Re:Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States
by ghufran_syed on Sunday July 25, 2021 @12:58PM
(#27950792)
"Double the amount of serious injuries" - using a metric based on whether you got time off or a change in duties. So if your company is better about making you see a doctor when you get an injury, and better about honoring the doctor's recommendation regarding light duty or time off, your company's number on this metric would get worse.
I see a lot of illegal workers in the ER who get injured at work but refuse to fill out the workman's comp forms - you can guarantee that their employers have a zero rate for serious injuries using that metric
[Edit - If you're looking to really improve conditions, maybe focus on the workers who don't show up in the official numbers? Reminds me of the old story about the drunk guy looking for his lost keys by the lamppost, not where he dropped them "because the light is better here"]
Re:Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States
by BoxOfRain on Sunday July 25, 2021 @01:54PM
(#27951333)
Good Lord, that's genuinely dystopian. People often say the '70s was too biased in favour of unions, but I can't help but wonder if the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction in the present. Those two paragraphs make me want to retch like a cat puking up a hairball.
Re:Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States
by andrepd on Sunday July 25, 2021 @02:17PM
(#27951509)
>I can't help but wonder if the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction
We are full on into an unopposed neoliberal world order. The pendulum has swung so far in this direction that an alternative or an opposition to this philosophy simply does not exist anymore in the public sphere.
Re:Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States
by WalterBright on Sunday July 25, 2021 @01:10PM
(#27950931)
I read an article about the native inhabitants of Australia and their very low rates of heart disease. It turns out that the males walked an average of 9 miles a day, the women 5.
Re:Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States
by HomeDeLaPot on Sunday July 25, 2021 @07:02PM
(#27953754)
Okay, that actually sounds like it might be healthier than my desk job. And Amazon providing health advice isn't a bad thing, cringey corporate speak notwithstanding. The 2x injury rate and lack of bathroom breaks are the troubling parts.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/2/22465357/amazon-industrial...
> Amazon tells its warehouse employees to think of themselves not as overworked cogs in an enormous, soul-crushing machine, but as “industrial athletes,” and to prepare their bodies for that experience like someone training for a sporting event, according to a pamphlet obtained by Motherboard. The comparison is a troubling euphemism for a company whose workers have almost double the amount of serious injuries as the rest of the warehousing industry and who reportedly are often unable to take bathroom breaks.
> The pamphlet tells employees that some of them will walk up to 13 miles throughout the course of the day, burning an average of 400 calories an hour. It also suggests all sorts of ways to help workers prepare for the athlete life, including changes to their diets and sleep schedules and making sure they’re not dehydrated throughout the day by keeping an eye on the color of their urine. It also suggests that employees buy shoes “at the end of the day when [their] feet are swollen” to avoid tightness and blisters — advice that will be familiar to distance runners or multi-day hikers.