Re:911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress ...
by ctrl-j on Monday March 11, 2019 @12:45PM
(#19360406)
> Whether they're in a office of a company that rents two floors of a 350,000 square foot office tower in a downtown of a major city, sitting on their couches in a single family home in a suburb playing videos games on their xbox, attending a music festival, literally any imaginable human activity.
This is not 189 total 911 calls - this is 189 calls for emotional distress.
Personal experience dictates that on-the-job suicidal thoughts are vastly diminished compared to netflix/xbox suicidal thoughts. When you are actively engaged and distracted, you are less likely to be wrapped up in self-destructive thoughts.
The best comparison would be do find numbers of on-the-job emotional distress calls from Walmart, McDonalds, UPS, or other large employers. I have no idea how Amazon compares, but 189 over 5 years intuitively seems high.
Compare apples to apples if you want to compare.
Re:911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress ...
by behringer on Monday March 11, 2019 @01:28PM
(#19360843)
On top of that, remember Amazon has its own emergency staff on hand so they probably don't call 911 when their own emergency staff resolves the situation.
Re:911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress ...
by jrnichols on Thursday March 14, 2019 @09:49PM
(#19395744)
I was one of those Amcare employees for a 6 month contract. The only first aid provider in a warehouse. I ended up placing 1 911 call for a seizure, and that was it. Zero mental health issues. Most everything was minor injuries, and many of those seemed like borderline workers comp fraud too.
Amazon has 8 or 9 warehouses in the Dallas Ft Worth area alone. I wonder how many 911 calls they've generated and what for.
189 calls / 5 years = 37.8 calls per year
37.8 calls / 46 warehouses = 0.82 calls per year, per warehouse
Now assume for a moment, this is probably a low estimate, that a single warehouse has a peak day shift population of 75 persons...
One of the things I have learned first hand, doing VoIP E911 and site address registration for E911 purposes, if you have a sufficiently large number of people (or in my case, live / on-net individual VoIP service circuits), there will be a certain statistically "normal" volume of 911 calls no matter what those people are doing.
Whether they're in a office of a company that rents two floors of a 350,000 square foot office tower in a downtown of a major city, sitting on their couches in a single family home in a suburb playing videos games on their xbox, attending a music festival, literally any imaginable human activity.
I am not trying to say that the Amazon warehouse jobs are not borderline abusive and a staff turnover meat-grinder, they probably are. Have read numerous reports from journalists that have gone "undercover" with the temp/staffing agencies Amazon uses to hire workers for their warehouses. It doesn't paint a pretty picture.