• bitwolf@lemmy.one
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    39 minutes ago

    Man if it’s a state of emergency let the mgr sink with the ship.

    It so sad, they probably complied because they needed their jobs.

    • Etterra@lemmy.world
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      35 minutes ago

      Well on the bright side at least now they don’t? I hope their families sue the shit out of the company and the manager.

  • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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    11 minutes ago

    I worked at a major destination-store focused on fishing and hunting products.

    We had a hurricane hitting and the manager on duty made it clear that anyone going home to help out their families would be fired. Then when he got the call that water was rising near his house, he took off.

    I’ve never hated a manager more than in that moment. When I was in management later, I made sure that I took all the shitty holiday shifts so my staff didn’t have to work until 10pm on Christmas Eve and then be back in the building changing prices for the after-Christmas sale at 2am on the 26th.

  • celsiustimeline@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 hours ago

    Sorry boss. I don’t die for nobody. Oh you want to fire me? I’m sure the Department of Labor and OSHA would love to hear about how you forced us to stay in a dangerous environment under threat of termination. I’m sure that’ll end super swell for you.

    • dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net
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      3 hours ago

      Sadly, it might end just fine for the boss. The employee would be better off going to the press first.

    • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      The part of your workday that you’re most likely to die during is your commute, especially if you drive, which is not covered by DoL or OSHA.

      ETA: Okay, if you’re a crab fisherman or salvage diver maybe your job is more dangerous. But for almost every job I can think of driving to work is more dangerous than everything you do.

      • Unboxious@ani.social
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        46 minutes ago

        The part of your workday that you’re most likely to die during is your commute, especially if you drive, which is not covered by DoL or OSHA.

        FWIW this is because of DoL and OSHA making sure that once you get to work they have to keep you reasonably safe. This was not always the case in the past.

  • Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
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    5 hours ago

    Evacuation Warnings should carry a legal responsibility to close all nonessential businesses until the immediate crisis is over.

    Honestly, even the Waffle House manager should hand over the keys to the Fire Chief. Those guys know how to cook, and clean up after themselves, should the need arise.

    • Fosheze@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      If I learned anything durring covid it’s that basically every business is “essential”.

      • DJDarren@thelemmy.club
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        4 hours ago

        Yep. Company I work for didn’t miss a day of work because our boss had the HR manager make up a certificate for us to all put in our cars telling the police that we were considered ‘essential’.

        I don’t think we are, but hey ho.

  • 5in1k@lemm.ee
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    5 hours ago

    I know they were scared to lose their livelihoods but there’s no way my job could have that level of control over me. ” Sorry fuckfaces but biblical stuff is happening outside, I’m out”

    • roofuskit@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      How many times in your life have you been without a meal for an entire day because you couldn’t afford one? Ever been without a place to live?

  • Ech@lemm.ee
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    6 hours ago

    We really need to break our conditioning that employment is the highest priority in our lives. That employers can dictate whether we take live saving action depending on how many pennies it’ll cost them.

    And this isn’t to victim blame. What happened to these people is a travesty and the company holds the blame for it, 100%. It’s more to point out that we’re the only ones that can take action on this. Nobody (certainly not corps) is going to break this mindset or norm on our behalf. Look out for yourself and your peers. You’re more important then your employer’s bottom line.

    • MNByChoice@midwest.social
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      3 hours ago

      If only our health insurance wasn’t tied to our jobs.

      If only wages were high enough to have something extra to cushion.

      If only we didn’t have to work so long, wr could think and make better decisions.

    • Fosheze@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      We really need to break our conditioning that employment is the highest priority in our lives.

      It’s not really conditioning when it’s actually the case. Without my job I’m likely homeless or dead within weeks. If Iose my job then I can no longer pay my bills, within a few months I’ll be homeless. More urgently though I lose access to my health insurance which means I lose access to the medications keeping my mental illness in check. Finding a new job normally is a pain; finding one when you’re so depressed that you really don’t even care if you live or die is next to impossible. Also once it flares up you tend to stop caring about even seeking treatment for it making it a self perpetuating issue. If I got fired I would have only a few weeks to find a new job before I wound up in a position I likely wouldn’t recover from. Sure there are things like unemployment but that doesn’t even come close to paying my bills let alone affording my own health insurance.

      So it would take a lot for me to risk walking away from my job and risk getting fired. I could easily see myself in the same position as these people, waiting until it’s too late to run out of fear of losing my job. If we want people to be able to walk away from situations like this then we need to make survival possible without employment. We need healthcare to not be tied to employment and we need real unemployment pay to keep people afloat while they find a new job.

    • the post of tom joad@sh.itjust.works
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      5 hours ago

      That employers can dictate whether we take live saving action depending on how many pennies it’ll cost them.

      If nothing else we must internalize this fact. i think many are still operating under the impression that their employers value their lives. We must understand viscerally that our lives do not, to them, at all. I think the rest takes care of itself once we get over that hump

  • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    99% of the country votes capitalist every two years, and then everyone clutches their pearls when capitalist things happen. Guys, this is the world you wanted. The ruling parties are not hiding who they are from you.

  • Gork@lemm.ee
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    3 hours ago

    Archive link to the story. There should be some consequences to the management who didn’t allow them to leave when the flash flood warning was issued.

    • Wogi@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      There should be some consequences to the management who didn’t allow them to leave didn’t send them the fuck home immediately.

      I work in a factory that sits on a flood plane. It’s happened more than once that by the time a decision is made to cut people loose, it’s already difficult to leave the area. Often by the time a flash flood warning is issued there are only a few minutes of clear roadway left.

      It’s entirely possible that a similar situation happened here, that the safest place for those people to be was in that building, that there was no way out and they would have been swept down stream regardless.even if that’s the case, this company should be held liable for sitting on their hands and keeping people at work through a storm where the risk of flooding was so great. That decision should have been made much sooner. If there was a job to come back to you can always post them for a Saturday and wouldn’t have to pay overtime until they actually hit 40 hours.

      I’m so fucking fed up with the false urgency in these places. This company made high density plastic parts. Literally nothing they were making is life or death. Nothing they were making couldn’t wait another day. No customers were going to bail because the factory they needed their parts from got hit by a fucking hurricane.

      But everyone, every fucking person in leadership, is constantly pressured to squeeze out more units, more production. Keep people working as long as possible, because every second they’re not making a product is a second the company is losing money. And because now every fucking company has jumped on to the lean manufacturing model, they are constantly, perpetually, chronicly behind. The second an order comes in it’s already too late and we need those units NOW. no lead time, no back orders. So stay at your machine because the boss man needs another Lexus.

      Fucking burn it down

    • The Pantser@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      There will be about the same consequence as the Amazon warehouse that wouldn’t let their employees leave during a tornado. Nothing.

      • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
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        6 hours ago

        That matter isn’t settled yet but my guess is that Amazon will ultimately settle out of court for a lot of money. With that said a Tornado is a different kettle of fish than a flood. The warning time for a tornado is usually measured in bare minutes, sometimes when you’re lucky you get 20 minutes and even then where exactly are you going to go?

        Floods like this one though had HOURS of warning and there’s positively no reason for employees to get caught like this. There was more than enough time for these folks to get a known safe place. It’s despicable.

      • thefartographer@lemm.ee
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        7 hours ago

        There absolutely were consequences. A longer-than-it-should-have-taken investigation was done from which they discovered that killing your employees is very naughty and were told that they shouldn’t do that anymore. In return, Amazon made a very sincere “whoopsie-doodle 👉👈, I sowwy. But we didn’t directly kill these production assets, so no harm no foul.”

    • Krauerking@lemy.lol
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      7 hours ago

      Why? They were immigrants so they could be disposable labor right?

      One of the employees who died, Bertha Mendoza, 56, fell off the truck and vanished into the flood, according to Ingram and a representative from Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition.

      Same with the fucking bridge that got destroyed in Delaware and every factory disaster. Immigrants doing the labor that die for our carelessness, and easy to replace.

  • xyguy@startrek.website
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    7 hours ago

    113 Years after the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire and not enough has changed for the better.

    • drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 hours ago

      This story and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire should be a reminder that almost every large business owner would kill you if it meant they could make slightly more money.

      How much extra value do you think they generated in a couple of hours of making plastic pipes? That’s what their lives were worth to the factory owners.

    • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      Can’t really expect change when all we vote for are capitalists. If we want our culture to change, we have to make different choices in the ballot box.

      • MrMcGasion@lemmy.world
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        55 minutes ago

        That’s part of it. Unions also made a difference for a while, until the propaganda machine convinced a bunch of people that Unions were bad. When in reality, Unions are a benefit to everyone, they protect workers from bad bosses, and historically they also protected bosses from getting the shit beat out of them by their employees.

  • teft@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    I do not understand the mentality. Companies do not care for your well-being. Don’t die for them just because your manager is an idiot that says “stay put”.

    • Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 hours ago

      Seriously! As a Floridian, I’ve told bosses I’m leaving on several occasions. It wasn’t a request. I’ll be back when it’s safe to do so.

    • slurpeesoforion@startrek.website
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      4 hours ago

      A lifetime ago I worked at a place that gave a shit on paper for legal reasons.
      One night I hear an unfamiliar alarm, as does everyone in my immediate vicinity.
      My contribution to the conversation about the nature of the alarm was to say they could stay and discuss it if they wanted to. But I was not about to burn up for the assholes who ran the place. I was out the fire door with all its alarms before they figured out it was a phone left off the hook.

    • treadful@lemmy.zip
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      7 hours ago

      We have the hindsight with full knowledge of the risk they were taking. I’d bet they only thought they were risking their next paycheck, not their lives.

      • teft@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        You think floodwaters rising towards your building isn’t sufficient signs to know that you’re in a dangerous situation?

        I’m sorry but I’ve seen enough in life to know you do not fuck with water on the move. Floods are dangerous as fuck. If the water is rising around you, get the fuck out of dodge or as high up as you can get.

        • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
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          5 hours ago

          I think people are generally slow to realize that they are in a life-or-death situation. I’m not talking about just the victims here, but rather about everyone accustomed to living in safety (including the bosses who told the victims to stay). We’re so used to making choices where death is not a potential outcome that we simply don’t take the possibility into account.

          I was in downtown Manhattan on 9/11, close enough to the World Trade Center that I felt the building I was in shake when the towers were hit. The funny thing is that I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t even horrified. I couldn’t see the towers from my window but I watched the smoke rising and experienced only a strange excitement. I didn’t leave the area until they told us to, hours later. (I don’t blame them. They were as stunned as I was.) The whole thing didn’t feel real.

          Now I know that I was in absolutely no danger (except from all the pollutants I ended up breathing after they eventually made us come back to the area before the air was clean) but I couldn’t have known that at the time.

          Edit: The thing with the pollutants is a good example too. I could smell that the air wasn’t clean; everyone could. They told us that they were monitoring the air quality and I trusted them despite having my throat sore by the time I went home every day from the irritants in the dust I was breathing. Hell, I could see the dust rising nearby when cranes loaded debris from the towers onto barges and I still just did what I was told with no objections.

        • treadful@lemmy.zip
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          7 hours ago

          Nobody has ever been surprised by flood waters before. Paths of travel in low lying areas have never been cut off unexpectedly before. It must just be these dumb workers fault they drowned. /s

        • Fermion
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          6 hours ago

          That area has never had that level of flooding since it was settled. Sure, everyone knows floods are dangerous, but not even the meteorologists were expecting the extent of flooding they actually got.

          Have some humility and realize that you have access to knowledge now that would have sounded crazy before the events.

    • eacapesamsara@sh.itjust.works
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      7 hours ago

      Homesslessness in the US is about a coin flip off for death or suffering, every hour of every day. Quitting your job or getting fired for insubordination prevents you from collecting unemployment, and most Americans have less than a weeks expenses saved due the the last 60 years of low pay and exponentially rising expenses, causing homelessness if you lose your job. You might die in a hurricane induced flood, but that risk can seem less than slowly dying while homeless or in prison for being homeless.

  • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    If “a state of emergency” doesn’t protect workers who are fleeing said emergency in the same way that jury duty and voting rights do, then they are broken and need to be fixed.

  • MudMan@fedia.io
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    7 hours ago

    Look, I know it’s not the point, and that is an insane story that should have serious consequences for those responsible…

    …but “PTO time” is bothering me more than I’d like.