Your desensitised hot take of 'well this stuff just happens' is appalling in a number of ways and is exactly the attitude that trickles down through businesses when it's someone else that's stuck at the thin edge of the wedge.
I can't see that in article (and I'm native Polish speaker). Article says that man told manager about his symptoms and manager instantly walked with him to paramedical team, instead of calling them. People in article say that it was "culpable mistake".
Yes, it was a mistake, but it's unlikely that it resulted in death of that man.
2 weeks later after not coming in on time I handed in my notice, got yelled at. They asked for more notice, gave it to them, last day, they said it was alright to not come in on time.
That warehouse certainly didn't have robots to bring us our packages for scanning by laser gun either.
Did any of your colleagues die of overworking?
Friend of the family mopped of a colleague after a barrel of acid dropped from the top rack and split at the top of the forklift cab.
I heard similar opinions about Amazon warehouses in Poland, but it's anecdotal evidence and shouldn't be used instead of statistics.
It's naive to think your priviledged situation applies to everyone, especially to amazon warehouse workers.
These jobs are not good for your health.
People do die at work quite often, but in this case there appears there'll be an inquest and investigation in to whether or not Amazon is at fault (From the article via Google Translate "Amazon is waiting for information from the prosecutor's office and the results of the investigation.").
We shouldn't assume Amazon aren't negligent just yet, just as we shouldn't assume they are. We don't know. Citing statistics on how many hours there are in a day isn't helpful.
> This man had trouble catching his breath. The leader told him to go a long distance on his own. This is a culpable mistake.
[1]: https://gloswielkopolski-pl.translate.goog/smierc-w-amazonie...
But as a person with a fair dose of the autism spectrum in the woodpile, I am nonetheless consistently unsettled by the inevitable nitpick argument that whatever dystopian trans-meta-corporate optimization that happened to wander into the spotlight today is in fact supported by such and such figures, and obviously we’re doing rigorous work here because we have links to web servers that send a little textual prose as an amuse bouche for the megabyte of JavaScript actively trying to defeat the already feeble attempts of our browser to send something less than our genome to some IP address somewhere.
Amazon fulfillment centers are what Dickens was talking about when Scrooge asked if there were any workhouses.
I’m not a financial accountant, but I gather that a balance sheet has a line on it called “goodwill”, that it is important to a company like Amazon, and likely something shareholders care about.
So being in the news for literally working people to death is quite possibly suboptimal for the shareholders.
Kinda sucks for the dead guy’s family too.
sorry about the inevitable nitpick but no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workhouse
on edit: evidently pointing out an egregious factual error which actually downplays the horrors of Victorian poverty by supposing a workhouse was something like a bad warehouse job gets the downvotes.
on edit 2: probably shouldn't have complained but was annoyed at the quick slapping I received.
“a total institution where those unable to support themselves financially were offered accommodation and employment.”
is not the direct superclass of an Amazon fulfillment center?
One click off the one you provided is Wikipedia’s take on a “total institution”:
“A total institution is a place of work and residence where a great number of similarly situated people, cut off from the wider community for a considerable time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life.”
So as Futurama’s writers would say you are technically correct, the best kind of correct: even the fucking villains who ran Edwardian and Victorian Britain at least gave you lodging for your slavery-like labor that you were basically born into.
Retro is perpetual, what’s old is new again at all times. Bell bottoms here, feeding the poor to each other there. Pretty soon we’re vacationing on Mars.
>the infamous Victorian workhouse, an institution that the editor of the medical journal the Lancet claimed could kill 145,000 people every year
I'm pretty sure the workhouse was significantly worse than being employed at Amazon.
>gave you lodging for your slavery-like labor that you were basically born into.
this was in Poland, a country that being in Europe I suppose has a functioning welfare system. The workhouse was in effect the Victorian welfare system.
conditions in Amazon's warehouses are bad enough that hyperbole does not help in the fight against it.
Rich people have gotten a lot of mileage out of convincing everyone that they’re a temporarily impoverished millionaire. The body politic is starting to get wise to this hustle (again) and the last bastion of dumbass Ayn Rand “socialism for me, but not for thee” tripe seems to be the temporarily impoverished tech billionaires on HN.
What was worse about that poorly-lit box perfumed by long-chain polymers where you have to hold it until your assigned bathroom break and you’re timed down to the minute on repetitive, physically stressful tasks?
The fucking WiFi?
For better or worse most of it was JS, so I have a deeper grasp of what “.prototype” means than the average hacker.
I’m not dissing web devs. I’m calling out all hackers, myself included, who looked the other way.
I mean, history and AMZN's share price would suggest otherwise.
Yes this may be true, but it is not relevant to the article content, where clearly it seems the working environment is at play.
And given the history of Amazon mistreating its workers, it is very hard to give them the benefit of the doubt.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.
Also, 99.9999% of the time a person has chest pain and difficulty breathing, it's indigestion.
We must resist this modern bullshit.
Of course you'd have to adjust for country-wide statistics.
We've had to ask you this kind of thing several times before. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.