After deaths, Amazon lands on list of most dangerous employers | Hacker News Reader

After deaths, Amazon lands on list of most dangerous employers

futurism.com

52 pointsnsstring9610 comments

Terrible article devoid of useful facts. Not that I'm defending amazon...it sounds like a terrible place to work. However, none of these deaths seems to be Amazon's fault. From the "dirty dozen":

● Andrew Lindsay and Israel Espana Argote, contract workers, died when the wall of an Amazon warehouse collapsed during a severe storm in Baltimore in November 2018.

● Brien James Daunt fell to his death during construction of an Amazon warehouse in Oildale, CA in January 2019. Falls from a height are a well-known – and preventable – hazard in the construction industry, with long-established protocols to reduce risks. CalOSHA is investigating the incident.

● Aviators Ricky Blakely, Conrad Jules Aska and Sean Archuleta died in February when an Air Atlas plane, carrying cargo for Amazon, crashed into Trinity Bay, southeast of Texas. Blakely and Aska worked for Air Atlas and were members of the Airline Professional Association (APA), Teamsters Local 224. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating the incident.

Agree. Curious how having their own delivery trucks is going to move that needle.

Out of curiousity I looked up some rough numbers (which is clearly far beyond what either this article or this dirty dozen organization were willing to do). They name 7 deaths related to amazon, but 3 were in a plane crash and one was during construction on a warehouse, both of which Amazon would have very little to do with and were almost certainly not employees of AMazon. So really it's 3 deaths, out of a workforce of about 650,000 which is about 0.375% of the entire US workforce. The list highlights that there were 5,100 workplaces deaths total in 2018, so if they matched the averages then Amazon would have 19 deaths per year. Instead they have 3 deaths over the past 2 years (since November 2018).

Obviously any such deaths are a tragedy, but by the numbers there are clearly much more dangerous jobs in the US than being an Amazon worker.

I think this is one of the most misleading articles I have seen on the front page of hacker news. First of all, being on OSHA's "dirty dozen" does not imply you are one of the most dangerous workplaces. And the report this article is based on cited 6 deaths in the past year - 3 from an airplane accident, 1 from construction, and 2 when a warehouse wall collapsed. 6 deaths in a year is very few at Amazon scale, especially when they are counting people who aren't actually employed by Amazon directly. And I don't think any of those deaths, except maybe the last two, can be attributed to Amazon.

It's not even OSHA's list it's just a nonprofit with a name that is strikingly similar to ones run by the government.

So I hate defending Amazon, but the article cites the "National Council for Occupational Safety and Health" which is not affiliated with the government despite having a name very similar to the CDC's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The list also seems pretty subjective for what qualifies as the most dangerous.

Headline is deceptive. There is no objective metric of "most dangerous" here. The list is a list of "employers that an activist group wants to make noise about."

Does Amazon have problems to address? Absolutely. Is it "most dangerous"? Absolutely not.

It's farcical to claim that Amazon is a top-12 most-dangerous place to work.

Here's a real list:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/2018/01/09/work...

#1 Logging: 100 per 100K annual death rate.

#13 Construction labor: 25 per 100K

#25 HVAC 8 per 100K

That's over dozen job types, encompassing many more employers.

Amazon warehouse: 10 per 100K+: ~10 deaths / 100,000+ warehouse employees (I can't find a clear number of full-time-equivalent, but Time says "300K employees", World Socialists say 125K warehouse workers in 2017)

USA unintentional injury death rate: 50 per 100K

USA heart attack death rate: 100+ per 100K

USA heart disease death rate, age 45-64: 150 per 100K

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_05-508.pdf

>Amazon’s high productivity quotas forces workers to pee in bottles to avoid bathroom breaks and risk injury working with the automated machines and robots — one of which sent 24 workers to the hospital after spraying them with concentrated bear repellent — which are stripping away human jobs and leaving those who are left in danger.

These jobs are difficult and dangerous and pay poorly and under no circumstances should a human be deprived of this terrible birthright.

I'm surprised there isn't more consumer action, such as boycotts, against Amazon.

I guess consumers are either ignorant of how crappy an employer Amazon is or care more about getting their cheap goods than about the welfare of Amazon workers.

wow, they are by far the worst on the list

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