in the school case, and I imagine in the warehouse case too, there’s a person responsible for checking who’s out so they can tell the fire brigade “everybody’s out of the building” or “all but three people are accounted for” which is super important. This is hard to do when people just scatter.
None of which excuses what happened to this poor man.
Amazon's job ad for "Warehouse Team Member" at that location indicates pay 30% above minimum wage plus benefits. That suggests the workers have a reasonable amount of leverage. After all, why would Amazon pay anything more than minimum wage if the workers had no leverage? There is nothing to suggest that Amazon operates as a charity.
> are easy to fire
Not when one is being fired over taking necessary precautions to serve their health and wellbeing. Ontario labour law does not take kindly to that in the slightest. In fact, Ontario regulation requires employers to make that known to the employees, so it isn't even a case of "He didn't know." The, as summed up by the popular TV show based on the nearby town of Listowel, "When a friend asks for help, you help them" explanation is the most likely. It is the Canadian culture to be compliant when someone asks something of you.
Logically, the workers knew there was no onus for them to leave their cars. But when your friendly coworker comes along "I know it is warm in there, but can you please come outside with the rest of us who don't have the same luxury?" it is hard in Canadian culture to say no. Rather you get "Sorry. I'll be right there."
.. but imagine if you were that manager that had told people to stand around in the freezing cold and then someone just dropped dead.
or the person above them
.. well i guess they probably don't think about this kind of stuff at all
i'm just having a hard time putting myself in one of those people's shoes
We're "incredibly servile" because of the lack of social safety net programs, healthcare being tied to employment, and wages being so shit compared to CoL that most Americans are about a paycheck or two from being broke. And there's little we can do about it thanks to Citizens United.
He said America, not United States of America. America refers to the combined area of North, South, and Central America. Of which Canada is a part, and, as it happens, Canada is where this took place. Healthcare is not tied to employment in Canada.
> We're "incredibly servile" because of the lack of social safety net programs
All employees in Ontario are covered under a collective agreement that asserts employers will not terminate employment for reasons related to health. Employees who stayed in their cars had no reason to fear for their job. However, they probably did have good reason to fear the mob of people who had nowhere warm to go.
Remember, this warehouse is in the middle of a farmer's field. The nearest settlement is several kilometres away, and the nearest settlement with any reasonable public place to shelter in is tens of kilometres away. There would be no other practical place to go to stay warm other than a car, but not everyone would have a car available to go to. There are other ways to get to work that don't leave you with a personal space heater at your beck and call.
Sorry, what? The user they're replying to said American, and also referenced a case in court with a Marshal which IIRC don't exist in Canada. They were clearly referring to the US. Which 99% of users who aren't needlessly obtuse would understand with the word American which in English typically refers to someone from the US and not North/South/Central America.
Obviously the article is talking about Canada, but many people in this comment section don't appear to have noticed that and think it happened in the US.
The marshal and judge simply would not have been obeyed. Rather they would have faced physical resistance, and possibly have been beaten up or worse, and no one would have been punished for it-- certainly they would have been disarmed.
Outside heaters, emergency blankets and ponchos, chemical warming packs, etc.
This is a workplace. We already take precautions against fire and chemicals and whatnot, this isn't asking for much more.
Which they were told not to enter, probably with the threat of being fired.
Because Amazon fears that someone will pocket some inventory during the fire alarm, and then stash it in their car.
So for the risk of the world's richest man losing maybe a grand or two in stolen inventory - someone died.
Forget to read the article? "staff who tried to warm up in their vehicles were told by supervisors to get out of their cars."
> So for the risk of the world's richest man losing maybe a grand or two in stolen inventory - someone died.
Because they thought if they told anyone who may have stolen inventory to get back out of their car, the thieves would bring the inventory back with them? These supervisors who subjected the workers to prolonged cold exposure when an alternative was available may not be the sharpest tools in the shed, but that's really pushing it.
From my unattached outsider's perspective, I am almost certain Bezos would do no such thing. In fact, it is almost guaranteed that he would have never known about it, assuming it would have saved this person's life. In my experience with small business, I wouldn't even be able to keep track if any of the workers there were sitting in a car during a fire drill unless I watched it happen. There is no way someone in a business of millions of people is keeping such tabs.
I can appreciate the imagining, though. I'm guilty of such things myself, finding out later the person I thought would draw ire wasn't thinking about me at all. I'm not sure that is cultural. It seems to be a basic human trait. In fact, our culture tries to remind people that nobody is thinking about you.
I’m around if you ever reach a point where your ego allows you to get past the earlier error. It is okay that your comment wasn’t thought through. Nobody cares. For the sake of kindness, I will continue to partake in this diversion therapy if that’s what you need to get through it, but know that I’m more interested in the original topic.
This death isn't the first. They've had so many problems with heat exhaustion the company hires private ambulance services so there's no public record of EMS being dispatched to their warehouses.
This also isn't the first time they've had people end up outside the warehouse in freezing cold.
Then there were the warehouse deaths caused because staff weren't allowed to shelter from a tornado.
The list goes on and on.
With millions of employees there is no way he is able to say on top of the policies the workers are putting in place, no. Hell, I've spent enough time in small businesses to observe workers creating boneheaded policies behind the stakeholders' backs, only seeing them come to light when the stupidity caused itself to become known. How are you going to know? Nobody is going to tell you until it is too late.
> Or their effects?
Yes, most likely he is now aware that someone died as a result of another worker doing something idiotic. Now what? He can command to the workers to stop being idiots. I expect he already does that on a daily basis. But do you think that will really work? If you have ever worked with other people in these types of "low rung" jobs you will know that the worker always thinks they know better.
Perhaps that is difficult to fathom from the tech "ivory tower"? Indeed, in tech – and I expect other "high prestige" careers – workers are generally more willing to think things through together and search for the best possible solution.