By Tom Burke / Herald Columnist
A worker safety lawsuit brought by Washington state’s Department of Labor and Industry (L&I) against Amazon was dismissed earlier this month by Judge Stephen Pfeifer of the Board of Industrial Insurance Appeals.
L&I had cited the company for setting productivity targets that risked hurting employees; alleging 10-hour shifts with mandatory overtime and a rapid work pace that put workers at risk of injuring their backs, shoulders, wrists and knees.
Amazon said, “Washington L&I’s allegations are inaccurate and don’t reflect the reality of safety at Amazon,” Amazon claimed.
And while this judge apparently agreed with Amazon, L&I says it will appeal.
What’s got me conflicted here is part of me says investigate the job before you take it, then if you don’t like the conditions, leave.
But that sounds so 19th-century and company-centric and ignores the contributions of a dedicated workforce. And workers, asking for reasonable accommodations, got us the eight-hour day, the 40-hour week, paid holidays and vacations, the end of child labor, and a whole lot more.
Now as I was reading I recalled my safety “experiences” when I did more “work” than pound a computer keyboard that, while making good stories now, in retrospect, makes me shudder.
Back in the day I was an ironworker in New York City, working (occasionally) on high steel but mostly doing rebar, the iron rods that reinforce poured concrete.
It was hard work, humping big bundles of 20- to 60-foot-long steel rods (from the size of a fat pencil to the diameter of a silver dollar) into place and tying them together. And there was always a foreman watching to insure productivity, as the hourly rate was nominally high.
Tying slab was the toughest. All day, every day, after we’d laid out, say, 6,000 squarefeet of floor with rods crossing every 6 inches, you stooped over and tied every place where two rods crossed. It was a lot of ties.
But it was nominally safe as we labored on a plywood deck.
Not so when prepping beams for asbestos fire-proofing. Especially if you were a “new mickey” (first timer).
‘Cause if you’d never worked up high (my first tall building was a project adjacent to the Brooklyn Bridge) they sent you out to the very edge of a 9-inch wide beam, 35 floors above the pavement, to secure chicken wire all around the beam. There were a lot of beams.
No one wore a safety harness. Or a hard hat. Or anything else but sturdy shoes, Carhartts, and a T-shirt.
And ‘bout the only safety training we got was, “Don’t look down,” and maybe some kind soul would show you how to shinny out to the edge on your fanny, until you worked up enough courage to actually walk upright on the steel.
Clearly, by today’s standards, such a work environment would have everyone, from the union shoppies, to company risk managers, to the local L&Is screaming, “NO, NO, NO!” at the tops of their lungs.
But back then we didn’t complain, it was just the way it was.
Like with our hard hats.
They weren’t mandatory until one bright summer day, while rebuilding New York City’s passenger ship piers over the Hudson River, the foreman handed everyone a nice, new, green hard hat.
Which we promptly tossed into the Hudson, floating them down, inverted, to the Statue of Liberty.
We did the same with the replacements the next day.
Now the third round of hats was accompanied with a note saying “No hat, two paychecks on Friday (meaning you were being fired). And like magic we all started wearing hard hats!
And on those piers, seeing the water rushing under the beams we were walking on, made us dizzy and disoriented. And without safety harnesses we all feared a plunge into the river. But again, no complaints, it was work. Besides, I was used to water and heights.
Because when in the Merchant navy I transited the Pacific, from Panama to Brisbane, in a bosun’s chair (a wood plank held up by some old rope) hoisted atop the cargo booms recording the serial numbers of every block on the ship (Farrell Lines’ Austral Pilot) or pounding new numbers into ‘em with a maul and die. (The Aussie “L&I” people were way ahead of us and very strict about workers’ safety even back in 1969. They wanted safety certificates for every one of those hundreds of blocks aboard.)
Again, no harness or hard hat; just me up there, alone, roooolling as the ship rolled, repeating the primary safety rule: “One hand for you; One hand for the ship.”
Things are different today.
Thank god, the unions, and L&I.
Because while complaining about a job after you’ve taken it seems a bit ungracious, if you aren’t looking out for your own safety, it’s not likely the bosses will.
Washington state has one of the lowest workplace fatalities rates in the nation; but is among the highest in terms of worker illness and injury. (Note: not because we’re inherently unsafe — experts say it’s because this state is so strict in reporting such data; has a unique, and accurate, reporting system; and other states and companies deliberately under-report [lie about] their data.)
Consumers like Amazon’s next-day delivery. Investors like its profitability.
And neither really cares about how such convenience and profits are “delivered.”
They should.
So let me gently suggest one of Amazon’s mottos, “Work hard, have fun, make history” maybe should be amended to, “Work hard, work safe, have fun, make history.” (And money?)
Slava Ukraini.
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