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Report Reveals Numerous Cases of Amazon Workers Being Treated in Ways That Leave Them Homeless, Unable To Work or Bereft of Income After Workplace Accidents (theguardian.com)
Several readers have shared a report: Vickie Shannon Allen, 49, started working at Amazon as a counter in a fulfillment warehouse at Haslet, Texas, in May 2017. At first, like many employees, Allen was excited by the idea of working for one of the fastest growing corporations in the world. That feeling dissipated quickly after a few months. [...] Nor is Allen alone. A Guardian investigation has revealed numerous cases of Amazon workers suffering from workplace accidents or injuries in its gigantic warehouse system and being treated in ways that leave them homeless, unable to work or bereft of income.
Allen's story began on 24 October last year when she injured her back counting goods on a workstation that was missing a brush guard, a piece of safety equipment meant to prevent products from falling onto the floor. She used a tote bin to try to compensate for the missing brush guard, and hurt her back while counting in an awkward position. The injury was the beginning of an ongoing ordeal she is still working to amend at Amazon. Over the course of a few weeks, Amazon's medical triage area gave her use of a heating pad to use on her back, while Amazon management sent her home each day without pay until Allen pushed for workers compensation. "I tried to work again, but I couldn't stretch my right arm out and I'm right-handed. So I was having a hard time keeping up. This went on for about three weeks," Allen said. Despite not getting paid, Allen was spending her own money to drive 60 miles one way to the warehouse each day just to be sent home. Once on workers compensation, Allen started going to physical therapy. In January 2018, she returned to work and injured herself again on the same workstation that still was not fixed.
Allen's story began on 24 October last year when she injured her back counting goods on a workstation that was missing a brush guard, a piece of safety equipment meant to prevent products from falling onto the floor. She used a tote bin to try to compensate for the missing brush guard, and hurt her back while counting in an awkward position. The injury was the beginning of an ongoing ordeal she is still working to amend at Amazon. Over the course of a few weeks, Amazon's medical triage area gave her use of a heating pad to use on her back, while Amazon management sent her home each day without pay until Allen pushed for workers compensation. "I tried to work again, but I couldn't stretch my right arm out and I'm right-handed. So I was having a hard time keeping up. This went on for about three weeks," Allen said. Despite not getting paid, Allen was spending her own money to drive 60 miles one way to the warehouse each day just to be sent home. Once on workers compensation, Allen started going to physical therapy. In January 2018, she returned to work and injured herself again on the same workstation that still was not fixed.
This is the free market at work. Exactly as intended by the corporations in charge.
I have an Amazon fulfillment center near me and after looking at some of the requirements for their professional job listings and hearing stories from people in my network I decided that I would stay well clear of them. They seem to be on the low end of the work/life balance quality spectrum as well as paying peanuts.
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Or maybe they could be fighting for food in Venezuelan late-stage socialism.
She was injured again on the same workstation. It sounds intentional to me. It's kind of like smacking your head on a low doorframe, backing up, clearing the cobwebs, and then continuing forward and smacking your head again. It doesn't even sound real.
....cheap... for the modern communist to still be able to afford soy lates and dream of other people paying for their stuff.
Communism, the great way for EVERYONE to be poor. *
* = except for the party elite.
I suggest we start with anonymous slashdot posters.
+1
Some stories deserve sympathy, but at 49, she can fuck off.
Look, I'm the first person to yell about poor working conditions for Amazon factory workers, but this particular cited case dances on a fine line. If the equipment you are provided does not let you do your job adequately, you raise that up to management as high as it is required to go, usually the equipment gets repaired. If not, instead of spending the gas to drive 120 miles and not get paid, or let your back get hurt by picking things up constantly, you spend $30 and buy a laundry guard and use that until they fix your workstation. 120 miles at 20 miles a gallon is 6 gallons of gas at $3 is $18 a day. After 2 days, you spent less on the laundry guard and didn't hurt your back.
Unions would help.
I certainly believe that she was treated unfairly, but if she returned after recovery to work on the same broken machine, why did she believe that things would end differently, that she would not be injured in the same manner again? Even if she were just not smart enough to know any better, her supervisor would seem to me to be criminally negligent in not having a machine repaired that injured her before and then returning her to that machine. And by "criminally negligent", I mean that he knowingly placed her in a situation that he knew world harm her.
Something does not seem right here.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
The hysteria of frequent media smear pieces notwithstanding, it's tough to take articles like this seriously at face-value. Lots of broad generalizations and impossible-to-prove (or disprove) allegations of straight-line relationships between an alleged safety issue with an employer, and outcomes like homelessness or disabling injury.
Unfortunately, part of my job is working with EPLI (Employment Practices Liability Insurance) carriers and risk managers. For every actual issue reported, there are multiple instances of people "gaming the system", fraudulently claiming workplace injury or discrimination, or filing repeated false HR reports to attempt to build up a "history" of abuses, being terminated for their bulls**t, and then pointing to that "history" as the REASON for their termination. Maybe I'm just too used to seeing the seedy underside of the Workers' Comp business, but to take light-on-details reports like this, and draw inferences of chronically deficient, or criminal, practices on the part of the large employer, is hard.
Most employees want to do a good job, be fairly compensated, and be appreciated at work. But a small percentage view work as a scam. Those aren't just the ones that spoil the party for everyone, but they're ALSO the ones most likely to turn up in press reports, because "going loud" and getting a company to pay them to go away is part-and-parcel of the scam.
If these folks were legitimately injured and abused by dumb-ass managers at Amazon, then I feel for them. But it's equally likely that a papercut became a "permanently debilitating hand injury", if historical reports like this are any guideline. Sad, but true.
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Look, I'm as libertarded as they come, but come on. Not every worker can graduate to middle management by 40. Some manual labour still has to be done these days, no reason to abuse the workers.
She used a tote bin to try to compensate for the missing brush guard, and hurt her back while counting in an awkward position.
So instead of alerting someone and getting the dangerous condition fixed, she tried to work around it herself and got hurt.
In January 2018, she returned to work and injured herself again on the same workstation that still was not fixed.
Good grief. You'd like to credit her with enough intelligence not to just turn around and do exactly the same thing that had just put her on the lam for 3 months, but then you'd probably have to conclude she was fishing for a payout from the big A.
She currently lives out of her car in the parking lot of the Amazon fulfillment center. “They cost me my home, they screwed me over and over and I go days without eating.”
Or then again, maybe she's just a bit... off.
1) OSHA. If it's a safety violation, don't just ignore it (or jury-rig a solution)--call it in.
2) It took her "a few weeks" to "push for" workman's comp? That's a day-one call. If you don't get it, you call the state Dept. of Labor (whatever the name is in that particular state).
3) When she came back, the guard was still not in place? a) refuse to work until it's fixed. b) see point (1).
Would a union help this? Probably. But unions also come with downsides (I've been a member of 3 unions and interacted with a few hundred). The plaintiff could have dealt with this a long time ago if she'd just called the appropriate government agencies--they *love* to fine big corporations for safety violations. Unions fought for--and got--these laws. But they're meaningless if people don't use them to protect themselves.
Honestly? 10 minutes on Google should have given this woman all the correct answers she needed to solve the issues. The original safety issues fall on Amazon, but after that? Most of her problems are the result of her "waiting for someone to fix it", rather than using the tools available to her.
Maybe in her brain it went like this
>work for business owned by world's richest man
>drive 60 miles for shitty job and low pay
>get injured at work
>recover
>get injured again
>sue
>retire in luxury from millions of bezo-bux due to settlement from company, in its attempt to avoid (even more) bad press.
Not to defend amazon (they're horrible) or attack someone who's basically down on their luck.. but there must have been a job closer to home that paid a little bit better?
It's almost like we have a GOP-controlled government that got a SCOTUS appointment and now has another, which will guarantee a court that will basically start from the Janus case and make all labor organization illegal because it infringes on imaginary people (corporations).
Straw-man much?
Janus merely noted that coerced union membership is unconstitutional.
Nothing's stopping Amazon's employees from unionizing.
At 49, actions that wouldn't have caused injury earlier in life start becoming dangerous - repetitive stress injury and various strains due to using body parts that have been inactive for years. She can be forgiven for developing her first injury. Going back and hurting herself again. not so much.
It does appear that Amazon has been a bit callous or careless here; the weeks without pay would not have happened if she had a good manager.
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Actually 60 miles would be, say 2 gallons of gas, about $6. Toss in wear and tear on the car and a local job for $1/hr less would still come out ahead.
Fast food and Walmart pay pretty well for entry-level type jobs (~$10/hr), people with brains will generally make manager after a short while, and there always seem to be vacancies. I dunno why someone would pick literal back breaking work over that for less pay, unless they've done something to get blacklisted from retail/food service (caught robbing a cash register once?).
Worker pay and benefits climbing at fastest pace in 10 years, ECI finds
Does anyone have any idea what could have happened 10 years ago that caused worker pay and benefits to stagnate for a whole damn decade?
Anyone?
Bueller?
I'll bite, but the problem started about 20 years ago... With the creation of the "subprime mortgage" which was needed to loan money to unqualified borrowers, backed by two Federally backed mortgage companies. A pile of money got loaned to people who couldn't pay it back and real estate prices shot though the roof as the market was awash in cheap money loaned by banks, converted into questionable securities backed by the fed. Why did banks do this in the first place? Anybody have a clue how this could take place, banks loaning money that would never get paid back?
Bueller?
Bueller?
Here's a hint.... WHO demanded that subprime borrowers be given loans and why?
Here's a statement: What happened at the end of Bush's administration is the house of cards finally fell, but the building of that structure took YEARS so the cause of the problem wasn't the economy and wasn't really Bush's fault (except in that he didn't see and avoid it). The REAL reason happened years before when banks started loaning money to unqualified people and why do you suppose they did that?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Did Abe Lincoln fight for the unions? Of course not.
Well, he didn't carry a rifle, but I'm pretty sure he was on the Union side. Not sure what schools teach these days, of course.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I mean, at some point occam's razor rings true.
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of such things getting fired. She doesn't live out of her car because she's a little off, she's doing it because she doesn't make enough money to afford a place to live.
People don't expect to be treated this way by a company as large as Amazon in America. You've got it pounded into your skull from birth this is the greatest country on planet earth from day 1. Nobody wants to believe that somebody in America could be taken advantage of to the point where they can't eat, can't afford a place to lay their head and repeatedly injure themselves. I mean... you didn't, did you?
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And of course it had NOTHING to do with lenders setting time bombs on the loans, lending money they didn't even have, or talking people into McMansion loans rather than starter homes they might have had a chance of paying off.
Note that it wasn't just (or even mostly) poor people who got nailed when the bubble popped. It was also middle class (former) homeowners and commercial properties. Then there's the whole robo-signing thing and banks trying to foreclose on properties they didn't even hold a mortgage on.
The situation with commercial properties was the really crazy part. Because of the screwy criteria for foreclosure, renters were actually raising rent on properties when tenants left even though they were barely 50% occupied and so driving even more commercial tenants out.
And of course, the whole deal of questionable financial instruments being created and fraudulently rated as AAA when they were more akin to junk bonds didn't help.
That was all related to de-regulating the banks, not requiring small loans to less well qualified borrowers.
Look, you can believe what you want to believe. There are certainly real cases, where real people have been hurt by actual negligence, or discriminated against with true malice. It happens, and those people deserve to be protected. There are lots of resources to help those people, and whatever the newspaper says, there are far more gov't departments that tend towards over-reacting with severe enforcement, moreso than turning a blind eye to true workplace violations.
But you have to recognize that when you credulously accept every story about injury and discrimination at face-value, you're not helping the real victims -- you're hurting all of the people who REALLY HAVE been wronged by dumping resources, attention and time on cases that distract from real problems.
There's just too many problems with this story. There are thousands of vacant jobs, requiring few or no skills, in the DFW market. A 60-mile commute in that area, for a specific job, makes too little sense because of how dense that area is. Rents are not that high -- $500/month median rent for a 1Br/1Ba, which is less than 33% of even a $10/hr job working 35-hours per week. She claims to have willingly gone back to doing an un-safe job, even assuming the employer was stupid enough to allow that to occur -- and, in terms of safety gear, that "all important" brush guard that the article hangs its hat on, isn't actually an OSHA-recognized piece of safety equipment!!
I see the horrible crud that happens to people every day, and I do count my blessings. But you do nobody any good when you get outraged and demand action based on "investigative journalism" like this crap. It has every hallmark of trying to make the "Amazon is evil" point, and too many warning flags that no sane person (or employer) would ever actually commit. If this piece is even 75% accurate, then it should be making the point of needing better mental-health counseling in TX, not one about workplace safety.
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Bush not only didn't see it and didn't avoid it, he took additional actions, such as military adventurism and tax cuts which exacerbated the problem.
Military adventurism? You mean the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions? You act like we got into those just for the thrill of blowing stuff up..
Tax Cuts? How on earth did that make the situation with the subprime mess worse? And Didn't the next administration not do the same things and more?
And you are totally discounting the facts behind how this whole house of cards got built and haven't admitted to the players or their motives in the setup phase. Had this house of cards not been built in the first place, there would have been no problem.
So What exactly is the Problem you are discussing? It doesn't seem to be what I'm discussing.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If I've been reading the reports correctly, fast food and similar places generally ensure that you work less than 20 hours a week at an irregular schedule. So you've got to juggle two irregular hour jobs, neither of which will provide health insurance, workers comp, or other "full time employee" benefits.
I think you need to re-figure the costs/rewards.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"Communism failed because capitalism didn't subsidize it enough." You people would be funny if you weren't so f*cking eil.
Those things also tend to be corrupt boondoggles and wastes of taxpayer money. So, yes, excellent examples of "practical communism".