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Offline Only Lilly

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In September, a 48-year-old Amazon worker named Billy Foister suffered a heart attack in a warehouse outside Columbus, Ohio.

A few days before, Foister had been reprimanded by a manager two minutes after placing an item into the wrong box. But according to a report from The Guardian, when Foister fell to the ground during the heart attack, it took 20 minutes for anyone in the facility to notice or call an ambulance.

Foister died, and Amazon is now claiming he didn’t die at work, and that it was a “personal medical issue” in an email to The Guardian. Shortly after he was taken to the hospital, “everyone was forced to go back to work. No time to decompress,” an anonymous Amazon worker from the same shift told the newspaper. “Basically watch a man pass away and then get told to go back to work, everyone, and act like it’s fine.”

Since November 2018, six Amazon workers have died, many more have suffered serious injuries, and there’s been an increase in reported mental health issues. According to The Guardian, Foister’s death is the latest in a grim pattern of workplace safety issues at Amazon that have landed the company on a list of the country’s most dangerous employers.

In April, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health included Amazon on its most recent “Dirty Dozen” list, citing its high incidence of worker suicide attempts, overworked employees peeing in bottles to avoid punishment, and poor treatment of contract and temporary workers, which Amazon relies heavily on for all operations. The company made the 2018 list as well, and the Council argues nothing has improved since then.

“The e-commerce giant posted $11.2 billion in profits in 2018 while paying no federal income tax,” the report reads. “Despite these vast resources, there is little evidence the company has made a significant effort to address worker complaints about stress, overwork and other conditions which can lead to illness, injuries and even fatalities.”

It’s no secret that Amazon’s factory workers are often unhappy (despite those bizarre “Amazon Ambassadors” that popped up to defend the company on Twitter). Between 2013 and 2018, a Daily Beast investigation found that 911 was called to Amazon warehouses 189 times after reports of suicidal attempts and ideation.

Amazon’s high productivity quotas forces workers to pee in bottles to avoid bathroom breaks and risk injury working with the automated machines and robots — one of which sent 24 workers to the hospital after spraying them with concentrated bear repellent — which are stripping away human jobs and leaving those who are left in danger.

“There was no reason for my brother to have died,” Billy’s brother Edward Foister told The Guardian. “It seems Amazon values money way more than life. If they did their job right, I wouldn’t have had to bury my little brother.”

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Offline Cherrycrush


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Offline Stoic

Re: After Deaths, Amazon Lands on List of Most Dangerous Employers
« Reply #2 on: January 24, 2020, 19:06:26 »
I never would have imagined it to be this bad. It's frustrating that not only these people are subjected to extreme mental and physical pressure, they're not even compensated fairly for it either. Hope that changing public discourse will lead to changes in company culture!  :'(

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Offline Joe

Re: After Deaths, Amazon Lands on List of Most Dangerous Employers
« Reply #3 on: January 25, 2020, 17:53:43 »
I can confirm these claims of being a very rough place to work.  Not from personal experience but I know 2 who have here in Minnesota and they all say the same.  They have no issue firing you for not being 10 minutes early and working while NOT on the clock (aka unpaid labor, which is illegal).  They have a good system for working fast but it's just not worth the physical and especially mental deterioration that it causes.  It's a big company with a lot of money.  It does many good things.  Amazon's prices and shipping is near impossible to beat.  But the path in which those items get to you is one covered in blood. 

And what really pisses me off is that Amazon pays little to no taxes.  AT ALL.  You ever wonder how they reached $1 trillion or Jeff Bezos became the first person to surpass $100 billion net worth (in a back and forth fight between him and Bill Gates for richest man alive)?  Answer: for 2 years Amazon paid no federal taxes.  But their employees already low paychecks still got taxed by the government.  And so they had to "-- pay higher wages to offset the tax burden faced by their employees." 



It's really funny to think that I, Joseph, paid more in taxes than the ENTIRE company of Amazon last year. 

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Offline Redtunnel

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Re: After Deaths, Amazon Lands on List of Most Dangerous Employers
« Reply #4 on: January 25, 2020, 18:02:40 »
A couple of years ago they decided it was cheaper for them to keep medical staff on stand-by in the parking lot outside for people who passed out than to install AC in the warehouses.
"The purity of a person's heart can be measured by how they regard cats"



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Offline Kobran

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Re: After Deaths, Amazon Lands on List of Most Dangerous Employers
« Reply #5 on: January 25, 2020, 18:38:38 »
When a company does $10 billion profit every year, they should be ashamed to not take better care of their employees. What I don't understand though, why does people still work in these conditions? Is it really that difficult to get a decent job in the US that you have to accept these work conditions?

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Offline Redtunnel

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Re: After Deaths, Amazon Lands on List of Most Dangerous Employers
« Reply #6 on: January 25, 2020, 19:40:02 »
When a company does $10 billion profit every year, they should be ashamed to not take better care of their employees. What I don't understand though, why does people still work in these conditions? Is it really that difficult to get a decent job in the US that you have to accept these work conditions?
People will do what they have to in order to survive. Half of the people in US live in near poverty and there's very little social welfare. Tax money is spent on military instead of education and health. They don't have strong unions to protect workers' rights.
"The purity of a person's heart can be measured by how they regard cats"



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Offline Only Lilly

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Re: After Deaths, Amazon Lands on List of Most Dangerous Employers
« Reply #7 on: January 26, 2020, 17:31:13 »
I the UK they do random drug screenings, they are always advertising for staff

 

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