Amazon worker – struck and shot in New Orleans terror attack – initially denied time off A warehouse worker at an Amazon facility in Mobile, Alabama, who was struck by a truck and shot in the New Orleans New Year's Day deadly terror attack, was initially denied medical leave by the internet mega-giant, possibly due to an HR mix-up. Alexis Scott-Windham was celebrating the New Year with friends on Bourbon Street …
I'd buy it. Many places I've worked have worker management products with extremely clear forms consisting of about thirty boxes with short labels and no instructions about what is supposed to go in any of them. Some of them need things that the software should be able to but didn't pull from my existing records. Others need codes pulled from a document that's somewhere in SharePoint or Google Drive depending on whether this is a Microsoft or Google shop. Some actually contain data about my request. Even more are just there and can be safely left blank. It always seems easy to fill in such a form incorrectly, especially the first time I've done it. That doesn't mean Amazon wouldn't or didn't mistreat the employee here. Something plausible is also a good cover story if you were at fault.
Classic manglement. The worker should have had to do no more than call her line manager and tell her what happened; the appropriate medical leave should be handled by the manager. That's the person who's supposed to know what all the forms mean.
I'm surprised: Amazon is known, after all, for the caring and compassionate way in which it deals with public relations its employees.
Amazon has using convoluted processes to discourage people from using services that don't directly make them money down to a fine art.
I learned that when contacting their support to ask if it was possible to order a kindle ebook without providing a phone number. Wasted more than 15 minutes of my and their time because they do not want to allow their web page and first support levels to admit that they do require a phone number. The first two support levels repeatedly confirmed it was possible to order without providing a phone number. Their 4th support level finally admitted it is not by pasting an obviously pre-canned statement why they "need" a phone number.
I think everything about Amazon has been built with the principle that things will go according to assumptions and make no provision for alternatives. It's more likely that there was a built-in assumption that a phone number would be provided, just as there was an assumption that nobody would be struck by a vehicle and shot.
"I'd buy it."
I wouldn't. Yay to America, I guess, because if that was me (which I very much hope never ever happens), my treating doctor will provide a piece of paper that I hand over to my employer stating that I am now on medical leave until such and such a date, and they accept it and that's that. Official doctor sanctioned sickness takes precedence, it does not come out of paid time off or holiday entitlement. I don't need to fill out any forms, I just hand the paper to HR and it's their problem. And if I'm in far too bad a shape to make it to my place of work, the doctor will fax (yes, fax!) a copy to them, and send another copy by post (because the law is that the employer must be notified within 48h).
But, then, I live in one of these horrible socialist-commie countries with unions and worker's rights and toilets with actual doors that close...
Likewise, having needed emergency surgery twice in two years with several weeks of recovery time for each. But then someone decided to centralise HR services and hide behind some pretty useless IT system, so now nobody knows how anything is supposed to work anymore.
You're right, and if something that severe happened, I wouldn't be trying to fill out the form. I'd send my manager an email and tell them to fill out the form, see you when I'm done with the medical stuff. However, I've tried to fill in the forms myself before, and the reason that I've mostly done them correctly is that I take a lot longer to do them the first time I try because I'm being very careful with what I put in each box. That means that, if this worker decided they would fill in the form themselves, I wouldn't be surprised if they made a mistake. They had a better option, making the employer do the paperwork, but that doesn't mean they used it. For that reason, I can't jump to either conclusion about whether Amazon is lying or just unhelpful.
It was a PR back track. That is, their standard worker hostile policy made them look REALLY bad in this instance so they're blaming it on a mixup. If instead of being on Bourbon Street in the wrong place at the wrong time that person had sustained similar injuries while out hunting or something Amazon wouldn't have backtracked because there would have been no press coverage to make Amazon look bad.
Not that I've looked - probably be able to order "lying sacks of shite" from Amazon and get it delivered via Amazon Prime (unless that is you want delivery to 20019 and 20020, in which case, the Prime delivery will take a few more days)
At some point, there were reports that Amazon was running out of potential employees for their warehouses in some places. This was due to the fact they had a very high turnover and they had a policy of never hiring again somebody they had fired. I'm not sure how they solved that problem.
Not hiring somebody you've previously fired seems not unreasonable to me. I once worked at a company that had a policy of never re-employing *any* ex-employee. I saw one guy told to leave on his first day after someone realised he'd worked there before, which was unnecessarily shit.
Please stop repeating that stupid term "culture" in a work environment.
Theres no such thing as culture, the company is nt your family or friend and there is no such thing as culture. They only want to work you hard and dont give a shit about you, so stop pretending they care.
. . . that if my only alternative other than to buy from Amazon is to go without something, I'll go without.
I have a relative who worked for AWS and he was miserable the whole time he was there.
One of those jobs where when you inevitably get fired (excuse me. . . downsided*), you breathe a sigh of relief.
_____________
* A typo for "downsized" but I decided to leave it -- a portmanteau of downsized and blindsided. Highly appropriate in many cases.
just heard from my mate Luigi, asking for the location of the CEO ........................
but seriously, this should NEVER happen, worker gets injured, worker get full PTO to recover, you do not need the aggravation of thinking your job is on the line when you are unable to do anything
personal to me, lost a leg in a crash, took govt benefits 6 months to figure out payments, got £400 a month, when mortgage was £1000
l spent a YEAR bedbound, contractor, so no work help, but yea, lost house, marriage, the works
benefits should cover your outgoings, to allow you to get better, take strain away from you, and help get you back into work ASAP
and other fairy tales ffs
No, the UK social protections are pretty weak.
if you are unable to work for illness or accident, your best bet is that your employer gives you paid sickness leave. Thats usually available for 1 month in a professional job. For a min wage role with a small employer, you might only get statutory sick pay, which is about the same level as unemployment benefits - but that also requires you to have contributed enough national insurance contributions over the previous 3 years.
unemployment benefit is a fixed rate with extra contributions for paying rent in some circumstances. paying mortgage interest only kicks in after 12 months.
Seeing a french national going though the redundancy process in england was painful. they had no real understanding of that the company was doing, what that would mean to them, or where they needed to go to get the help that may have been available to them as it was pre-brexit
.
SSP in the UK is 6 months for a full time employee.
I should know.. been off sick for 3 months and got that no problem. boss even 'helped' with a few bills(after some arm twisting)
However one of the companies I've worked for gave you 1 week full pay for each year upto 26 yrs as sick.(they paid that from an insurance policy)
And the government.. well 6 months full pay 6 months 1/2 pay , then no pay.... although they will keep your job open for you... mostly.
But compared to the US, the UK is a worker's paradise.
It should be as easy as contacting a manager or having a family member contact them, let them know what has happened and the manager deals with it. The problem is that there's some MBA in the company that's decided that they need to analyze the crap out of absences and detailed information is therefore required. The edict flows downhill like waste water where it's turned into an online form that the employee has to log in to fill out (being in hospital and unable to access their employee account is another strike). The convoluted and unexplained web form has evolved from a "pass the story" internal mechanism so the underlying mission of the tracking is completely missed. The company has then alienated their employees even more, caused legal issues through inappropriate discipline being applied and this sort of story hits the news.
This form-filliing is a waste of time and money at all levels. Fortunately one government is taking baby steps in the right direction - eliminating businesses from asking for a doctor's note for absences of 3 days or less.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-doctors-note-requirement-1.7421952
"Fortunately one government is taking baby steps in the right direction - eliminating businesses from asking for a doctor's note for absences of 3 days or less."
The times when I've been ill for more than 3 days, it would have been inadvisable to visit a doctor since they don't want somebody in the throes of the flu lounging in their waiting room. How would I get there? Ambulance? It wouldn't have been safe for me to drive running a fever and my body having sudden needs to be sure there's nothing in my stomach.
What's the point of requiring a doctor's note anyway? If you don't believe the employee that they were ill, there's a trust problem. If the employee is having to call out sick to get a day off for something, there's a policy issue that needs revising so the company can have more notice.
The last job I had with somebody else, I would notify them if I was taking a day off. I didn't "ask" for one. Since I was salaried, the labor laws in the state meant that if I made an appearance for any length of time on a day counted as a day worked. If I worked more than 8/hours as an "exempt" employee, I didn't get paid overtime. It worked out and I don't think there was any counting of days in/out going on. Nobody was playing that game since they hired well initially. It got worse right about the time I left but that can happen when companies try to grow. Even when not well, I would work as much from home as I felt up to. A lot of engineering is mental so warming a very particular chair while doing that part doesn't make a difference.
Yeah if the bullet fragmented when it bone then she might be SOL. My friend got shot by a .25 here in winnipeg, guy came up to him walking down the sidewalk, held up his piece and said 'gimme a dollar' which my friend had no cash on him. So he got shot in the shoulder, where a bunch of shrapnel remains. Police never even looked for the assailant.
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