From their post on the topic it sounds like you should be happy with their plan:

https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/how-amazon-priorit...

> Millions of masks have been distributed across our network. They are available to all Amazon associates, delivery service partners, Amazon Flex participants, seasonal employees, and Whole Foods Market stores employees. We are encouraging everyone to take and use them.

As for testing, they have been unable to do it through regular channels so they are building a lab to do it themselves:

> An important safety step might be regular testing of all employees for COVID-19, including those without symptoms. We have begun assembling equipment we need to build our first lab to process tests and hope to start testing small numbers of our frontline employees soon.

As for cleanliness:

> We have increased the frequency and intensity of cleaning at all sites, including regular sanitization of door handles, handrails, touch screens, scanners, and other frequently touched areas.

> Our enhanced cleaning has added almost 200 additional points of contact per site across our janitorial teams, and we’ve increased the size of our cleaning teams threefold to support our buildings.

> We require everyone to wash their hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, especially after using the bathroom and before eating, as well as after blowing their nose, coughing, or sneezing. If soap and water are not readily available, alcohol-based hand sanitizer stations are easily accessible throughout our buildings.

> In addition to break times, employees can log out of their system to wash their hands whenever they choose, without worrying about impact on their performance goals.

Policies take time to develop as people develop understanding of the situation , then there’s availability and putting policy into practice.

Amazon has by now spent millions of man-hours on addressing COVID-19 -- meetings, designing splash banners, etc. They are a very big company who pays big money for top talent. Amazon is not the scrappy upstart it was 15 years ago. Let's hold them accountable according to what they are capable.

Edit: it would seem obvious in retrospect that if most major governments have action plans in case of global pandemic, a global logistics company should have done the same. I would be very surprised if they hadn't, frankly, and my view of Bezos would be lower than it already is if they hadn't because this is really something that should have mattered to him before it was a real situation.

Frankly, I'm quite surprised Amazon, FedEx, UPS and USPS have done as well as they have under these conditions.

Yes, you can plan to some extent... but these are PEOPLE heavy issues. The only way this would have gone without issue is if it was pretty much ONLY robots, and had 3-4x the number of people needed, skilled and trained to support those robots, and that the robots themselves were under 25% utilization to begin with.

Telling a company they need to spend 4-5X as much for operations, just in case of a once a centuray global pandemic, is pretty unlikely.

Now, if you want to talk about getting domestic sourcing of more products, particularly in infrastructure, defense, medicine and communications/tech, I'm all ears. There's no reason more than half of medicine and telecom/tech equipment should be foreign sourced for a country the size/scale of the US as a matter of defense. With where we're at with China and Iran (effects on Taiwan of particular concern), it's even more amazing there aren't more talks about this.

I'm so tired of this holier-than-thou "they should know better/be better prepared" bullshit. Once-in-a-century black swan event - yeah, every company should definitely have plans for something like this!

Moving massive resources in an effort like this is no small feat, and trying to treat it like it's as simple as signing people up to Slack is silly. It's amazing how people think operations like just magically manifest "because".

Even companies with “pandemic” plans have a kind of outline of cascading triggers but a lot of the resulting triggers are undefined and those are things which basically say ($leadership) convenes talks things over and develop emergent plans and offer to their lower managers who take that and develop their own plans accordingly. And then that has to be revised with feedback from staff , etc...

Not every company. But maybe a global, near-universal online marketplace, logistics company, etc. has a 10-year plan.

I've had some opportunity to have insight into corporate pandemic planning over the years.

It's important to understand that U.S. corporate planning for a pandemic has assumed a certain level of urgency and competency from the federal response.

This has been reasonable, as the federal government has for the last 20 years, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, taken potential pandemics very seriously, and responded aggressively to them.

The federal response to the 2019 novel coronavirus has completely failed to live up to these expectations and the result is that everyone is scrambling to catch up. Corporations and states are following their playbooks... but those playbooks were not written in terms of "let's be ready to fill in for the federal government when they fall on their faces." The whole point of the federal government is to be a backstop for everyone else in the face of huge national threats.

This is one reason you're seeing Republican lawmakers be so willing to pump money out of the government: they know the government screwed up the early response, and so it is fair that the government should pay to help mitigate that.

Most major Governments have an ability to print money on will, and yet they were caught red handed in handling covid19. Not to mention that the entire mandate of government is to keep their country safe as first thing, and yet their incompetence was on fully display. I for one, am glad that private companies didn't copy the government.

As someone reading through this thread, I have some feedback for you. This is partly to test the commonly held view that feedback is desired instead of blindly voting and partly to help you. I piped it through `base64` so that you can ignore it if you don't feel like it:

WW91ciBjb21tZW50cyByZWFkIGxpa2UganVzdCBvdXRyYWdlLiBUaGlzIGlzIG9mIGxvdyBpbmZv cm1hdGlvbiB2YWx1ZSB0byBtZS4gVGhpcyBpcyB3aHkgSSB3aWxsIGRvd24tdm90ZSB5b3VyIGNv bW1lbnRzIGluIGZ1dHVyZS4K

Thanks. I read it. I'm curious where is the mental block that prevents people from seeing the point I'm trying to make. Am I brow-beating around the bush too much, neither clearly nor concisely?

Unrelated, but base64 encoding feedback is a great idea.

I'm not convinced, as it creates the possibility of egregious violations of community standards being difficult for moderators to detect.

Less of an issue, but still worth some thought: Just like paywalled submissions must be by-passable so that we can all share in a conversation equally, base64 threatens to create subthreads that are not equally accessible. (Trivial easy if you are on a laptop, not on mobile).

That's a fair point. Acting in good faith I had not considered abuse of the technique.

I've often wondered what a forum would look like where you could make the equivalent of 'aside' comments. The way someone might, while you're speaking, say softly "hyPERbolee, not HYper-bowl" to correct you without interrupting.

Perhaps a good example is StackOverflow's Q&A format w/ comments and chats. You can comment and move to chats but the emphasis is on the important part: the question and the answers.

Allowing voting on these "asides" in StackOverflow permits all of the usual stuff while relegating them to the asides they are.

Of course, in the case of what I used it for, it is generally impolite to offer advice unasked but the nature of slow feedback loops means it's better for me to offer an ignorable piece of thing. i.e. if you think I'm an idiot, I want you to have the power to ignore me. That is only polite to compensate for the brain-hacking strength of having text describe you. You can't ignore it afterwards.

>I've often wondered what a forum would look like where you could make the equivalent of 'aside' comments. The way someone might, while you're speaking, say softly "hyPERbolee, not HYper-bowl" to correct you without interrupting.

That would either be PMs, or the forum equivalent of posting "sage" on an imageboard (which prevents the post from bumping,) neither of which HN supports.

Although given the forum's focus on quality over quantity, I think some kind of "whisper" mode might be worth looking at, to opt out of having such comments from appear on the new comments page.

Yeah, I considered PMs but they're really not the same because the point is that everyone benefits with low attention contribution. The whisper mode is totally what I was thinking of.

They could be comments that are automatically marked dead for everyone but the intended recipient. People with showdead on already self-select for higher noise content anyway.

I hadn't thought of that, that's interesting.

I learnt it from someone I know[0]

0: https://lobste.rs/s/lhijk2/horrifically_dystopian_world_soft...

>Stop playing PR hype-man for Amazon, they don't need your help.

You can address the other speaker's points without this.

That person is not playing anything. They are noting what the facts are right now.

Those aren't facts, those are PR slogans from a blog post on Amazon's web site. I am not holding my breath to see whether these policies are enacted in good faith, given Amazon's business practices and labor relations of late.

Are you saying Amazon didn't do the things the other user noted?

I'm being specific about the framing and the narrative that is constructed when well-meaning users parrot corporate talking points in an organic setting like a public Internet forum.

Credit for the effort, but it has been a consistent issue over the last month and employees are still voicing concerns.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/21/enough-enough-l...

Once the vast majority of employees say it's actually fixed I'll give Amazon real credit for it, but it's empty PR until then.

This article mentions 300 people, which isn't a very big fraction of Amazon employees. I'm sure some employees who aren't participating sympathize, but what number would convince you that the "vast majority" think it's fine?

> Forcing people to show up to work under these conditions is murder.

Nobody can be forced to show up, and no, that's not murder.

> A starting point would be...

Amazon has a page listing their pretty thorough adjustments for health & safety: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/how-amazon-priorit...

Unpaid time off is forcing low-income workers to show up unless they want to starve.

Not having enough money to survive isn't a made up thing. However you want to define it, people need to make ends meet including right now.

>Not having enough money to survive isn't a made up thing.

No one has suggested that anything here is a 'made up thing', are you creating strawmen?

>However you want to define it, people need to make ends meet including right now.

I'm interested in understanding what the GP's point was. I don't get to definitely choose arbitrary definitions and interpretations for them. The dictionary and accepted usage offers a range of interpretations.

Apologies.. your comment sure read a lot like 'if starve really means eat less, maybe they should just suck it up and eat less.' I though it was obvious that GP's usage of the word 'starve' wasn't to be taken literally.

Ah yes because they're not being held at gunpoint it's not forced.

Do you really have a very literal definition of forced? No nuance or anything?

The nuanced approach is to reject extremist characterizations, not embrace them.

Yeah unfortunately you're in the wrong here.

There are multiple levels of forced. It's not an on and off switch, as much as people make it out to be.

In what way am I in the wrong? I did not claim and do not believe that there is only one level of 'forced'. No one here is making it out to be that way.

Edit: Just because there is a range of accepted meanings for the word 'forced' doesn't mean that all uses of the word 'forced' are correct. Even with the most low key interpretations of the word 'forced', I don't think that this is in any way the correct word for this situation.

> What's a few avoidable deaths between friends, after all?

Amazon is about as close to the ideal of an "essential employer" as anyone is, though. They're shipping a huge amount of food and other essentials. Objectively, a package delivered through a managed professional environment is less risky and involves fewer potential transmission events than one purchased at retail.

Online sellers, where they have product to deliver, are the ones we want to prioritize keeping open.

Now... there's lots to complain about with Amazon's response in other ways. It's very reasonable to argue that their workers need more PPE, employer-provided testing and notification, hazard pay, better safety practices, etc...

But if you want to argue that Amazon should shut down... who do you want to be open instead?

I'm glad I waited an extra minute to comment b/c you did all the work. Amazon has allowed me to limit my local travels to two physical environments for essentially the past six weeks. There's a value to that in reducing transmission.

By requiring others to do that for you and paying them pennies for what value they're providing.

I'd agree with you if the company decided to not take profit during this time and paid the employees the same amount of value they produce.

> By requiring others to do that for you and paying them pennies for what value they're providing.

The median wage of an Amazon Warehouse worker is about $60,000 / year, which is above the median wage in the US[1]. The 25th-percentile wage for the same worker is $53,000 — still higher than the median wage, and this is an entry level position that requires no college eduction.

Amazon also provides 401(k) matching for their warehouse workers and provides them the same group health insurance as their software engineers and executives[2][3]. It is quite possibly the most generous set of benefits currently available to an entry-level low-skill worker with no college education.

> I'd agree with you if the company decided to not take profit during this time and paid the employees the same amount of value they produce.

Couple things: 1) I think you're overestimating how much profit Amazon makes on its retail business; the margins are razor thin. 2) profit is just the cost of labor for the managers, I.e. the people that are coordinating the labor and calling the high-level shots. This includes coming up with the policies and systems to ensure the company can continue to operate in the midst of a global pandemic.

Finally, Amazon employed 798,000 people as of 2019, and added 100,000 new jobs in the last month alone, with 50,000 current openings outstanding. A lot of the margin goes into literally providing all of these wages and benefits for nearly 1 million people. This is more than many industrialized nations.

[1] https://www.paysa.com/salaries/amazon--warehouse-worker

[2] https://www.aboutamazon.com/amazon-fulfillment/working-here/...

[3] https://www.glassdoor.com/Benefits/Amazon-US-Benefits-EI_IE6...

The first number is so laughably far away from reality. Do you have any idea how many hours a week you would have to work to make $60k at $15/hr? Does the average warehouse worker make double the starting rate or work 70 hour weeks?

As someone who works in the industry I do agree however that they do an okay job taking care of their people compared to others. But nobody is going to write an article about how shit it is to work at a warehouse owned by a company no one has ever heard of. Amazon has actually done a lot for people at those places too though, if there is an amazon warehouse nearby starting at $15 an hour nobody is going to come work for you for barely above minimum wage anymore, it has definitely put some out competitive wage pressure.

The Paysa number is probably correct... For the tiny minority of workers in Amazon Warehouses who are salaried. If we look at actual wages (not just salaried employees) it would be far lower.

Terribly naive to include that point in the argument.

Do you have access to more reliable numbers?

Like I said, they can fix the problem. It sounds like they're trying, but it's not proven that they've gotten all the way. In the past they were clearly inadequate and it's why employees went on strike and publicly protested.

"Essential employees" shouldn't be put at risk just because people need them to ship stuff out. We shouldn't put "essential employees"' immune-compromised relatives at risk either.

> "Essential employees" shouldn't be put at risk just because people need them to ship stuff out.

But... isn't that what "essential" means? No one claims this is fair. It's not fair that as software developers we get an automatic pass to continue our careers working from home while our bartender friends have to file for unemployment either.

But at the end of the day we need stuff to live. Someone needs to run the power and intenet and water infrastructure. And someone needs to deliver goods to people who need them.

I mean: I agree we need to make this better for those folks. I just don't see how Amazon demanding essential workers come to work is the wrong thing here.

>A starting point would be Amazon providing tests and ensuring that everyone has been tested before returning to work

Amazon can't win.

If they did that, the newspaper headlines would read "Bezos demands DNA samples of workers as a prerequisite to being paid."

I don't know about that, but there'd definitely be newspaper headlines about the number of workers testing positive implying that it's somehow Amazon's fault. We've already seen this with one of Amazon's NYC warehouses (over numbers that seem very much in line with NYC in general), various food manufacturers, etc. Apparently some meat-packing companies are now reluctant to test any of their workers because of the bad publicity and the damage it does - they'd rather just close down the entire site.

COVID tests aren't DNA tests. It's a swab of the back of your throat (through the nose, oof) to test for a specific virus. It's not hard to find the specific stuff used to perform the tests, it's out there on the internet, the CDC published it. Are we really descending into paranoia about Amazon trying to genetically profile employees?

There's a big population of people who just start from the premise that Amazon must be doing something wrong and search for facts to justify it. I lost my ability to assume good faith when people complained they should pay $15 an hour, they started paying $15 an hour, and then the controversy immediately restarted about how greedy they are to not pay more.

I'm pretty sure they could start paying a minimum wage of $30 an hour and people would be irate that they're making it impossible to hire anyone because Amazon is overpaying. When you're the biggest player there is nowhere to hide.

This probably won't be too far off, if the current level of unemployment benefits holds. Just the $600 a week on top of state benefits comes out to $15/hr.

Never mind the fact that Amazon does 401(k) matching and provides its warehouse workers the same group health insurance plan as their software engineers, which might possibly be the most generous health insurance plan for an entry-level position that requires no college degree.

I'm right there with you... I don't like Trump, even if I agree on a lot of policy actions/choices, but the guy can't have a good day with a lot of people. So many are outright lying to push an agenda over truth, and you can't really rely on anyone to be informed anymore.

Right now, I'm much more concerned that we're on the brink of war with China and Iran... partly because China sees us as weakened over COVID, I'm not sure on Iran's motivations right now either... With how much of our tech comes from taiwan, it's really concerning... this could literally set the world back a decade for a decade.

It's always interesting seeing a comment go up as high as a three and as low as -1, back and forth.

Oh no! He said something not negative about Trump... downvote now!

> COVID tests aren't DNA tests.

Correct, because SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus and contains no DNA. But the test does work by detecting the viral RNA and it is hard to find the specific stuff (reagents) to perform the test and that's a big reason why we're all sheltering in place without a proper nationwide testing regime.

They are not forcing them since they are allowed to take time off. You can't self quarantine forever anyways, standard procedure is 14 days of quarantine if you think you may have been exposed to the virus or if you have any symptoms.

Unpaid time off. How are people supposed to eat and pay rent if their only available leave is unpaid? How will they afford their hospital bills after being exposed?

Same as the 20+ million Americans who are laid off and seeking unemployment?

I'm not sure why that makes it okay to add to that population? Amazon has the resources to temporarily cover paid leave until they can guarantee safe conditions in their warehouses for employees. Regions that have prematurely relaxed their virus controls have seen new outbreaks, the same could happen in warehouses. It's in everyone's best interest for Amazon to offer paid leave until their workplaces have been proven to be safe, which is going to take a bit even after all the appropriate measures are in place.

The safety net is by far the better way to address this, it's a drop in the bucket relative to the total cost of the safety net.

> It's in everyone's best interest for Amazon to offer paid leave until their workplaces have been proven to be safe, which is going to take a bit even after all the appropriate measures are in place.

Amazon appears to think that your "until" condition is here now, per the safety measures they purport to be taking.

Yeah, I don’t see how few extra bucks is worth literally risking life. Total numbers look big but really it’s $120 more per each shift where you can be exposed or expose others to a deadly virus.

Remember that you are risking your life every day getting out of your bed, even without this virus.

>What's a few avoidable deaths between friends, after all?

There is no vaccine coming for a year, maybe two, maybe never. "Flattening the curve" is ONLY a delaying strategy to not swamp the health-care system and hope that some treatments are developed (no guarantees there either). COVID is going to be part of our lives.

Are you saying we should shelter in place forever?

>A starting point would be Amazon providing tests

What tests? Are you expecting every employer to test their workers every day?

>along with ensuring everyone has masks and gloves and enough time to thoroughly wash their hands throughout their shift.

That's reasonable. Masks + social distancing + gloves, and policies for hand washing and disinfecting of commonly used surfaces. I suspect Amazon isn't too far from that, and if they are it's only because of the global PPE shortage.

IMO a starting point is: Single test for all employees before return to work, 100% guarantee that everyone has a mask for their shifts, the facility has ventilation, and they have gloves. 100% guarantee that facilities have soap and running water.

In the past all of what I mention has been a problem in warehouses, and it's why employees are protesting. Amazon can fix this, but it's been a problem very recently.

It's super reasonable if they can't gather up a bunch of N95s and medical grade gloves, but paper surgical masks or cloth masks should be feasible by now. It sounds like they're working on their own testing infrastructure, which is great.

The death rate with proper medical care is very low. The avoidable deaths are a direct result of a swamped medical system.