John Oliver did not say that Amazon had an employee die. John Oliver started off talking about Amazon and then switched the discussion to the companies trying to keep up with Amazon (in the order fulfillment business) which is where said death occurred. These competitors apparently have far worse employee treatment than Amazon but claim they have to in order to keep prices down due to Amazon's efficiency.
For example, last October, a 58-year-old woman died of cardiac arrest on the warehouse floor after complaining to colleagues that she felt sick, according to a police report and current and former XPO employees. In Facebook posts at the time and in recent interviews, employees said supervisors told them to keep working as the woman lay dead.
A relative worked in a big bank in the 80s where a vendor CE died of a heart attack while doing maintenance on a mainframe at 6AM.
Directed by operations management, security did a “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” move, rebuffed first responders, who shrugged and left. Employees in the data center were directed to go about their business. They rolled the guy around for most of the day until someone told a bigshot of sufficient stature to override the lunacy of the production control people.
Given sufficient empowerment and toxic enough culture, people are capable of anything.
Well, it's not like they're going to be able to help her at that point. Might be that supervisors were just trying to get employees to clear out of the way of police ect. Without knowing the exact wording of what employees were told, it's kinda hard to judge the reaction.
You'd think the role of regulation and oversight is to force the company into bankruptcy before allowing it to have far worse employee treatment including coworking spaces with corpses.
