Ezra publishes a pretty horrifying post about the occupational safety and health practices of everyone's favorite online retailer:
[Amazon's Lehigh] warehouse, Soper reported, is brutally hot in summer. In a nod to modernity, “computers monitored the heat index in the building and Amazon employees received notification about the heat index by email.” One day, the index “exceeded 110 degrees on the third floor.” A local emergency room doctor treated so many warehouse employees for heat exhaustion this summer that he called federal regulators to report an unsafe work environment. A security guard called the Occupational Safety and Health Administration after seeing two pregnant women taken to nurses. Some workers would break out into a sarcastic chant: “End slavery at Amazon!”
There were occasions in June and July, Soper reported, when “Amazon paid Cetronia Ambulance Corps to have ambulances and paramedics stationed at its two adjacent warehouses.” The company refused to cool the warehouse by opening the garage doors because managers feared it would lead to theft.
That last sentence reminded me of something, as you've probably gathered from the title of this post: at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, "the door to the Washington Place stairway was locked to prevent theft by the workers," resulting in the deaths of many of those workers in the factory's infamous fire.
Gotta keep those doors closed to prevent theft, no matter what the consequences. Since the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the consequences have been reduced from being burned alive to suffering heatstroke as a result of working in nearly intolerable heat. That's a century's worth of progress for you.
