Comment by Mtinie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mtinie | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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

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.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074937971...

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.

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