
911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats - pseudolus
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-distress-911-calls-report-2019-3
======
jrnichols
189 calls over a 5 year period across 46 different facilities, and the
original article even notes that many of those were not work related at all.

It seems to try to lean towards "Amazon warehouse jobs are causing people to
think about killing themselves" but the opposite could also be said - Amazon
was able to engage these same employees with suicidal ideations and get them
help. Only one seems to have actually killed himself, and that's after a
bipolar diagnosis.

What is the suicide rate in other similar positions? How about call centers or
other jobs with strict adherence to clock in/out or task time? It's easy to
blame Apple or Amazon or Flextronics, but how does it compare to the rest of
society?

~~~
bantunes
"It's this isolating colony of hell where people having breakdowns is a
regular occurrence," former Amazon employee Jace Crouch told the Daily Beast.
An anonymous employee told the Daily Beast that the company treated its
workers like "robots."

~~~
013a
They have 200,000 employees. I bet I could find at least one in the warehouse
up the street who believes Bezos is an alien lizard lord from another planet.
The (anonymous) beliefs and observations of one person aren't even close to
relevant.

------
legitster
I have a friend who works in an Amazon warehouse and asked him about it:

"It's fine. Pay is decent. I get to do a lot of walking, which is nice. I'll
probably look for something more long term."

I asked him about all of the horror stories and stress I've read about:

"You work in an office. Are you saying there isn't any stress or bad bosses or
horror stories?"

Point taken. They have 200,000 warehouse employees. On average, the experience
will be 'meh'. Just like most jobs.

But I am more troubled about how this article conflates stress and mental
health, and the thin insinuation that contemplating suicide is a normal
response to a bad workplace. As if one can be a workplace upgrade or job
transfer away from eliminating pain. Or that people in good jobs don't deserve
to feel bad.

~~~
KorematsuFred
It all depends on how many people work there. A job at a restaurant will be
10x more stressful and will face people issues than a job as a coder in
downtown San Francisco. I think people need to adjust their expectations. All
this bad press has not hurt people willing to work in Amazon's warehouses even
in one of the best job markets so I think Amazon warehouses are at par with
their industry standards compared to Walmart, Costco or Target.

I will trust market signals over journalists and experts any day.

~~~
andrekandre
> I will trust market signals over journalists and experts any day.

i think it’s a balance, market signals alone aren’t enough imo. it’s multitude
of sources that are important, and then to correlate with data that indicates
a trend in one direction or another... “market signals” don’t necessarily take
into account morals or “human dignity” etc... if we just relied on “market
signals” we would arguably still have child labor and (even more) lax labor
laws because desperate people will fill any role they can get to “fit the
market”

that being said “journalism” now a days is more and more clickbait and
sensationalism (profit motive at work?) so i can totally understand the
sentiment....

~~~
KorematsuFred
I respectfully disagree. I know your opinions come from your good heart but
they are actually wrong. Market is way better at ensuring dignity rather than
experts and market eliminated child labour and not labour laws. If at all
labour laws such as minimum wage have deeply hurt some of the most vulnerable
young people like the black teenagers from poor neighborhoods. Personally even
I had difficulty understanding these basic concepts when I lived in India but
when I arrived in USA and wondered why this society has achieved so much I
found the answers.

I am not a blind follower of market and I understand the need for an effective
regulation but it should revolve more around people's negative rights rather
than abstract concepts like morality or dignity. I do not think people in DC
or Sacramento give two shits about real dignity or morality at all.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNj2g2_dfkI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNj2g2_dfkI)

------
Mtinie
> The Daily Beast noted that its report was "not evidence that Amazon staffers
> experience suicidal episodes more often than other American workers, in or
> out of a warehouse." And the rate of suicide in the United States is on the
> rise — the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention estimated that there
> were 1.4 million suicide attempts in the US in 2017.

I wish BI (or better yet, The Daily Beast when they ran the original story)
had included actual statistics to put the reported rate of 911 contacts into
context. Where does 189 times in five years (~38/yr, ~3/mo averaged) within an
employee population of between 400k and 600k, plus seasonal temporary
employees, fall into the overall incident count for similar or proportional
corporate populations?

If estimates of suicide attempts (and not just ideation) within the general US
population in 2017 are 1.4M (out of ~200M working-age people[0]), we're
looking at a rate of 0.7%. Just back of napikin'ing the rate for Amazon (using
500k employees for simplicity) I get ~0.007%/yr. Mind you, this does not mean
that Amazon is doing anything right, it simply means it does not appear to
represent an outlier against the overall population.

Warehouse jobs are likely high stress and physically challenging. I would
expect they'd have a higher instance of emotional distress and suicidal
thoughts/threats than non-warehouse jobs simply by virtue of the (broadly
generalized) socio-economic positions a lot of their employees find themselves
in.

\-----

[0]
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S)

~~~
Spooky23
Be careful about burying this in stats without context.

Of the 1.4M attempts, how many are expressed at work in the context of working
conditions? People handle different kinds of stress in all sorts of different
ways. How many threats of suicide are made annually? Way more than 1.4M.

In the context of taking away agency from employees, serious suicidal threats
are one extereme expression of stress. I’d be curious how many employees are
taking a crap in the workspace deliberately, what the incidence of sex at work
is, rates of theft, preventable injury, etc are.

~~~
Mtinie
You're right. I was sticking with the numbers The Daily Beast included as an
attempt at a comparison. I also challenged the numbers by stating the "1.4M"
number appears to be only attempts; a narrower definition vs. the "calls about
emotional distress or suicidal thoughts" referenced, re: Amazon. Do statistics
exist which translate these 189 calls into a number of actual suicide
attempts? Hopefully the answer is "0".

The follow-up questions you offer are equally interesting, thank you.

~~~
Spooky23
No problem... lessons learned the hard way as a people manager.

Some companies forget the humans are more than work, and treating them like
automatons has negative impacts on the business and the people. Just as zero
tolerance is bad in other cases, it's almost always bad in employment
scenarios.

------
avgDev
More reasons for me to stop using Amazon but.... this is pretty interesting
for me and I am not sure how to feel about it. On one hand I feel like they
exploit the least educated and relatively poor people. On the other hand I
think the only reason they are getting bad press is because they are a large
corp.

I have worked at many small businesses over the years and did physical work. I
was treated like garbage by most bosses, didn't have any insurance at all and
worked 16 hour days when needed. No paid time off, 0 benefits, some jobs paid
cash. Nobody would care if complained because it is a small business and
nobody would read an article about it. This is happening to many many people
in the US. If they didn't push to get out of those jobs they may be stuck
there for life. Now, I am an SE, get good benefits, less stress, more respect,
everyone is more lenient and polite. Yet, deep down I still have PTSD of
walking on eggshells because of shit employers.

~~~
tomnipotent
> More reasons for me to stop using Amazon but

189 calls over 5 years from 600,000+ employees (and many more that have come &
gone) and the article didn't even bother to compare that against the general
population. Bad reporting and conclusions. There's no news here.

~~~
nikofeyn
in what world is this no news? these aren't just statistics on employees who
happen to work at amazon. these 911 calls were reported to be placed while at
work. what other places of work is it common for employees, while working, to
experience such emotional distress that they need to call external emergency
services?

~~~
tomnipotent
> in what world is this no news?

The real world, where people call 911 all the time. This isn't unique to
Amazon, and I'm willing to wager that Costo & Walmart have similar statistics.

------
chriselles
Disclosure: I worked at Amazon 97-01 in Operations.

Amazon’s culture, when I worked there was firm but fair.

It was largely manual labour with a veneer of technology on top that has grown
thicker over time.

I hired and fired countless people.

In my opinion, the bifurcated culture at Amazon found on Glassdoor contrasts
Amazon Operations with Amazon Corporate white collar jobs.

I believe it stems from the early days of the company.

Priorities were: 1)Customer ecstasy, get the orders out the door accurately.
2)”Average Up” with every single new hire.

Those two priories left little(read none) capacity for coaching, development,
or even diplomatic warnings/terminations.

There would be a large pool of ex-Amazon folks who were involuntarily
terminated for being unable, unwilling to meet a minimum standard.

And there would be an even larger pool of general population who look at
Amazon, and Jeff in particular, as a money machine.

The reality is that Amazon is far more like McDonalds than Google from the
perspective of Amazon workers in Operations.

Profit per Amazon Operations employee is exceptionally low.

I think it’s more accurate to describe and view Amazon as a basket of
companies.

Working AWS or Alexa is a completely different beast from working as a picker
in an Amazon warehouse.

But they are conveniently, and intentionally, confused and conflated to
portray Amazon poorly when comparing Amazon Operations to a peer like UPS,
DHL, or FedEx would probably be more fair and relevant.

However, it would appear that the unintended consequences of focusing only on
the customer and “averaging up” with hiring at the expense of all else has had
lasting effects on culture and perception.

Just my 0.02c

~~~
Inconel
I worked in Ops as well, albeit as an L1 - L3 part time AA. I was actually
surprised, especially after what I'd read online about Amazon, at how much
slack they would cut employees regarding rate and other behavioral issues. It
always seems like it would take way too long to weed out bad employees. I
definitely don't relish anyone losing their job but I'd say my biggest issue
working at Amazon was how demoralizing it would be to see so many extremely
hard working associates having to pick up the slack for lower performing ones.
I'm sure this is fairly site dependent though.

------
walrus01
Rather than businessinsider.com , a better URL for this is
[https://www.thedailybeast.com/amazon-the-
shocking-911-calls-...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/amazon-the-
shocking-911-calls-from-inside-its-warehouses) , which is the actual story.

------
forthehorde
The name of this article is a bit misleading (as other commentators stated),
but the growing suicide rate is troubling. I think the part where employees
feel like robots is a huge part of the problem. It's hard to make ends meet in
a rough economy and a lot of people don't believe they have any say in current
democratic process, one vote is what you get but the whole management of the
system is hardly controlled by the electorate. There's a huge feeling of
hopelessness, Mark Fisher in "Capitalist realism" wrote how youth fails to
cope with the prospect of future that a big part of them will have to do a job
they won't find satisfaction in. Some of us can land truly great positions but
the suicide rates show a huge population living under distress.

~~~
ken
There's a couple different ways to interpret "feel like robots". This article
specifically says:

> _feeling like "robots" due to intense surveillance in the warehouses, while
> others described how their coworkers would urinate in trash cans because
> they didn't have enough time to rush to the bathroom_

I'm of two minds. I can see the need for surveillance at a warehouse full of
consumer goods, but excessive surveillance can feel oppressive.

Not having time for bathroom breaks is a real problem, though. So is getting
hurt doing your job. These aren't normal, even at warehouse jobs.

> It's hard to make ends meet in a rough economy and a lot of people don't
> believe they have any say in current democratic process, one vote is what
> you get but the whole management of the system is hardly controlled by the
> electorate.

That's quite insightful and I think it comes very close to the real "feel like
robot" issue without mentioning the "U" word that is so controversial here:
union.

In a warehouse job, you're always going to _act_ pretty much like a robot.
That's just what it is. You don't have to _feel_ like a robot if you get
reasonable working conditions (e.g., regular breaks, overtime pay) from a
collectively bargained contract. Being a member of a democratically run group
can make all the difference.

(This might also help with the surveillance issue. Having worked under a
union, there's definitely a sense -- occasionally spoken -- that you do not
screw up, because you'll make the union look bad.)

~~~
krapp
It doesn't help that Amazon's mascot is a robot (Danbo), some of the
facilities are full of robots, and the acronym stowers need to remember for
their process is ROBOTS. Working there it can feel like you're living in
somebody's bad future.

------
BurningFrog
Of course, 911 calls from businessinsider.com offices only come from happy
people having a great day.

~~~
titanomachy
Do they even have offices, or is it just a bunch of temp bloggers working from
home?

The quality of their journalism is several notches below the sources I try to
get my news from.

------
SolaceQuantum
According to the media bias check website[1], the original reporter (The Daily
Beast) has a high Factual score, meaning its literal statements are likely
true, and a left-leaning bias, meaning the topics it covers will be of more
interest to the leftist politics.

(This post is mostly because I personally don't think business insider is
particularly factual, and so did some research to validate its claims.)

1\. [https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/daily-
beast/](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/daily-beast/)

~~~
barkingcat
Who checks the purported bias checkers?

~~~
max76
China Daily is in their "Least biased" category despite the fact that it is an
English language publication owned by the Publicity Department of the
Communist Party of China and published by People's Republic of China. I think
I have a different definition of bias as Media facts, which seems to be
entirely focused on Left/Right biases.

