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?
«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."»
A written defamatory statement is libel. Spoken defamatory statements are slander.
Part of the problem with organizations publishing stories like this and calling it “news” is that there is a higher bar for proving defamation against a news origination;
Where the defamatory comments are made by the media or where they are directed towards a public figure, the First Amendment requires that the defamed person must prove the offender published a defamatory statement with knowledge that the statement was false or with a reckless disregard of its falsity.
I wonder if the 911 call rate is any higher than the general non working population as a whole, sitting in private residences on couches.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
Instead of mentioning 911 calls the article ought to have been about the working conditions and have more in depth interviews with people like Jace. The reporter probably didn’t have time to do such a piece and Business Insider probably doesn’t think it’ll be worth the investment to do such a piece. Instead we get an article that detractors can embrace and supporters can point out its obvious flaws.
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.
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.
> 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....
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.
Everything is about degree. Nobody in my office has ever called 911 due to something like this. I have no idea where this rates in comparison to other warehouses. But also it's hard to measure because maybe Amazon calls 911 to report this where other companies wouldn't -- similar to Apple calling an ambulance over people walking into glass doors just to protect themselves.
I've worked in warehouses. I've never worked in an Amazon warehouse, but I have worked with people who have, who've told me it's the worst warehouse they've ever worked in, and they refuse to buy anything from Amazon.com today because of that experience.
I've also worked in offices, and while it can be stressful I've never seen anyone urinating in a garbage can because they weren't given time to go to the bathroom. I think I would have noticed that.
I work in an Amazon warehouse. The first two months I was in the worst pain of my life, after that, the worst problems were backaches and tedium and complaints about the bad UI with their stow app. I'm not going to lie, though, VTO is a hell of a drug if you can afford it.
Some people can deal with the stress, some people can't. I don't think it's a strength/weakness thing either. It's just one of those jobs where you're perfectly aware of the degree to which you're a cog in a machine, and everything you do has to meet metrics.
If you want a job where you feel as if you matter as a person, or a job that brings you a sense of meaning, satisfaction or long term security, L1 at an Amazon warehouse isn't for you.
I wouldn't consider the horror stories to be typical, given the size of the network. I also wouldn't dismiss them, given the culture and the incentives Amazon can create. If someone told me there was a warehouse somewhere where the AMs shocked the pickers with cattle prods, I'd believe that Amazon would try it at least once, if they could get away with it, just to see how many seconds they could shave off their time.
It's more likely that the type of people working in Amazon warehouses have less access to resources (friends, therapists, etc), so 911 is the only place to call.
I'm reminded of the articles a few years ago calling out Apple for Foxconn employee suicides. When you looked at the numbers it turned out that the suicide rate for Foxconn employees was substantially lower than normal for China.
> According to a 2011 Centre for Disease Control and Prevention report, the country has a high suicide rate with approximately 22.23 deaths per 100,000 persons. In 2010, the worst year for workplace suicides at Foxconn with a total of 14 deaths, its employee count was a reported 930,000 people. [1]
That's 0.0015% at Foxconn, 0.0222% overall. In other words, Foxconn employees committed suicide at only 7% the normal rate. And that was the worst year for Foxconn.
But it didn't stop a whole lot of news stories picking up the "Employees at Apple's factories are killing themselves" angle.
Comparing Foxconn employees to the general populace is not necessarily the right cohort for comparison. For starters, the natural prior for suicides is that you would expect unemployed people to have a higher suicide rate than employed people. Nevertheless, I think that Foxconn's suicide rate was shown to be in line with the typical suicide rate for Chinese manufacturers.
I've worked a number of warehouse jobs, including at Amazon, I didn't find them particularly stressful and I'd say from a physical standpoint they ranged from moderate to maybe slightly higher at the worst. Amazon I would describe as better than most similar lines of work in terms of pay and overall environment.
I don't doubt that there are problematic Amazon locations out there but I never experienced any of the really negative stories I read online despite moving between different locations and building types.
I think that considering it's a baseline pay job for what it is. I would only guess that a significant portion of the workforce is also very young, and it's their first experience actually doing any kind of physical work for money. That around 0.1% might be depressed enough to call for help under those circumstances, I'm surprised the number isn't higher.
It is hard for me to imagine that Amazon warehouse jobs are much worse than other warehouse jobs. This reminds me of Tom Wolfe's telling of the character Conrad Hensley (of Oakland, CA) in A Man in Full. His warehouse job was pretty bad and he was on the ropes.
Yeah it's silly. Generally its helpful in most headlines about [any large org] to substitute [Public Schools] and see if someone would bother to bat an eye at the headline.
> 911 calls from [Public Schools] show emotional distress and suicide threats
Nobody would care. (Maybe partly because people are already resigned to public schools being CAFOs, though)
189 calls over a 5 year period across 46 different facilities for Amazon. For schools in NYC its like, 300 a year per school iirc? (for behavior problems, not for physical health emergencies)
> Generally its helpful in most headlines about [any large org] to substitute [Public Schools] and see if someone would bother to bat an eye at the headline.
Just because nobody would care doesn’t mean people shouldn’t care
I think the point is not that people wouldn't care at all, but that most wouldn't jump straight to the assumption that this is entirely due to public schools doing something horrible to the children, but rather that this reflects a broader societal problem with mental illness and mental healthcare[1]. By contrast, there are plenty of people whose brains consist mostly of a soup of simplistic media tropes, who are primed to think of "tech company hiring low-wage workers" as combining the worst of Dickens and Black Mirror and thus jump uncritically on flawed data as evidence of horrific conditions.
I think previous reports of Amazon's warehouse policies are concerning, but I don't see the utility in being dishonest or sloppy with the facts of the situation.
[1] I'm aware that many do think of (some) public schools as hellholes, but they'd be correct not to assume that the problems describe all or mostly originate with the school's actions.
> 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.
Remember that these statistics are specifically from Amazon warehouses, and not from Amazon warehouse workers calling from home. We'd need statistics on calls from workplaces. A quick google scholar search finds suicide rates [1] in the workplace which are significantly lower than what you cite as general suicide rates. I couldn't find any data on 911 calls, so we can't really draw any statistical information from this data.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
You are right that there isn’t much of a story with regards to suicide at Amazon warehouses but there is a story with regard to the general working conditions at its warehouses. I guess mentioning suicide is good business from an entertainment/news aspect but this article is not helpful in terms of helping bring to attention the bad working conditions at Amazon’s warehouses.
What's the rate of suicide calls to 911 in the general population? If it's around 0.1%, I wouldn't be surprised... Most people hit that point at least once in their lifetime.
> On the other hand I think the only reason they are getting bad press is because they are a large corp.
I think that's true, but understandable. Amazon is widely known and extremely successful, so stories about it will attract more interest, and its scope justifies the expenditure of significant resources. Also, pervasive problems at large company are harder to dismiss as being merely the result of "one bad boss" or something like that.
Hopefully negative coverage of large companies like Amazon will lead to work protection reforms that can also be used to help small business employees.
The definition of 'exploit' has very little to do with force. If someone drops $5 and doesn't notice, and I keep it, I exploited their inattention. If there's a forest, and I have a chainsaw/crane/truck, and no one cares if I chop it down, I can exploit their indifference and exploit that resource. If you click on a phishing link, the hacker exploits your carelessness. If the developers of your OS left a security hole, hackers can exploit that (and when they do, it's called an exploit). If you love puppies, the ASPCA can exploit that to get donations. And if you have only a high school education and live in an area with plenty such people, I can exploit that by building my warehouse there, and you'll be eager to work there for minimum wage, and I can exploit that. No guns were drawn in any of these examples.
In most of your examples except the Amazon one (and, maybe, the ASPCA one), the person being "exploited" is worse off afterwards.
You are equivocating on two subtly different definitions of exploit: the bad one where you abuse someone (the hacker exploits your carelessness... to hurt you), and the neutral one (exploiting a resource).
In your Amazon warehouse example, people in the area are better off than they would have been without the warehouse.
I encourage you to see them all in the neutral sense. I intentionally included examples where exploitation can have a positive effect (ASPCA, if you love puppies), no effect (picking up the fiver the person has already lost), negligible or temporarily negligible effect (forest) or arguable effect (Amazon) on the victim. These things are usually not primarily about the victim and how awesome it will be to screw them over. (Except maybe the hacking examples where they might find it fun or funny.) But the neutral use of the word exploit is the one that will come closest to the business analysis being done by Amazon or any other big company. They don't set out to screw people. But they will exploit people, as a resource, to the degree that they're available at a good price.
Anyway I was only here to point out that exploitation doesn't always involve force, not really to argue whether Amazon workers are better off. Couldn't really weigh in on that without surveying them. And I'd need to have a list of criteria in mind, which may or may not match the people's own criteria. (Or I'd have to use their own criteria, which would mean asking more questions and lengthening the interview a bit.)
Off the cuff though I'd say whoever calls a suicide line or 911 because of work issues is probably not overall better off because of that job. (Add the appropriate disclaimers to the effect that those people are presumably a very small minority, and probably have non-work-related issues in addition to or instead of work-related ones.) Also they're not as well off as someone else who got hired at the hypothetical "other employer" with the warehouse in walking distance from their house who pays twice the rate and has showers, free employee caviar etc. (Edit: or just being allowed to take a simple bathroom break with dignity!)
Then there's also the notion (and this is where it gets really hand-wavy) that being a conduit for that money, from your employer's customers to your landlord, isn't exactly the height of joy and fulfillment, as most of us know. Though it does define some basic level of competency in a capitalist economy and being well off or at least better off as you say, than you would with a worse job or no job.
In my opinion, you can exploit people even if they willfully do something for you. For example, in some poor nations people do work that is very harmful, they do it to survive. People put up with amazons policies because they need the job to survive.
What if Amazon kills all the local business and becomes the only employer of people from few villages? They can exploit and use the same logic that you describe.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
The original dailybeast article also keeps pointing fingers at Amazon but fails to mention (in context) how night shift workers are at a higher risk of depression and related factors:
> On the other hand, 5 studies on nighttime shift work in occupations outside the health sector, with observation periods of two or more years, yielded evidence of an elevated risk of depression after several years of nighttime shift work, but not in any uniform pattern. A supplementary meta-analysis of 5 of the studies revealed a 42% increase of the risk of depression among persons working the night shift (95% confidence interval [0.92; 2.19]). [0]
That's important context here, and conveniently omitted.
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.)
> The Columbia Journalism Review describes Media Bias/Fact Check as an amateur attempt at categorizing media bias and the owner of the site, Dave Van Zandt, as an "armchair media analyst."[3] Van Zandt describes himself as someone with "more than 20 years as an arm chair researcher on media bias and its role in political influence."[4] The Poynter Institute notes, "Media Bias/Fact Check is a widely cited source for news stories and even studies about misinformation, despite the fact that its method is in no way scientific."[5]
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.
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?
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