Tag: heart attacks
Amazon workers ‘forced to go back to work’ after fellow employee dies on shift
An Amazon worker in apparent cardiac arrest was lying on the floor of a warehouse for 20 minutes before anyone noticed, according to a report.
Billy Foister, 48, who scanned and stocked shelves for the Internet giant, collapsed at an Etna, Ohio, facility just a week after he’d visited a medical clinic complaining of chest pains and a headache. He was given two beverages to combat dehydration and sent back to work, the Guardian reported.
Foister’s brother, Edward, told the paper he was shocked his brother was on the floor dying for so long before an Amazon floor monitor spotted him.
“How can you not see a 6’3” man laying on the ground and not help him within 20 minutes? A couple of days before, he put the wrong product in the wrong bin and within two minutes management saw it on camera and came down to talk to him about it,” Edward Foister said.
According to the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, which included Amazon on its 2019 “Dirty Dozen” list of the most dangerous employers in the United States, six Amazon workers died on the job between November 2018 and April 2019. At the Etna warehouse alone, 28 calls to 911 were made between January and March 2019.
An employee who worked the same shift as Foister told the Guardian that after he died, they were immediately “forced to go back to work.”
“No time to decompress. Basically watch a man pass away and then get told to go back to work, everyone, and act like it’s fine,” said the Amazon employee.
Amazon said they responded to Foister “within minutes,” but Edward blames the company for his brother’s death.
“There was no reason for my brother to have died. He went to AmCare complaining about chest pains. He should have been sent to the hospital, not just sent back to work just to put things like toothpaste in a bin so somebody can get it in an hour,” Edward told the Guardian. “It seems Amazon values money way more than life. If they did their job right, I wouldn’t have had to bury my little brother.”
In March, at the same warehouse, another worker died after going into cardiac arrest. In a 911 call, a supervisor tells another employee to “go back to work.”
In January 2019, Linda Becker, the widow of Thomas Becker, sued Amazon after her husband had a heart attack while toiling at the company’s Joliet, Illinois, warehouse.
An Amazon rep told the Guardian they “work hard to provide a safe, quality working environment for the 250,000 hourly employees across Amazon’s US facilities.
Photo Credit: AFP/Getty Images
Eric Garner’s daughter in coma after suffering heart attack
Erica Garner — whose father Eric Garner became a symbol of police brutality when he died after being placed in a chokehold —was in a coma Sunday night after suffering a heart attack, family members said.
“So my sister had another heart attack last night and she’s in critical condition,” Erica’s sister Emerald Snipes wrote on Facebook.
“I just left the hospital and it’s not looking good…I pray she makes it she has two little ones to live for.”
Garner, 27, became an activist after her father’s untimely death in 2014.
The woman’s Twitter account asked supporters to pray for her.
via: https://nypost.com/2017/12/25/eric-garners-daughter-in-coma-after-suffering-heart-attack/