Amazon, worker safety, and fact-checking

Over on Google+, my friend Patrick Tufts writes,

"A few days ago, a newspaper in Pennsylvania reported that Amazon was forcing employees to work to the point of collapse in high heat, and that an emergency room doctor had to notify OSHA. Amazon PR then came out and denied that conditions were unsafe, and blamed unusually high summer temperatures in the area."

"I like to fact check stories. It's kind of a thing with me," Patrick continues. "I can't check the first, but I can check the second two claims."

His conclusions are here.

Spoiler: He doesn't buy the excuse.

• [DewiMorgan]

  In the UK, we don’t (far as I know) have a set temperature above which it’s illegal to ask people to work. Apparently we have a *minimum* temperature, that’s all. Always struck me as crazy, but may explain why so few greenhouse-like offices have AC there.

  • [alphaxion]

    The reason for no max temp in the UK is so that mining doesn’t break the law when it comes to working temp conditions – the temp can go very high in mine shafts.

• [EH]

  See, Amazon *did* force them to work, but it was the temperature’s fault for being so high. 

  Odious.

• [tobergill]

  Here’s what they told me:

  At Amazon, the safety and well-being of our employees is our number one priority. Wehave several procedures in place to ensure the safety of our associates during thesummer heat, including increased breaks, shortened shifts, constant reminders andhelp about hydration, and extra ice machines. July 2011 was a highly unusual month and set records for the hottest temperaturesduring any single calendar month in cities across the East Coast. As a result of theabnormally high temperatures, we took many additional precautions to ensure thesafety of our associates including closing our Breinigsville facility three timesduring the summer heat wave. We also supplemented our cooling systems by placingindustrial AC units in all of our East Coast facilities, including Breinigsville.Also, in case associates needed any medical attention, we had our onsite healthcareteam immediately available to attend to any needs. We are looking at additionalmeasures we can take in the future, including permanent cooling solutions for ourBreinigsville facility.

  • [Reece Chenault]

    And as you could see from the data supplied by the other article in the BB post… Amazon is full of crap.

• [vaxen]

  I work for a company that has a warehouse in tennessee we had record heat this year, over 100 with 80% humidity on several days this summer.  Yeah our warehouse was hot and miserable.  Mandatory 15min water breaks every hour, neck ice packs, and every swamp cooler running with ice water helps.

  Opening the dock doors doesnt always help, especially if your building is designed with airflow coming in one end and going out the other.  If we open the dock doors, only about 25% of our staff would benefit and the other 75% would have dead air.

• [Sebastion Wires]

  I was in the same boat as vaxen for some time (maybe even the same plant).  You don’t really need a break to drink water- as long as you have free access to water and an ice machine, and can keep a jug in your truck, you’ll be good.  If you don’t drink or smoke, sweat and a fan blowing on you will keep you from cooking yourself just fine.  Amazon must either set REALLY stupid policy, or the guy who got sick had no idea of basic personal health.

  • [Steve]

    You mean the 15 that passed out.  Blame the victim just as long as your Made in China plastic crap arrives before the Hipster Holidays!

    • [schadenfreudisch]

      there are hipster holidays?

    • [Sebastion Wires]

      “Amazon must either set REALLY stupid policy, or the guy who got sick had no idea of basic personal health.”

      You can choose to interpret that as blaming the victim, sure.  Myself, I’m still on the fence.  In the plant I worked in, people did pass out, almost always because they were sick and came in to work, or just plain dumb about how to handle the heat.  We didn’t have idiots on management; apparently Amazon does.

• [danimagoo]

  The real story here is the complete lack of basic journalism on the part of the newspaper originally reporting this story.

• [Nadreck]

  Love how he points out that there are two ways to cool a loading dock: a) install a hundred thousand dollars or so of insulation and air-conditioning, or b) keep the door open on hot days for free.  Many places seem to choose (a), I guess because that burns the most giga-watts and burning giga-watts is fun.

  Similarly, in modern highrise design you could (a) install gigantic air-conditioning systems and large, sun-focusing windows or (b) have transoms and windows that open.  (a) is the universal choice.  Most of the new condos I’ve seen would suffocate the occupants if the power went off.

  • [ocker3]

    Nope. Check out Vaxen’s reference to opening the doors only working for 25% of the staff. Think about it, you’d need some Really big doors to get enough air flow to help everyone, and any amount of wind that strong is going to start pushing stuff/people around. Better to have smaller A/C vents at multiple places than try and get enough air moving from one entrance and one exit to cool everything. Plus you’re talking about Huge vertical stacks of boxes, perhaps perpindicular to the main loading docks. And if the air outside just isn’t moving, you’re screwed.

• [Kevin Rider]

  I love that you went with, “Amazon, worker safety, and fact-checking” as opposed to removal of the last comma…does this mean an MLA fight?

• [ptufts]

  Hi Boingers, I was wondering where all the comments on my post were coming from! And thank you Xeni!

  I wanted to try and answer some of the questions in the comments here about the original reporting by Spencer Soper in The Morning Call, then hydration and employee responsibility, and finally dock doors and cooling.

  So first off, The Morning Call’s article. I was quite impressed by the reporting, honestly. They did an investigative piece, interviewed at least twenty people, and even included source material from the OSHA report (I think they had to file a Freedom of Information Act request to get that). Then they put it all in context. I wish I could do that!

  All I did was look up some temperatures. That’s easy if wonky stuff to do, but I think it puts the Amazon statements of unusually high outdoor temperatures to the test.

  No one’s arguing the warehouse wasn’t hot, but Amazon’s saying the outside weather couldn’t have been anticipated, as if it were a once in a century event. But in each of the days Amazon claimed record or unusual temperatures, the daily temperature was somewhere between below and *well* below record, with lots of 80 degree days. I was imagining weeks of insane 100F days, but no. While it was really hot and humid some of the time, that’s a combination New Englanders call “Summer.”

  But what about hydration? The employees have to take a role in their health. They’re doing heavy lifting in heat, and by the accounts, Amazon was getting water to them (good!). However, Amazon was also increasing – even doubling overnight – work quotas as well as handing out demerits to workers for leaving early due to the high temperature in the warehouse. Half a demerit for leaving early, six demerits and you’re gone, I think the article said.

  So, hydration on the job. Here’s one guy’s account of his work and his quota. See if he’s got time to drink his big gulp:

  “One former temporary warehouse employee said he worked seven months before he was terminated for not working fast enough. In his 50s, he worked 10 hours a day, four days a week as a picker, plucking items from bins and delivering them to packers who put them in boxes for shipment. He would walk 13 to 15 miles daily, he estimated, and was among the oldest pickers.”

  “‘At the beginning, I thought I was doing really well,” he said. “I never missed a day, was never sick, never came in late. I was the model employee. But after a while, I could only achieve a certain rate and I couldn’t go any faster. It was just brutal.’”

  “He said he was expected to pick 1,200 items in a 10-hour shift, or one item every 30 seconds.”
  Elsewhere in the article, they mention that pickers have to keep both hands on their cart while pushing it, so he doesn’t have a free hand for a water bottle. He gets more minutes off on hot days, but his quota stays the same.

  And those 1200 items? Some of them are on the floor, CDs and books where he has to get on his hands and knees to read the titles and get the right item. 2 items a minute at an *average* speed of 1.5 miles an hour the entire 10 hour shift (counting breaks raises the average speed), and getting on hands and knees “250 to 300 times” a shift.

  It would be *very* easy with a schedule like that to fall behind on water. Hydration becomes a quota problem then.

  Now, what about cooling and the dock doors? It’s true that an open door could interfere with the AC, however the OSHA account said that there was *no* AC. Plenty of water for employees (good!), but clearly AC was inadequate, non-functional, or absent entirely.

  Even if there were no breeze, opening the dock doors would allow heat and humidity to escape from the warehouse, which sounds like an oven, to the outside, where high temperatures were in the 80s for much of the month.

  They could also open the dock doors at night, when the temperature was in the 70s, and cool off the building for the next day. But if they kept the place buttoned up, and even without record setting days, just some above average days in a row could lead to the building becoming an oven.

  If there was a breeze, and the warehouse had docks on opposite sides of the building, they could have had cross-ventilation too. But I don’t know what the layout of the building is. I would guess though that with a facility that large, there are decent odds they have at least two sides of the building with docks.

  The reason cited in the article for keeping the dock doors closed wasn’t to help the internal cooling systems work well, though, it was fear of theft.

  This matches my own experience working years ago on a department store loading dock. Store security would not open the doors on hot days, and that dock got hot. Fortunately, we had a manager who understood and wouldn’t make us work hard in those conditions.

  Brutal summers in the Northeast aren’t a once a century event. I think Amazon will do the right thing eventually, but sometimes big companies forget what’s right, call it a surprise rather than a mistake, and need to be reminded of what they can do.

• [lib5so]

  I’m confused about why OSHA was involved.  Unless I missed something, or regulations have changed in recent years, I thought that OSHA did not have any maximum temperature limits in the workplace.  Can anyone point me to the relevant OSHA sections (if there are any)?

  • [RHK]

    http://www.dir.ca.gov/doshpol/p%26pc-36.htm

    A. DOCUMENTING AN ACCIDENT EVENT
    1. Accident Events Triggering Completion of Cal/OSHA 36(S)

    District personnel shall complete a Cal/OSHA 36(S) whenever the District is notified
    (or learns about) the occurrence of an accident which involves the following, regardless
    of whether the event is legally reportable to DOSH:
    a. Fatality (“FAT”);
    b. Serious injury or illness:
    c. Pesticide-related poisoning;
    d. Serious exposure; or
    e. Catastrophe (“CAT”)
    NOTE: “Catastrophe” is a term used by Federal OSHA to indicate a type of
    accident event which must be investigated even though such an event may not involve a
    fatality or serious injury or illness. As used by Cal/OSHA, a “catastrophe”
    refers to the inpatient hospitalization (regardless of duration) of three (3) or more
    employees for examination or treatment resulting from an employment injury or illness
    caused by a workplace hazard.

  • [ptufts]

    OSHA got involved after the local ER called them to report a possible unsafe workplace due to all the people showing up at the ER with heat issues. The OSHA report (with doctor’s name redacted) is linked on the left side on the original news article, along with notes from OSHA’s interviews with others.

• [Lobster]

  I had no idea Amazon was even in a position to let this happen.

• [Mark Pitcavage]

  I should note that the Allentown Morning Call, which published the original story, has done a lot of good investigative journalism over the past 20 years, and I have been impressed by a number of stories they have done (and I don’t even live in the area; I live more than 300 miles away).

• [Steve]

  Ahh I see that teens are stealing games still from the warehouse.  So the doors stay shut til the little sticky fingers knock it off.

  • [Sebastion Wires]

    Pheh.  Plant I worked in had open doors, and I loaded over 300 lbs of silver bullion each night.  Past every door, we also had 100 yards of asphalt and then a 12 foot chain link fence around the whole place, and the only way out was through a metal detector and patdown.  Thefts still happened, of course, but (afaik) the stuff wasn’t going out the loading bay doors.

    Point being, closing the bay doors is neither required nor sufficient for security.