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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.
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
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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