Replaceable.

I was with my mother when she died.

I was with my husband when he died.

I don't know quite how to put it, but there is something righteous, and even something comforting, about being with a loved one when they die, to help see them off to the other side. My mother died knowing that she was going to be reunited with my father, my sister, my aunt, my grandparents, my uncles. My husband died knowing that he was heading for the Big Sleep. He was all tuckered out, ready for it all to be over.

To me, being present at these deaths was not unsettling. 

Over fifty years ago, I saw a man drop dead on the streets of Oslo, Norway, on a fine spring Saturday afternoon. The man, who appeared to be in his fifties, was across the street from where we were walking, in my line of sight. I saw him collapse. A number of people rushed over to his side. From headshakes, we knew that he was dead. Maybe because I was pretty young - just 23 - maybe because my father, in his fifties, had died just two years prior - this stranger's death in Oslo was somewhat unsettling to me. Who was he? Who did he belong to? 

A few weeks ago, as I was heading into the grocery store in Boston's Downtown Crossing, I saw the Medical Examiner's van and witnessed a couple of men loading a body bag into the rear of the van. This stranger's death was somewhat unsettling to me. For a few days after, I regularly checked the news to see whether there was anything about someone dropping dead in front of the Primark. Was he someone I knew - or at least would recognize - from the shelter where I volunteer? Who was it? Who did they belong to?

I hoped that they hadn't died in a panic. I hoped that they had someone to mourn them. 

Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Oregon recently had a close encounter with death when a fellow employee died suddenly in their presence. Here's what happened:

Sam was helping unload trucks when a heavy thud against concrete echoed across the Amazon warehouse. An employee’s lifeless body lay on the floor. Work halted in the loading docks on the south side of Amazon’s distribution center in Troutdale, Oregon. Sam and other employees stared at the person who’d collapsed just 20 feet away. Conveyor belts of packages continued to roll. “I didn’t have a direct line of sight of the person’s face, but I saw a body form laying lifeless,” Sam told The Western Edge. Employees who spoke for this story requested anonymity to protect their jobs and their names have been changed...

The man who collapsed died Monday, April 6 on the Amazon warehouse floor as machinery filled the cavernous loading dock with a dull hum. For more than an hour, several employees said, workers in the facility were instructed to continue fetching totes, picking items off shelves and loading them onto trucks for delivery as the man lay dead, and management figured out their next steps. News of the fatality quickly spread through the building, but workers say top managers did not call operations to an immediate halt. A week later, several workers said they still do not know what caused the man to die. (Source: The Western Edge)

Someone ran over to give the downed man CPR and Sam, who knows CPR, asked her manager if she could go over and help out. She was told that help would have to come from someone in management (as if!) or someone on the safety team. “Just turn around and not look." Sam was told "Let’s get back to work.”

The death...has left employees at the facility in shock and concerned about their own safety. Several workers said they found their bosses’ response too callous; they seemed more concerned with keeping packages moving than with an employee dying in front of them.

This warehouse didn't have a good reputation to begin with. Historically, it had had a high injury rate and generally poor working conditions: noisy, dirty, infested, hot. This isn't helping the rep any.

The man who died was something called a "tote runner." 

...a physically-demanding job that involves gathering stacks of yellow plastic bins as tall as a person, loading them onto a cart and hauling them up and down the long corridors of the warehouse for delivery to other workers, who will fill them with the goods that go onto trucks. 

Amazon had recently reduced the number of tote runners at this facility, so there are fewer folks performing their tasks, with more pressure on them to work harder. (Tote that barge, lift that bale...)

As for the other employees, a few hours after their colleague dropped dead and his body removed, they were told to clock out and that they would be paid for the rest of their shift. The next day, warehouse workers were told about a counseling hotline, and were informed that they could take unpaid leave if they were distressed, or get paid overtime that day if they decided to stay at work. 

All well and (not so) good.

Even absent official protocols for what to do when someone drops dead at work, shouldn't the managers have told employees to take a break until the body was removed? The next day, shouldn't management have at least told the workers what had happened - at least as far as they knew it?

One employee posted this on the "My Voice" forum on the employee app:

“It makes me feel more ashamed to work there knowing that people can drop dead and we have to carry on knowing it doesn’t matter to the higher ups, and everyone is replaceable.”

Of course everyone is pretty much replaceable.  Especially at outfits like Amazon, which is rapidly replacing jobs (like tote runner) with robots. And whose founder and Executive Chair, Jeff Bezos, is out there raising a $100B fund with the goal of acquiring manufacturing companies and using AI and robots to as fully automate them as possible. 

Whatever your job - tote runner, assembly line worker, accountant, junior lawyer, writer, etc., etc., etc. - you're in danger of being displaced by AI in the not so distant future. Some jobs, like influencer, I will be delighted to see replaced by bots. But the question remains what exactly are people going to do in this not so brave and definitely hideous new world. 

But for the Amazons of this world, not having to worry about how human employees will respond to a colleague's dropping dead - perhaps because of their high-pressured, physically demanding job will definitely be a side benefit of automation. No matter how AI'd up they are, I doubt that robots are going to be unsettled in the robot next to the keels over. No wondering who they were. No wondering who they belonged to.

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Image Source: Jacobin