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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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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.
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.
I do enjoy not starving to death and dying from polio. Modern technology is also quite nice.
People starve to death under Capitalism, and avoided starving to death before Capitalism was a thing. Salk's team developed their vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh, which is state funded. Development of modern technology has relied heavily on research grants from the federal government. The Internet we are using now likely would not have come about without a government research initiative.
None of these things have resulted solely from Capitalism. They required investment from the government, i.e. Socialism, in order to become viable products.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Actually, the US was pretty backwater until WWII, at which point we became the biggest economy in the world because all of our competitors' industrial capacity got wiped out during the war.