An Amazon employee at the Troutdale, Oregon warehouse passed away at work closing week, a firm spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch.
Per a memoir from the Western Edge, an just investigative outlet covering the Pacific Northwest, the employee collapsed on the ground at the PDX9 warehouse and lay ineffective as workers persevered to work spherical him.
“We’re deeply saddened by the passing of a member of our team, and our tips and deepest sympathies are with their beloved ones at some stage in this advanced time,” Amazon spokesperson Sam Stephenson urged TechCrunch. “We’ve been in contact with his household and revel in equipped resources to enhance them. For workers at our PDX9 facility, we’ve equipped onsite concern counselors and extra enhance. We’re thankful for the work of the Multnomah County Sherrif’s Division and local emergency clinical services.”
On a Reddit discussion board for Amazon success middle workers, quite a bit of folks claiming to work at PDX9 said that the constructing had been in particular hot after soundproof curtains were assign in, which runt airflow. They speculated that the warmth can enjoy contributed to the employee’s loss of life, because it would compound the physical requires of success middle work. Per the Western Edge, some workers noticed that the constructing was cooler after they returned to work the subsequent day.
Amazon, nonetheless, said that Oregon’s Occupational Security and Properly being Administration (OSHA) obvious the incident to be non-work connected. Staff were sent home early and were paid for the the rest of their shift; the night time shift was cancelled, and workers scheduled to work were paid as properly, in accordance with the firm.
The PDX9 warehouse has a reputation for having harsh working prerequisites; in 2018, an investigation from Present, an investigative journalism outlet, stumbled on that 26% of workers at the warehouse had sustained accidents. A memoir in accordance with 2024 OSHA files showed that the firm’s success services memoir severe accidents at a rate more than two instances the warehouse alternate reasonable.
Amazon’s success services were topic to quite a bit of probes by federal companies and prosecutors over warehouse security, with investigators alleging that the firm manipulated files and failed to properly doc workplace accidents. The USA Attorney’s Place of job for the Southern District of Unusual York is conducting an ongoing investigation into workplace security at Amazon warehouses.
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Amazon urged TechCrunch that the firm has viewed a 43% reduction in its global recordable incident rate since 2019 — a metric that tracks any work-connected damage requiring more than basic first assist. The firm said it has invested more than $2.5 billion in security enhancements since 2019, including hundreds of hundreds of hundreds of dollars in 2026 by myself.
Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of expertise and tradition. She has moreover written for publications love Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Overview, NPR, and Alternate Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If Handsome, a podcast about files superhighway tradition, with science fiction writer Isabel J. Kim. Sooner than joining TechCrunch, she labored as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and movie competition coordinator. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos.
That you might contact or test outreach from Amanda by emailing amanda@techcrunch.com or by skill of encrypted message at @amanda.100 on Signal.
