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Warehouse Fired Women Workers


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  • 10 months later...
2 hours ago, Ms. Tito said:

Wow. This is genuinely enraging. Fuck capitalism. 

Honestly, this is less fuck capitalism and more fuck Amazon. Plenty of companies based in capitalist nations let pregnant women work, and give paid maternity leave.

And if capitalism is bad then what on earth is going to replace it because I simply don't see a better practical solution

 

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On 3/12/2020 at 1:38 AM, OmorashiFan59 said:

Honestly, this is less fuck capitalism and more fuck Amazon. Plenty of companies based in capitalist nations let pregnant women work, and give paid maternity leave.

And if capitalism is bad then what on earth is going to replace it because I simply don't see a better practical solution

 

I think you're right about that. Sometimes I meet people who don't believe the strange,injust and even illegal activities some big companies I used to work for got away with. It's the 'getting away with'-part that matters most, that's exactly why we have unions. And knowing about these horrible unjustice,what a free press exactly is for. 

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I used to work at a major car insurance company as a clear-liability adjuster in their call center.  It was my first corporate job after college.  This employer treats their employees like absolute children.  The company has a 'dependability' policy wherein you must maintain a 97% dependability rate.  If you fall below 97%, you are terminated, zero questions asked.  One guy on my team was terminated because he was hovering around 98% and missed one shift because he had a heart attack.  Even though he had the sick time to cover the shift, they docked his dependability because he didn't call in beforehand (y'know, cause he was having a fucking heart attack).  They didn't even wait until the end of his scheduled shift to have security clear out his desk (and by that point his wife had called in and everybody was aware of the situation).  Every second you are late counts against your dependability.  Even for high-level salaried employees, who must also clock in as if they were hourly workers.  In the call center, each person is allowed 10 minutes of 'personal time' each shift.  This includes bathroom breaks (and pumping breaks for new mothers...).  Pregnant women who need the bathroom frequently during an 8 or 10 or even 12 hour shift are subject to that 10 minute limit, and any minute more that they need counts against their dependability.  They are very literally choosing between risking termination or risking having an accident at their desks.  I worked with a pregnant woman who wore diapers because she was having absolutely none of that bullshit and she was very open about it to anyone who would listen.

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Honestly, that sounds less like an omo fantasy and more like omo hell... It's understandable for rather small businesses to have to reject pregnant women on the grounds that literally every minute from every worker is required to keep them afloat, but big companies pushing them out is ridiculous. Especially if the woman has some non-redundant skill/expertise.

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  • 1 month later...
On 3/16/2020 at 12:26 AM, Chevrolet said:

Eh. I'm skeptical about the claims made here. A company as big as Amazon probably goes through a lot of employees. Makes sense that at least a few would be fired while pregnant. This article is just trying to be outrage fuel.

While that's possible, Amazon is the company that accidentally set off bear mace on the warehouse floor, multiple times with at least two of those incidents being related to their on-floor robots. I looked for news coverage of the Texas one, but it seems to be overshadowed by the significantly worse incident in New Jersey. They also are notorious for denying/timing bathroom breaks, expecting employees to work at absurd speeds, and deliberately placing break rooms and bathrooms far away from the work area, so it takes more of every break to walk there. John Oliver did this much more well-researched piece. It even talks about the employee who had a heart attack and died on the warehouse floor and was ignored for 20 minutes. 

I don't work for Amazon, but I do work in logistics, and it can be a heinously sexist field at times. I'm a young woman, and I've had multiple job interviews where they skirt around discriminatory and illegal questions, by asking, "Are you married?" (If I'm recently married, they don't want me to get pregnant and take maternity leave), "Do you have a boyfriend/fiancé?" (if I'm due to get married, then I might take off for the wedding/honeymoon and they rather I didn't), and "Do you have children?" (If I have kids, I might have to suddenly leave work to take care of an emergency or even just step out for a phone call, which slightly lowers productivity). All of these questions are illegal and are designed to get protected information, but a lot of employers get away with them by saying "Oh I was just making conversation.  I didn't ask if she was pregnant." since pregnancy is considered a temporary disability and is considered protected under the ADA by the EEOC. I've worked blue jobs before, but this is the only industry I've been called "little lady" by my supervisors. I absolutely believe the article. 

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