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Do Not Call 911! The Life and Death of an Amazon Warehouse Temp (huffingtonpost.com)
theodp writes: Earlier this week, Amazon sicced former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on the NY Times and the ex-Amazon employees that were interviewed for the NYT's brutal August 2015 article about Amazon's white-collar workplace culture. So, one can hardly wait to see how Amazon and Carney will respond to The Life and Death of an Amazon Warehouse Temp, Dave Jamieson's epic new HuffPo piece on what the future of low-wage work really looks like. Jamieson tells the heartbreaking tale of Jeff Lockhart Jr., who through some workforce sleight-of-hand was working-at-Amazon-but-not-entitled-to-Amazon-benefits when he met his maker after he collapsed in aisle A-215 of Amazon's Chester, VA fulfillment center and laid unconscious beneath shelves stocked with Tupperware and heating pads.
Lockhart, whose white work badge distinguished him as a member of the Integrity Staffing Solutions temp worker caste as opposed to a blue-badged Amazon employee (Google yellow-badged its benefits-less temp workers), sadly left behind a wife and three kids, the oldest of which is legally blind. Jamieson writes, "Whoever found Jeff on the third floor apparently alerted Amcare, Amazon's in-house medical team, which is staffed with EMTs and other medical personnel. In the event of a health issue, Amazon instructs workers to notify security before calling emergency services. An employee brochure from a facility in Tennessee, obtained through a public records request, reads: 'In the event of a medical emergency, contact Security. Do Not call 911! Tell Security the nature of the medical emergency and location. Security and/or Amcare will provide emergency response.'" If you're pressed for reading time, Salon's Scott Timberg has a nice TL;DR recap.
Lockhart, whose white work badge distinguished him as a member of the Integrity Staffing Solutions temp worker caste as opposed to a blue-badged Amazon employee (Google yellow-badged its benefits-less temp workers), sadly left behind a wife and three kids, the oldest of which is legally blind. Jamieson writes, "Whoever found Jeff on the third floor apparently alerted Amcare, Amazon's in-house medical team, which is staffed with EMTs and other medical personnel. In the event of a health issue, Amazon instructs workers to notify security before calling emergency services. An employee brochure from a facility in Tennessee, obtained through a public records request, reads: 'In the event of a medical emergency, contact Security. Do Not call 911! Tell Security the nature of the medical emergency and location. Security and/or Amcare will provide emergency response.'" If you're pressed for reading time, Salon's Scott Timberg has a nice TL;DR recap.
As much as I love bashing Amazon for its cruel working conditions, I don't see anything wrong with not calling 911. If they have a trained EMT team on location, then it's the right thing to call them, instead. We have the same policy in our office.
The local team should then immediately call 911., And if I look at the response time (20 min), then they probably did this. 20 min to a remote location like an industrial plant or warehouse is not excessive. In fact, kudos to Amazon for having properly trained and equipped EMTs!
I can verify that getting to the emergency location can be a problem in a number of large corporate worksites, and some sites do have competent personal who can get there _much faster_ with preliminary support, for electrical issues that may require shutting down power, for flooding, and even for CPR and other urgent medical issues. I applaud their efforts, and I've even been the helpful co-worker when an employee had a heart attack, and we got the victim to where the ambulance could help them immediately, shaving roughly 15 minutes off the time to the hospital for the patient.
However, calling "corporate security" first is also an opportunity to hide illegal immigrant workers, clean up the scene of unsafe conditions, get stories straight about any mistakes that may have triggered the accident, and limit employer liability, and to control the rumor mill. It can certainly be abused.
According to the one article, he was already making $12 an hour, which is well above minimum wage in Virginia. I'm sure we could debate whether his benefits were adequate or not, but probably the biggest challenge he faced seems to have been making the cut to be a permanent rather than seasonal/temp worker.
Even that aside though, I don't think keeping the minimum wage down is going to do anything but delay the inevitable. As robots get cheaper, what are we supposed to do, keep lowering it even further to keep pace?
The bottom line is, no matter where the minimum wage lies, the day will come where we just don't have any work available for people like this guy - not because he's lazy, or doesn't want to work, but simply because he has no skills at tasks that a machine can't do better and cheaper. What do we do then? He still has to eat, as do his kids.How is he supposed to make a living, in a world where robots gather the raw materials, process them in factories, drive the delivery trucks, etc?
At some point we'll probably have to start talking about switching to a Guaranteed Basic Income, or something similar, because there just won't be enough demand for unskilled/low skilled human labor anymore.
Several if not all of the Amazon warehouses now use robots to move shelves to the pickers, instead of the pickers running to the shelves. The sad story of a hard-working Joe who wanted to feed his family & died on the job is becoming the sad story of even the crappy jobs disappearing.
The "all corporations are evil" liberals immediately think and post that Amazon is trying to hide something and is using cost cutting to put their employees lives at risk.
Now, if someone spends even a minute thinking about this first, they'll understand that Amazon, and other large companies, have gone to considerable expense to keep medical staff in house. That calling security first puts EMTs on the scene faster and sets up the environment for security to direct outside help to the scene.
I'm not even in a large office building. Imagine you call 911 and say please come to the door of "Company". Firetruck shows up goes to the front desk and they don't even begin to know where to send them. Calling security/front desk lets someone who isn't paniced fill in the details on where to go and how to get them to the site of the problem. Complaining that Amazon says to contact security first is stupid and shows that the person writing the article has never worked in a corporate environment in their life or they wouldn't write it up this way...
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Yup. This is anecdotal, but...
I was a Group Leader at a University facility. We were under a strict rule- in case of Emergency, call x5211. (Yes, we really did also have Big Red Buttons, and training for when to push them.)
I saw a guy fall off of the Radiation Shielding, a distance of some 25 feet. He was Big- maybe six-five and 250 pounds, gifted when it came to High Voltages, but otherwise clumsy. I went right to him, told him not to move in the most commanding voice I could muster, went to the phone about ten feet away, (We had a _lot_ of phones.), and called x5211. Within 30 seconds or so, I heard the Sirens. Within two minutes, _they_ were the ones telling him not to move, with much better commanding voices.
Our Paramedics had training above and beyond what the local Fire Department had. We really did have the best. Top places in the kind of statewide contests that Firefighters and Paramedics train for.
It turned out well; the Electrician was quite proud of his bruising, and had no problems showing it to anyone who asked. That fall would probably have me in the Hospital for a few weeks.
30 seconds between witnessing the Fall, and Sirens.
In the Amazon case, it was 9 minutes before before properly trained and vetted Paramedics were called, and another ten minutes before they showed up. That they were called at all meant that the local Amcare "EMT"s realized at some point how out of their depth the situation was.
What would have been the outcome if proper Medical attention was provided? Who knows. The guy was a Timebomb. This could just as well happen at a stoplight on the way home from work.
But ask yourself-
Would you trust Amcare?
(By the way, the Web is full of Amcare horror stories.)
If inside doesn't have an ambulance, you need to call 911 first. Then, when 911 is called, and the "real" response is on the way, call the security and let them know 911 is on the way for a medical emergency. They can send something too, or not. But delaying an ambulance response to satisfy security's power trip is a bad decision.
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This is really 100% a logistics problem determined by both the size, layout, and "unusualness" of the establishment. For giant warehouses, dangerous manufacturing facilities, places with rail lines on site, etc., with multiple gates and physical building doors, the reason you don't call 911 is because you probably can't tell them anything useful about how to efficiently get to you, and once you call 911 the next call from the people who *do* know is possibly not going to go well (as they will instead try to reroute the emergency team you led to the wrong place, except maybe no one can actually figure out where they currently are in relation to where they should be). For smaller buildings or those that are more familiar (or with regular layouts like office structures with numbered floors and offices), the first call being to 911 is absolutely the right thing.
If a company has published internal documents and pamphlets that say to call security, and specifically to *NOT* call 911, then that is because they are either a) guilty of gross negligence (very unlikely), or b) have a plan in place to address issues in a way that is most efficient - sometimes developed in partnership with the local emergency services - and have qualified emergency response personnel on staff.
Like others have said. It's far better to get the REAL help rolling and to know and be sure that such help is actually coming rather than depending on your corporate master to do the right thing.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Pretty much.
I read the article. It's all about feelers feeling feels. There's not a bit of objective wrongdoing even hinted at on Amazon's part. They provide a facility that can employ 8% of the unemployed people in the town, and HuffPo acts like they're awful for it. It's strenuous physical labor, and some people can't handle it, especially when you're obese (6'3", 300lbs = 37.5 BMI; for his height, 200lbs is his healthy weight).
HuffPo is just trying to ride a wave of anti-Amazon sentiment to get ad-views.
All the feelers at HuffPo can rest easy though: when the robots replace all of these people, there will be no need to bitch about the working conditions any more!
In fact, the sleazy cost-saving measure would be to fire all the company's EMTs and medical staff, and tell all employees to just call 911 and wait for the city's EMTs to arrive.
911 first, always.
Don't be stupid.
If you've been trained to call security first, ask them why during that training. During training, they can answer all the questions you want.
If corporate has EMTs on staff 2 minutes away, and you bypass them, you could be killing the person you're trying to rescue.
You're talking out of your asshole. I work on a large campus, and besides the fact that an EMT can't get through security to get on site or into the closed areas, we have full-time, actual doctors on site.
The advice is to call the security in an emergency, as they can move people out of restricted access areas, provide first class first response, and move them into places where the ambulances can reach.
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