Did anyone else see the headline at the bottom of the page claiming that 'Amazon Workers are Today's Coal Miners'?
I haven't read the article, but given the amount of death and human suffering coal miners overcame, I can only assume it is consciously sensationalist.
It is almost as if certain villainous categories are built into our collective minds and we are looking for actors to play the parts.
It seems to me that mining was vastly more physically demanding and dangerous, to the extent that when McLelland complains about physical hardship at the fulfillment center I'm unsympathetic; and that fulfillment center work is vastly more dehumanizing, in contrast to the miners who, for all their toil, had pride in what they do.
So many ambulances responded to medical assistance calls at the warehouse during a heat wave in May, the paper said, that the retailer paid Cetronia Ambulance Corps to have paramedics and ambulances stationed outside the warehouse during several days of excess heat over the summer. About 15 people were taken to hospitals, while 20 or 30 more were treated right there, the ambulance chief told The Call.
That's from 2011. Amazon bought Kiva Systems to install robots in their warehouses. No more walking around in Amazon's newer warehouses; the pickers stand in one place as shelving units of products are brought to them by hundreds of mobile robots.
Picking from bins is still manual, but Bezos has Rethink Robotics, which he owns personally, working on that.
I haven't read the article, but given the amount of death and human suffering coal miners overcame, I can only assume it is consciously sensationalist.
It is almost as if certain villainous categories are built into our collective minds and we are looking for actors to play the parts.