Amazon Delenda Est

You are supporting a company that tells everyone to keep working when another employee dies on the job.

Management at Amazon is by design a bunch of, "Little Eichmanns," to quote Ward Churchill. 

Amazon does not just need to be broken up, it needs to be razed to the ground, and salt needs to be sowed in its ruins.

This is what your Amazon Prime membership funds

Sam was helping unload trucks when a heavy thud against concrete echoed across the Amazon warehouse. An employee’s lifeless body lay on the floor.

Work halted in the loading docks on the south side of Amazon’s distribution center in Troutdale, Oregon. Sam and other employees stared at the person who’d collapsed just 20 feet away. Conveyor belts of packages continued to roll.

“I didn’t have a direct line of sight of the person’s face, but I saw a body form laying lifeless,” Sam told The Western Edge. Employees who spoke for this story requested anonymity to protect their jobs and their names have been changed.

………

The man who collapsed on the floor died Monday, April 6 on the second level of the Amazon warehouse as machinery filled the cavernous loading dock with a dull hum.

In 911 calls, obtained through a public records request, one employee called for an ambulance at 1:55 pm. The dispatcher coached a confused employee over speakerphone on how to use a defibrillator.

………

For more than an hour, several employees said, workers in the facility were instructed to continue fetching totes, picking items off shelves and loading them onto trucks for delivery as the man lay dead, and management figured out their next steps. News of the fatality quickly spread through the building, but workers say top managers did not call operations to an immediate halt. A week later, several workers said they still do not know what caused the man to die. Records indicate he was 46 years old.

Rather unsurprisingly:

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A 2019 investigation by Reveal found the Portland area facility had the worst injury rate out of 23 major distribution centers analyzed using data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). In 2018, more than a quarter of all workers at the building - known as PDX9 - had some type of injury on the job.

If you work at Amazon, I suggest thinking about the humble wooden shoe,  known as the sabot in French.

In the past, workers found alternate uses for said shoes, throwing it into the machines.