The Guardian reports that 48-year-old Billy Foister, an Amazon warehouse worker, died in September after suffering a heart attack and lying unconscious on the warehouse floor for 20 minutes before anyone noticed him. Adding insult to the tragedy is that, according to Foister’s brother Edward, Billy had just complained of having a headache and chest pains one week earlier. After being seen at the facility’s AmCare clinic, he was told he was dehydrated. Foister was then given beverages to hydrate and sent back out on the floor.
Edward Foister also questions why it took so long for those at the facility monitoring the floor to realize Billy was in trouble. “How can you not see a 6 ft 3 in man laying on the ground and not help him within 20 minutes? A couple of days before, he put the wrong product in the wrong bin and within two minutes management saw it on camera and came down to talk to him about it.” Amazon told the Guardian that they had responded “within minutes” of Foister’s collapse.
In January, the Chicago Tribune reported on Linda Becker’s lawsuit against the retail giant for allegedly “delaying medical attention” to her husband, 57-year-old Thomas Becker, after he clutched his chest and fell to the floor of a Amazon warehouse in Joliet, Illinois. According to the lawsuit, Amazon waited 25 minutes before calling the fire department to help Becker—a fire department that was located only a half mile away from the warehouse. Becker died.
“We had our life planned out. I don’t have a life anymore. It has left a big void,” Linda Becker said. “This has been unlike anything I’ve ever had to deal with. He loved life; he didn’t want to die.”
Amazon’s working conditions have been the foundation of work labor activism the past couple of years. Recently Somali workers in Minnesota have protested the harsh working conditions and the lack of cultural sensitivity from Amazon’s higher-ups. The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) released their “Dirty Dozen” report the last week of April, and on that list was mega-online retailer Amazon. According to the report, a series of deaths and general all-around poor safety and working conditions led to the company’s inclusion. This falls in line with The Daily Beast’s report in March that Amazon warehouses made almost 200 emergency 9-1-1 calls reporting suicidal coworkers.
None of this helps Billy Foister, who was let down by a business that sees numbers and not people; counts time in cash, not mindfulness; and worries about profit streams over safety concerns. The Guardian writes that according to one worker who was there the day Foister died, and asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, while Billy Foister expired on the warehouse floor, his coworkers were ordered to get back to work as if nothing had ever happened.