Year: 2011

Hell Freezes Over: Amazon.com’s PA Sweatshop Workers Endured Extreme Cold During Late Night Evacuations

~ Chris Cocca ~ 2 Comments
amazon.com
Image by soumit via Flickr

Thank you, Spencer Soper, for staying on Amazon.  An excerpt from yet another Amazon expose filed by Soper at The Morning Call:

On Nov. 27, someone activated the fire alarm in the Amazon warehouse at 3:26 a.m., forcing an evacuation, according to court documents. Amazon maintains the evacuation lasted approximately one hour and 45 minutes. The fire department responded and no fire was discovered.

As is routine in most emergency evacuations, workers were not permitted to get their coats when alarms sounded unless they happened to have them within reach. Many warehouse workers don’t have a regular work station and store their coats in a break room, so they had to leave in what they were wearing. Because of the physical nature of their jobs and warm temperatures in the warehouse, many employees wear only T-shirts and jeans or shorts while working, several employees said.

Multiple warehouse workers suffered injuries as a result of cold exposure that night and were taken to a nearby hospital for treatment, according to Amazon’s account filed in response to Grady’s lawsuit. Those employees returned to work the next day, Amazon said in court records.

A warehouse worker complained to OSHA about workers being exposed to cold during a fire alarm evacuation that night, according to an OSHA file of the incident.

“There were people passing out, having asthma attacks and I do believe a man had a seizure,” said the worker, whose name was redacted in OSHA records.

The same worker and a second one complained about another fire alarm evacuation Dec. 4 that lasted roughly two hours.

“There were pregnant women, men and women in T-shirts and shorts, some with sleeveless shirts and shorts,” one complaint states. “People were passing out and feeling ill left and right. … I am absolutely disgusted with this company’s practices and I do believe OSHA should visit this building and give them some sort of coaching on how to better handle the situation before there are more people suffering from hypothermia.”

I’ve been boycotting Amazon since Soper’s first investigation in September.  I tend to believe workers claiming injury at the hands of giant, careless corporations.  I tend to believe that bureaus like OSHA are well-intentioned and ineffectual.  As a progressive, I tend to distrust the intentions of big business and the deliverability of meaningful correctives by many well-meaning (and many ass-covering) agents of our government.  I have some progressive friends who need to believe at an ontological level that if OSHA doesn’t find anything at Amazon, everything must be fine.  I get all the reasons for that. I get why so many progressives still find it hard to admit Big Labor’s own part in undoing the early advances of the unions.  But being politically honest and being truly progressive means moving past that and realizing the degree to which the agencies we’ve authorized to protect us from unchecked greed have failed in profound and simple ways.

Amazon, you can bet that this story isn’t over.  Plaudits, loud, loud plaudits to you, Spencer Soper, for staying on this.

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Clint Eastwood Makes a Republican Case For Gay Rights

~ Chris Cocca ~ 1 Comment
President Reagan speaking at a Take Pride in A...
They like Ike.

My wife and I saw a trailer for Clint Eastwood’s  J. Edgar recently, and boy, does it look good.  As we watched, my wife leaned over and told me about Eastwood’s recent GQ musings about human rights in general and gay marriage in particular:

“I was an Eisenhower Republican when I started out at 21, because he promised to get us out of the Korean War,” Eastwood tells the magazine. “And over the years, I realized there was a Republican philosophy that I liked. And then they lost it. And libertarians had more of it. Because what I really believe is, let’s spend a little more time leaving everybody alone.”

Make a “get off my lawn” joke if you want, but Eastwood’s right about what the modern GOP becomes when put in the hands of Michele Bachmann and other dominionists in libertarian clothing. Americans of any or no party can certainly be of good will while holding some disparate political beliefs in tension, but we need to be honest about it.  There’s certainly no good will coming from quarters that want to curtail gay rights.

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PANK’s Sense of Humor, The Missouri Review’s Argument For Online Submission Fees

~ Chris Cocca ~ 1 Comment
The Missouri Review
Image via Wikipedia

This post is from 2011.  Today (2019), online submissions are near-ubiquitous, and submission fees are, in my experience, even more common.

Sundry notes of the literary type ahead.

I got a rejection letter from PANK today.  Fine.  The address it came from?  awesome@pankmagazine.com.  Hilarious!

Dinty W. Moore, the  editor behind Brevity, shared a link to this piece from The Missouri Review today via Twitter.  From “Why Literary Journals Charge Online  Submission Fees” :

One of the things worth recognizing is that the cost of submitting to a magazine is a fixed prospective cost: a cost that will be incurred and cannot be recovered. Submissions have never really been free. It’s simply that the cost (paper, envelopes, postage, etc.) has been paid to the post office, not the magazine. It didn’t go to the magazines. And I’m not saying that it should have. Freed up from (some) of the costs of submitting to literary magazines, has there been an increase in subscriptions? Has there been an increase in financial support of literary journals from writers?

No. Not at all.

Later:

In fact, submissions increase significantly. This varies from magazine to magazine, but the increase in submissions is somewhere between twenty to thirty-five percent.

My comment:

The increase in submissions has more do with more people trying to be writers, getting MFAs, having to submit to more journals because of more competition, being unable to pay fees at every journal that charges them, or, if able to pay those fees, certainly not subscribing to more journals. It also just so happens that the streamlining of online submissions came at a great time: the world economy has been in the gutter for close to four years. I’m glad to be rid of the cost of paper and postage, but I’m not plunking those extra dollars down for more journal subscriptions. Yes, we keep hearing about how writers don’t have a lot of extra money, but that’s because, well, we (and you) don’t.

The fact that writers no longer pay the costs of postage to submit doesn’t mean that those phantom dollars are now a revenue stream to be captured.  That money’s already going to other things, like paying student loans.

Movies That Make You Put Down the Remote (And Stay Up Way Too Late)

~ Chris Cocca ~ 19 Comments
True Grit (Glen Campbell album)
Nearly perfect.

I have a pretty easy rubric for knowing which movies are my favorite.  When I find it on TV, will I watch it till the end no matter what point it’s at and no matter how late at night it is?  For these, the answer is “yes.”   In no particular order:

  • True Grit (original)
  • Batman (1989)
  • Remember The Titans
  • The Godfather
  • The Godfather Part II
  • Legends of the Fall
  • The Graduate
  • A Few Good Men

I’m sure I’ll think of more.  What are some of yours?

Picture: How Soda Caps Are Killing Birds. Image: What’s Really In Our Food?

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

I’ve written about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (that is, the floating mass of plastic waste the size of Texas wreaking havoc in the Pacific Ocean) on quite a few occasions.  It’s in the news a lot and is becoming better-known.  And bigger.  And more devastating.  Take a look at this short piece from NPR today.  Warning: it’s graphic.  It should also be infuriating.

Consider also the eerie parallels between albatross parents mistakenly feeding their babies plastic and the degree to which we do or don’t know what’s really in most of the food we feed our kids.

But “Venn” Is Just So Fun to Say!

~ Chris Cocca ~ 1 Comment

A few days ago, I shared this schematic and called it a “Venn Diagram for the New Revolution.”:

One reader responded thusly:

“except the statement in the middle neither says that the government has too much power nor is part of the tea party opinion pool

conclusion: the author neither understands venn diagrams nor political opinions.”

I’m glad she/he did so, because it brings up an important point I should articulate further:

The daily talking points from the Libertarian Party, which I understand is NOT the Tea Party as such but draws form the same well, tows this line: “corporations have too much power because the government has too much power.” Even though strong elements in the Tea Party believe that limited government inevitably means more real power for corporations (and crazily, they’re okay with that), I do believe that there’s an equally sizable pool that agrees with corresponding parts of OWS on the idea that both corporations and the government have too much power, and that the problem is self-sustaining. Yes, a simple diagram doesn’t get at these nuances. But it’s helpful for people who believe as do I and many readers that powerful constituencies in OWS and the TP could collaborate in meaningful ways.