Warehouse Woes: Amazon and the new “middle class”
For a month now, thousands of workers have been applying to work at a new Amazon warehouse in Schertz. The City of Schertz paid $7.6 million in subsidies to the mega-corporation in order to secure the 1.26 million-square-foot warehouse that will bring “good job[s] in a durable, growing industry” according to a recent speech from President Obama, delivered at an Amazon fulfillment center (company lingo for ‘warehouse’) in Tennessee.
But what kind of jobs is Amazon really bringing? Horror stories from Amazon plants around the country have come to light. In a 2011 exposé on a local Amazon warehouse, Lehigh Valley, Penn.’s Morning Call revealed that the building was so hot in the summer that the company paid for ambulances to wait outside the building to treat workers. An emergency room doctor eventually called federal regulators to report an “unsafe environment” at the warehouse.
The Seattle Times reported last year on working conditions at an Amazon warehouse in Kentucky where workers were intimidated into not reporting injuries that might hurt Amazon’s safety record. A former human resources employee told the paper, “They would have meetings on how we could get rid of people who were hurt. It was horrible.” A former safety officer added, “This was just a brutal place to work.”
Reports of abuse by Amazon are not confined to the United States. Earlier this year, a German documentary revealed that Amazon hired a neo-Nazi-linked security firm named H.E.S.S. (an allusion to Nazi deputy-Führer Rudolf Hess) to watch workers at its warehouse in Southern Germany. The neo-Nazi security guards engaged in widespread abuse against the largely immigrant workforce brought in to handle the holiday rush.
http://sacurrent.com/news/warehouse-woes-amazon-and-the-new-middle-class-1.1549801
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