I work at Amazon, in the warehouse, stowing.
We have safety gloves, but even when wearing them I regularly (like, to the tune of a dozen to a couple dozen times a shift) get static electric shocks.
Now, of course, it’s not electrocution; there’s not a live current I assume, it’s just static electricity…but while some of the shocks are little, only slightly annoying ones, several a day are bad.
Like, touching an electric fence, makes my entire arm jerk and makes me flinch back and yell in pain bad.
I get one to two of those really bad shocks every single shift.
I started bringing this up to a manager way back in late October of 2021, and then again in early March 2022 after getting two really bad shocks within minutes of each other.
My manager (a different one from the October one), the safety team; and a senior manager were all informed, and a meeting with the senior manager took place where he assured me they would look into it.
Just like I had in October, I suggested conducting a survey asking all stow workers if they got shocks, how bad, how frequent, etc, and this time they actually did the survey, and lo and behold half the stow workers reported common shocks of varying pain levels.
A few weeks went by with no news, and I went down to the safety team again to ask about progress, and was given three anti shock gloves to try, none of which had any grip, so stowing and holding packages was difficult.
I informed the safety member of how poorly the gloves worked and noted that they were unusable for stowing since boxes just slipped out of my hands and I couldn’t stow for long enough to see if I’d end up getting shocked cuz they were not grippy enough.
That was over a month and a half ago.
I still get shocked daily, like I said, once or twice a day badly enough to make me cry out in pain, and nothing has been done.
I just had another meeting where I asked to see their progress and got told that the different safety person I was meeting with had never heard of the issue, nor had another senior member who I talked to, but they assured me they’d get right on it
If another month goes by, can I sue for them not solving this?? I’m getting shocks daily on the level of an electric fence and they’ve had half a year to get us better protective gloves and they haven’t