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Businesses Medicine United States

Amazon Tells Employees In New York and New Jersey To Work From Home To Prevent Coronavirus Spread (cnbc.com) 34

Amazon on Monday asked employees at its New York and New Jersey offices to work from home to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. This comes as the company told employees at its offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Seattle area to work from home, following reports that an Amazon employee in Seattle tested positive for the virus. CNBC reports: The Amazon-owned audiobook company, Audible, is headquartered in Newark, New Jersey. Amazon also employs thousands of people in New York City, including employees at Amazon Web Services and members of sales and marketing teams, among other units. An Amazon spokesperson told CNBC in statement: "We continue to work closely with public and private medical experts to ensure we are taking the right precautions as the situation continues to evolve. This includes recommending that employees who are able to work from home in Seattle/Bellevue, the Bay Area, New York, New Jersey and the Lombardy region/Asti province of Italy do so through the end of March."

Amazon last month restricted all nonessential travel in the U.S. in response to continued spread of the coronavirus. As of Monday afternoon, there are now more than 113,300 cases of the coronavirus worldwide, and at least 3,892 people have died from the virus. There are at least 600 confirmed cases of the virus in the U.S., and at least 22 deaths.

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Amazon Tells Employees In New York and New Jersey To Work From Home To Prevent Coronavirus Spread

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  • Of course (Score:5, Insightful)

    by burtosis ( 1124179 ) on Monday March 09, 2020 @09:31PM (#59813592)
    The grunts with no sick leave or medical care are still being whipped to produce in shipping centers! So don’t worry, your amazon prime package will arrive on time, though you may want to drench the outside of the box in at least a 70% alcohol solution.
    • I ordered some spray bottles for the alcohol, but I'm still trying to figure out the exact procedure without wasting too much alcohol.

      I hope they quarantine them inside the shipping center, I have more orders that haven't shipped!

      • "I ordered some spray bottles for the alcohol, but I'm still trying to figure out the exact procedure without wasting too much alcohol."

        Use ethanol, then there will be no waste. If you spray too much, everybody in the room will be disinfected inside (get drunk), that's it.

        • I'm going to start carrying an opened bottle of Whiskey in the car.

          I'll just tell the cops it's disinfectant.

        • Perhaps a Silver Lining to all this is that many companies will realize that telecommuting is actually effective. Instead of it being an exception or perk, it might become a regular and mainstream practice.

          Of course with increased telecommuting comes reduced traffic with subsequent reduced pollution, lower office space costs, arguably less time lost to illness since a person isn't sitting in a petri dish office 8 hours a day, increased patronage of local businesses, and perhaps lower stress.

    • Too bad people get upset that jobs will be lost every time a company attempts to automate [slashdot.org]. Imagine if the shipping centers were run entirely by robots, with humans only overseeing them (and occasionally going in to repair a broken robot). The grunts would then have been retrained for a job which could be done remotely from home. But because of anti-automation hysteria, the grunts are now stuck going into work at the shipping centers, exposing each other to potential infection.
      • by superposed ( 308216 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2020 @03:00AM (#59814036)

        Your comment presumes that Amazon has avoided automation because of public outcry against job losses. I doubt that has ever happened at Amazon or ever will. They do what they think will be most profitable, and the public don't have a say in it. The article you linked backs up that view -- they still use humans because they work better than robots for certain jobs. When the robots are good enough, they'll switch.

  • Soon they will start holding the stock in peoples homes and ship from there. Better yet, stock it in the trucks, and just have each one drive to the houses that ordered the products it carries. Amazon employees will never have to see each other!
  • Report from Seattle coffee houses is that they're packed like it's a snow day ... tech employees told to stay home are staying at Starbucks instead. Really fixing the problem.

Some people manage by the book, even though they don't know who wrote the book or even what book.

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