Who knew? Check out BCR’s guidelines, hosted on Angelfire.
Category: writing
Hell Freezes Over: Amazon.com’s PA Sweatshop Workers Endured Extreme Cold During Late Night Evacuations
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.
Related articles
- Spencer Soper Wins Sidney Award for Exposing Brutal Conditions at Amazon.com Warehouse (bigthink.com)
- Inside an Amazon Warehouse (mcall.com)
- Amazon.com, Give Your Employees Good Working Conditions or We’ll Go Elsewhere (crooksandliars.com)
PANK’s Sense of Humor, The Missouri Review’s Argument For Online Submission Fees
- 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.
Who Is the American Middle? Almost Everyone You’ve Ever Known Is Crazy (but Might Not Know it Yet)
Who is the American Middle that has the power to make the 2012 election something different?
Most people reading this post. That huge nexus of overlap between the responsible Tea Partiers and the responsible Occupiers. The employed. The unemployed. The insured and uninsured. Homebuilders and homeless. Students with too much debt, families without enough food.
A reader writes: “I know you joke about your Kuccinich/Paul dream ticket, but I go one step further: it takes a group of crazy D’s and a group of crazy R’s putting aside all that easily divides them and works toward helping real people overcome the big government and big business working against them. What a concept?”
What a concept. I hereby propose the noble and wrongly-maligned fox as the symbol of the next American electoral revolution. If crazy is Ds, Rs, Is, TPs, OWSs all working together for the kind of change we need, I’m crazy all day long.
Songs that Say Something about Generation X
I know we’ve done variations on this theme before, but I there was a search query for this topic over the weekend and I aim to please. As you might know, I consider search queries the blogging equivalent of Letterman’s CBS Mail Bag, so here we go. Nominations are open. As you consider, remember the Daily Cocca’s proposed gradations of Gen X. And don’t forget the Pixies.
And Now a Word from Our Libertarian Friends
Just got this in the in-box. Are they right? Do lobbyists have too much power because the government has too much power? And if so, which government? The government of incumbent elected officials? The government of tenured bureaucrats? And don’t get me wrong, people in both groups do wonderful things. But who’s really hog-tying the People’s latent political power? Probably everyone.
A word for our Libertarian friends, for your consideration.
I don’t like the trope that everything can be fixed by shrinking government, nor the promise that all will be well if we simply vote for Libertarians.
DC Reboot: Superman #1, Batman #1, Flash #1
From when the New 52 was still new:
As you might recall, I really liked the social justice superheroics of Action Comics #1. Last night, I finally got around to reading Superman #1, Batman #1, and The Flash #1 and wanted to share my thoughts.
Superman #1: Very ambitious. We have the struggles of new vs. old media, the problems with media conglomerates in general, Superman as guardian of the past, Clark Kent rejecting a sweet cable news deal because 1) he despises cable news and 2) millions of people would see his face every day, like, forever, a Perry White full of vim and vigor, saying “let’s show them the hard-hitting analysis that only print can deliver!” A lot of things like that, which I eat. right. up. The conflict between Supes and the actually “villain” of the arc wasn’t as interesting to me, but I do like the fact that the book serves as a one-shot while giving us the seeds of some classic arcs. Clark loves Lois like Dobie Gillis loved Tuesday Weld. And there’s even a young (much nicer) Warren Beatty type between them.
Unfortunately, the content of Clark’s exclusive story about Superman and the big incident, which we get in caption boxes, doesn’t feel like the front-page work of a great reporter. I’m eager to give George Perez the BOD on this because 1) I’m a writer, and yeah, it’s freaking hard, and 2) he’s George Perez. Maybe Clark’s unpolished style is part of his cover? There’s also a very strange crossover page from Stormwatch that makes Ben 10 look like Beowulf.
Overall, a good read with a lot of interesting things to say in the first half about history, time, urban renewal, economic decay. I want to give it a 7 out of 10, but Action was so good, Superman feels more like a 6.5. I’m conflicted. I’ll go 7. That seems high on a ten-point scale, but not as good when you think about it as a percentage and covert that to an an academic grade. (This is why I blog).
7.
Batman #1: The best of the bunch. Bruce’s new contact lens tech is great, the Batcave looks great, and the internal monologue that stitches most of the story together is top-notch. Bruce’s love for Gotham, and his investment in its future, could be a template for the philosophies of hope surrounding some very pressing real-world reclamation projects. He exudes a strong ethos, suggesting that forward-thinking and risk-taking for the common good are moral virtues. I’m not saying this was a civics lessons disguised as a comic book, but it was uplifting and hopeful. Not something you tend to expect from a Bat-book. And did you notice that I keep saying “Bruce”? That’s an effect of good writing and successful character development in a matter of pages. This still isn’t a book for kids, as a crime scene near the end (central to the hook for issue 2) reminds us. If you’re looking for a Batman title for younger readers, The Brave and The Bold is good if you don’t mind mostly slap-stick violence.
8.6
Flash #1: There’s a very special place in my heart for the Flash. But my Flash is and always will be Wally West. Jay Garrick is my second favorite. That’s not a comment on my feelings about Baby Boomers in general…Wally is the Flash I grew up with, an imperfect hero struggling with all kinds of emotional issues and mentored by an icon from the Golden Age. What’s not to love? I totally get that Wally’s favorite Flash is his uncle, original mentor, and former partner, Barry Allen. I totally understand the overwhelming sense of loss that pervades Wally’s Flashness, especially in the 90s, is what makes his character so compelling. I also love that he’s a screw up. I’m not 100 percent sure where he’ll shake out in the new DCU, but I hope there’s a prominent place for him. I hope he’s not de-aged like all the Robins, but I suppose he has to be if Barry and Iris aren’t married yet.
Onto the Barry-centric book at hand. Loved the splash page. Captured the Silver Age feel that brought us Barry in the first place. The story moved quickly (ha) and ended on a cliff-hanger that has me interested. It felt like a younger read, something akin to those titles from DC’s early-90’s Impact line. (The Fly was my favorite). Since Impact was meant to introduce new, mostly younger readers to old characters at an accessible level and the reboot is meant to do the same, mission accomplished. The Flash has always been one of the most kid-friendly of the major DC heroes (emotional issues that we adults love aside), and I think that will continue.
It was a fun read, which is the point of a Barry book. I don’t like the new suit. Too panel-y.
8
A good mix, but nothing touches Action.
Chris Cocca 