Most stray cats die before they turn one, so what's the best way to deal with them?

by Trish Fleming, Heather M. Crawford, Mike Calver, Tida Nou, The Conversation

Credit: Shutterstock

Odds are, if you've seen a cat prowling around your neighborhood, it doesn't have an owner. Australia is home to hordes of unowned cats, with an estimated 700,000 living without appropriate care in urban areas, around rubbish dumps or on farms.

Unowned cats are sometimes called "stray" or "semi-feral": they, or their parents, were once owned by humans but are now abandoned or lost. Unowned stray cats rely heavily on human settlements for food and shelter and breed freely. Feral cats, on the other hand, live in the wild and can survive without relying on people for food.

Like their feral counterparts, unowned cats are a public health threat, they can fight with or transmit diseases to pet cats, and they kill native wildlife. And, of course, they themselves suffer poor welfare. In fact, our recent studies show unowned cats have significantly shorter lives than pet cats, with less than half surviving their first year.

It's vital we find effective ways to reduce their numbers—but what's the best way to go about this?

Street cats have hard, short lives

Free-roaming cats have hard lives on the streets. Even when they're owned by someone, things can come to a sticky end.

Numerous international studies report high death rates for roaming pet cats, with causes including road accidents and accidental poisoning. They're also frequently injured or killed by domestic dogs.

Even Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's cat Paddles, the "first cat" of New Zealand, was killed by a car in 2017.

Unowned cats encounter the same issues and more, but without an owner to provide immediate veterinary attention. So it's no surprise free-roaming unowned cats have low life expectancy.

We analyzed the demographics of free-roaming unowned cats in Perth, Western Australia. The 145 unowned cats we studied had significantly shorter lives than the 899 pet cats in Perth. The median age of unowned cats was just eight to ten months. By contrast, the median age for pet cats was about five years.

The unowned cats in our study looked healthy, were reproductive, and had few external parasites. However, these animals were the ones that had survived long enough to be trapped and studied. Cats often hide when traumatized or ill, and so sick cats will often just "disappear".

Alarmingly, 58% of the cats we examined had consumed dangerous refuse, including sharp, dangerous items or indigestible material that blocked their gastrointestinal tracts. Nearly all (95%) carried substantial loads of transmissible helminth parasites.

Across Australia's states and territories, there are two main approaches local governments use to manage unowned cat populations in urban and regional areas: trap and euthanase or trap and adopt.

Another approach is to trap, desex and return cats to their point of capture (called "trap-neuter-return"). Although this is currently being undertaken by private individuals and groups in capital cities and some towns, it is considered illegal across most jurisdictions in Australia, as it is construed as abandonment or releasing an invasive species.

1. Euthanasia

In most parts of the country, where problems with unowned cats have been reported, they are trapped and removed. This normally means euthanasia.

For example, in Brisbane, a council program that ran since 2013 efficiently reduced the numbers of unowned cats with euthanasia, with complaints about stray cats falling from about 140 to just ten per year, over five years.

But high rates of euthanasia for unowned cats can be problematic for many people, especially for veterinarians undertaking the task. It can be traumatic and challenging to euthanise healthy cats just because they are unwanted.

2. Trap-neuter-return programs

Some believe desexing cats and returning them to street life, with supplementary feeding, is a solution to large numbers of unwanted cats, because it avoids euthanasia.

But overseas studies have shown trap-neuter-return programs encourage abandonment of unwanted cats at feeding stations. Numbers of cats can actually go up, despite best efforts.

And what is the quality of life for returned cats? Given the difficult, short lives of free-roaming cats, trap-neuter-return programs are arguably a less ethical choice with poor welfare outcomes for the cats themselves. There have even been calls in Japan to revise trap-neuter-return policies on account of poor health and well-being of the cats.

Returning neutered animals to where they were found may also violate state laws. Enforcing these laws is critical to reduce unowned cat populations, improve the welfare of cats, and discourage dumping of unwanted pets.

Desexing cats is an important way to curb the numbers of unowned cats on the streets. 

But cats shouldn’t be returned to where they were found. Credit: Shutterstock

3. Adopt a cat

In May, the ACT government released an ambitious and targeted ten-year plan with the vision that, by 2031, "all cats in the ACT will be owned, wanted and cared for by responsible owners." It is an exemplar of what the community can do to improve the lives of cats, and we believe it should be modeled elsewhere in Australia.

The plan has been developed to raise best practice standards, recognizing the duty of care needed to ensure the health and well-being of cats.

This starts with responsible owners. It calls for improved compliance with compulsory desexing and registration. To encourage people to comply, the ACT government will be implementing free or low-cost desexing and free microchipping. Compulsory containment for new cats acquired after July 1, 2022 is also on the cards.

The plan provides a strategy to trap roaming cats, with improvements in how pet cats can be identified and returned to their owners, while unowned neighborhood cats will be put up for adoption.

So what do we do about it?

Well, we know two tasks are critical: removing unowned cats from the streets, and reducing unwanted breeding and abandonment of cats.

Trap-neuter-return programs can do more harm than good because cats still live a hard life on the streets and may lead to some people feeling comfortable abandoning unwanted cats at the release sites. And while euthanasia has been shown to be effective, it can be a difficult choice.

Instead, Australia must boost efforts to socialize and adopt unowned cats, and enforce laws that stop owned cats free-roaming the streets. This will require enormous effort with community education, but it is a compassionate choice addressing all problems caused by free-roaming cats (both owned and unowned).

If you're inspired to give a cat a "furrever" home, contact your nearest cat welfare organization or local council. And if you already have a pet cat, it's important to keep it on your property all day, every day—not only to protect native wildlife, but to protect the cats themselves.

Cats prefer to get free meals rather than work for them

Provided by The Conversation 

 

Afghanistan has vast mineral wealth but faces steep challenges to tap it

by Scott L. Montgomery, The Conversation

A map of mineral resources published by the United States Geological Survey in 2007. 

Credit: United States Geological Survey

The official ending of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan leaves a number of long-term questions, including how the country can build a functioning economy. Now that U.S. assistance has evaporated and international aid is largely shut off, what options does Afghanistan have?

One possibility resides in natural resources. Afghanistan possesses a wealth of nonfuel minerals whose value has been estimated at more than US$1 trillion. For millennia the country was renowned for its gemstones—rubies, emeralds, tourmalines and lapis lazuli. These minerals continue to be locally extracted, both legally and illegally, in mostly small, artisanal mines. Far more value, however, lies with the country's endowments of iron, copper, lithium, rare earth elements, cobalt, bauxite, mercury, uranium and chromium.

While the total abundance of minerals is certainly vast, scientific understanding of these resources is still at an exploratory stage. Even with a better understanding of how rewarding their extraction might be, the presence of these resources will not provide a jump-start to a new economy. As a geologist who has studied the extent of their resources, I estimate a minimum of seven to 10 years will be needed for large-scale mining to become a major new source of revenue.

USGS follows the Soviets

British and German geologists conducted the earliest modern surveys of Afghanistan's minerals in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But it was the Soviets in the 1960s and 1970s who performed the most systematic exploratory work throughout the country, producing a large body of detailed information that stood as the backbone to more recent studies.

From 2004 to 2011, the U.S. Geological Survey conducted a detailed review of available data, adding new information from its own aerial survey, limited field checking and from the Afghanistan Geological Survey. This work better identified mineral sites, richness and abundance.

No one who examines this work, as I have, can ignore the large-scale exploratory effort by Soviet scientists. Detailed field mapping and massive sampling, including tens of thousands of meters of borehole drilling, and lab analyses were performed. Given the time and money invested, it would appear high-level plans were in play to develop Afghanistan's minerals once the country was under Soviet influence.

Based largely on this information, the USGS delineated 24 areas in the country and estimated their mineral abundance. Data packages were prepared on all 24 areas for companies to use as a basis for making bids to exploit any resources.

Chinese and Indian companies expressed strong interest, and actual concessions were granted. Arguments over contract terms and concerns about security, however, have stalled activity since the late 2010s.

Mineral abundance

How much mineral abundance does Afghanistan actually have? I'll try to answer this with a brief summary of USGS estimates for metals of special interest: copper, iron, lithium and rare earth metals. Geoscientists who were part of the USGS effort have noted that their figures are "conservative" but also "preliminary."

Regardless, it's safe to say the resources in total are huge. Total copper resources for all known deposits sum to about 57.7 million metric tons. At current prices, the resource value is $516 billion. These are "undiscovered" resources—identified but not fully explored and assessed. If further study were to judge them recoverable at a profit, they would rank Afghanistan among the top five nations for copper reserves in the world.

A Chinese company built this mining camp at Mes Aynak in Afghanistan about 10 years 

ago to house workers for a planned copper mine that never began production. The people

 in the front were taking part in an archaeological dig. 

Credit: Jerome Starkey/flicrk, CC BY-SA

The largest copper deposit, which also contains significant amounts of cobalt, is the Aynak ore body, located about 18 miles (30 kilometers) southeast of Kabul. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Soviets began development of the mine but it was suspended in 1989 following Soviet withdrawal from the country. The high-grade portion of the total Aynak deposit is estimated at 11.3 million metric tons of copper, worth $102 billion at current market prices.

Afghanistan also has world-class iron ore resources, concentrated in the Haji Gak deposit of Bamiyan Province. Haji Gak has an estimated 2,100 million metric tons of high-grade ore that is 61%-69% iron by weight. At current price levels, this represents a value of $336.8 billion, placing Afghanistan among the top 10 nations worldwide in extractable iron.

Lithium resources in Nuristan Province, which occur as veins, impressed Soviet geoscientists with the amount of hard rock ore (lithium is also mined from brine). Based on USGS estimates, it is a significant but modest resource in today's terms, as exploration for such deposits has increased around the world in the past decade.

Finally, rare earth elements exist in southern Helmand Province. These deposits mainly contain cerium, with smaller amounts of more valuable lanthanum, praseodymium and neodymium, totaling perhaps 1.4 million metric tons. Two of these, praseodymium and neodymium, are at high price levels—more than $45,000 per metric ton—and make exceptional magnets used in motors for hybrid and electric cars, but the abundance of these elements is not large relative to how much other countries have.

Above-ground factors and geopolitics

Mining wisdom holds that what's in the ground is less important than what's above ground. Market realities, security, contract terms, infrastructure and environmental concerns matter more than sheer abundance to whether resources can be developed.

Among these factors, perhaps the most relevant at present is strong global demand for the metals, particularly copper, lithium and rare earth elements, which are essential to the growing markets in renewable energy and electric vehicles.

Whether or not Afghanistan can begin mining these elements will depend on what the new Taliban government does. Under the former Ministry of Mines, a $2.9 billion contract for a portion of the Aynak copper deposit was granted to two state-owned Chinese companies. The 30-year contract signed in 2007 had a high royalty rate by global standards and required that ore smelting and processing be done locally. Other conditions included building a 400-megawatt coal power plant and a railway to the Pakistan border. Also stipulated was that 85%-100% of employees, from skilled labor to managerial personnel, be Afghan nationals within eight years of the date work begins. Though originally agreed to, these terms were later declared onerous by the companies, halting development.

Though roads exist to many ore deposit areas, Afghanistan lacks good-quality roadways, railways and electricity. Mining companies are no stranger to such challenges, yet the situation is heightened in this case by rugged terrain and the landlocked nature of the country. Railways, in particular, would be essential for transporting ore, raw or refined, to foreign markets.

There are also environmental and cultural concerns. Mining can result in major impacts to land and air quality, as well as watersheds—a particular concern in water-poor Afghanistan—if not regulated to best practices. No less, enforcement of such standards is required and has been a problem in many lower-income countries.

Close to the Aynak copper deposit is a large site of Buddhist relics, statues, temples and stupas. There are also Bronze Age mining sites that constitute important archaeological resources. Here, too, no clarity yet exists about how Taliban leaders, who ordered the destruction of the great Buddhist statues at Bamiyan in 2001, might view these sites.

For Afghanistan, its resources could mean a source of long-term foreign investment, skill-building and infrastructure expansion, all essential for a sustainable economy. But a major question is which companies would be involved. Afghanistan is also at the center of geopolitical struggles, involving both India and Pakistan, as well as China, Iran and the U.S. That the Taliban are now in control does not make the country's minerals any less invested with large significance.

Author's note: In 2015, I was the instructor for a task force class in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington that produced a report on Afghanistan's natural resources and the possibility of their acting as a basis for economic development. This article is devoted to the excellent work done by students on that task force.

Afghanistan finds deadly fungal infection in COVID patients

Provided by The Conversation 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2021/08/how-afghanistans-1-trillion-mining.html

 

Lack of global standards for COVID-19 certificates creates 'barrier to their successful implementation'

by University of Exeter

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

The lack of global standards for coronavirus certificates is a key barrier to their successful implementation around the world, a new report warns.

Experts have called for widely accepted international standards for documentation which records COVID-19 vaccination and health status, although implementing them quickly will be difficult.

The University of Exeter research calls for policymakers to ensure coronavirus health status certificate providers abide by basic data protection principles, including lawfulness, fairness and transparency, purpose limitation, data minimisation, accuracy, storage limitation, integrity and confidentiality, and accountability. It identifies three key barriers to implementation—lack of trust, lack of global standards, and lack of a holistic approach.

The report recommends the certificates are only used during the pandemic, so that their use is discontinued once the WHO declares that COVID-19 is no longer a public health emergency of international concern.

It also says policymakers should ensure that COVID-19 health status certificate providers build data protection into the design of these certificates by default, and that the confidentiality and security of the information collected and processed are maintained. Providers of these certificates should prevent any unauthorized access, accidental loss, damage, or destruction of the data.

The report presents independent research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of UK Research & Innovation (UKRI)'s rapid response to COVID-19.

The research was led by Dr. Ana Beduschi, who carried out literature reviews and evaluations of primary and secondary sources of law. The research was also informed by twenty semi-structured interviews with technologists and experts in digital identity and certification conducted between December 2020 and March 2021. The study also benefited from the insights and views of experts who participated in two workshops in March 2021 and May 2021.

Dr. Beduschi said: "Focusing only on the technological solutions for COVID-19 health status certificates is not sufficient. As these certificates have a direct impact on people's rights, there is a crucial need to consider the laws and regulations, including those on data privacy and human rights.

"If effectively implemented, COVID-19 health status certificates may contribute to managing the effects of the current pandemic. Yet, their introduction poses significant challenges to data privacy, equality and non-discrimination. The urgency surrounding the adoption of these measures should not lead to governments rolling out COVID-19 health status certificates in haste without the appropriate protection of data privacy and human rights.

"Policymakers must strike an adequate balance between protecting the rights and freedoms of all individuals and safeguarding public interests, while managing the effects of the pandemic."

The report emphasized that COVID-19 health status certificates should be available to all, not only those with high levels of digital literacy, but highlighted the risks of fraud associated with paper-based certificates. The research also underlined the need for secure applications and embedded technologies such as QR codes.

Digital health passports should not be introduced until COVID-19 vaccines are available to all, report warnProvided by University of Exeter 

 

Child care providers vaccinated at higher rates than general population

by Mallory Locklear, Yale University

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Connecticut and Washington recently became the first U.S. states requiring child care providers to get vaccinated against COVID-19. The new policies reflect the essential role child care providers play and their elevated risk of both contracting and transmitting SARS-CoV-2.

Until now, however, the vaccination rate for this critical group has remained unknown. But a new Yale-led study published in Pediatrics found that vaccine uptake among child care providers in the United States was higher than for the general adult population.

A national survey of the child care workforce conducted between May and June of this year found that, among 20,013 respondents, 78.2% were fully vaccinated. During that same time period, just 65% of the general adult population had been fully vaccinated.

"Child care providers are one of the few groups that have intimate interactions with many people on a daily basis, putting them at higher risk of getting and spreading COVID-19," said Walter Gilliam, the Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor at the Yale Child Study Center. "Protecting them from COVID-19 is important for their health and the health of the children they care for."

Child care providers are also critical for a healthy economy. "They're the workforce that makes other workforces possible," added Gilliam, senior author of the study. "If they fall ill or if COVID-19 causes child care facilities to shut down, that impacts every working parent relying on that care."

He added: "These findings are promising but show we still have a ways to go when it comes to vaccinating child care providers."

Vaccination rates among child care providers revealed in the survey mirror trends observed throughout the U.S. population. Providers who were younger, had lower income, or were Black reported lower rates of vaccination. Providers who were elderly, had higher incomes, or were Asian-American reported higher rates of vaccination. Geographically, vaccine uptake was lowest in the Mountain West and the South and highest in New England and the Pacific West. Massachusetts had the highest vaccine rate at 89.4%, while Wyoming had the lowest, at just 53.5%.

Vaccination rates also differed across child care settings. Providers who worked in child care centers were more likely to be vaccinated than providers based in home settings.

"This could be due to a number of reasons," said Kavin Patel, lead author of the study and a clinical fellow in infectious diseases at the Yale School of Medicine. "Home-based child care providers are typically responsible for smaller groups of children than those working in centers, so the risk of COVID-19 spread might be perceived as lower. Also, some centers may have required staff vaccination."

Home-based providers may also have received less targeted messaging about COVID-19 vaccination than their center-based counterparts, said Gilliam.

Among the non-vaccinated child care providers, nearly 12% said they were "very likely" or "absolutely certain" to get vaccinated in the future, while over 59% said they were "not likely" to get the COVID-19 vaccine. The most commonly reported reasons for vaccine hesitancy related to fears around vaccine safety.

"These findings show where we need to focus messaging efforts," said Gilliam. "Earlier this year, messaging that highlighted the particular occupational risks for child care providers led to large increases in vaccination rates. We need another round of messaging that emphasizes these risks and reaches the groups with lower vaccination rates."

Parents can help, too, by asking questions about what safety measures their child care providers are taking and how facilities are helping their staff attain vaccines, he said.

Gilliam, Patel, and their colleagues will continue to monitor child care provider vaccination rates. "It will be interesting to see how or if the Delta variant and the return to school affect vaccine uptake in this population," said Patel. 

Easy steps to get your child ready for the COVID-19 vaccine

More information: Kavin M. Patel et al, COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake Among US Child Care Providers, Pediatrics (2021). DOI: 10.1542/peds.2021-053813

Journal information: Pediatrics Provided by Yale University 

 

Increased advertising and algorithm changes at Google may make it harder to find what you're looking for

by Mohiuddin Ahmed, Paul Haskell-Dowland, The Conversation

Credit: Shutterstock

Over the past 25 years, the name "Google" has become synonymous with the idea of searching for anything online. In much the same way "to Hoover" means to use a vacuum cleaner, dictionaries have recognized "to Google" as meaning to undertake an online search using any available service.

Former competitors such as AltaVista and AskJeeves are long dead, and existing alternatives such as Bing and DuckDuckGo currently pose little threat to Google's dominance. But shifting our web searching habits to a single supplier has significant risks.

Google also dominates in the web browser market (almost two-thirds of browsers are Chrome) and web advertising (Google Ads has an estimated 29% share of all digital advertising in 2021). This combination of browser, search and advertising has drawn considerable interest from competition and antitrust regulators around the world.

Leaving aside the commercial interests, is Google actually delivering when we Google? Are the search results (which clearly influence the content we consume) giving us the answers we want?

Advertising giant

More than 80% of Alphabet's revenue comes from Google advertising. At the same time, around 85% of the world's search engine activity goes through Google.

Clearly there is significant commercial advantage in selling advertising while at the same time controlling the results of most web searches undertaken around the globe.

This can be seen clearly in search results. Studies have shown internet users are less and less prepared to scroll down the page or spend less time on content below the "fold" (the limit of content on your screen). This makes the space at the top of the search results more and more valuable.

While Google (and indeed many users) might argue that the results are still helpful and save time, it's clear the design of the page and the prominence given to paid adverts will influence behavior. All of this is reinforced by the use of a pay-per-click advertising model which is founded on enticing users to click on adverts.In the example below, you might have to scroll three screens down before you find actual search results rather than paid promotions.

Annoyance

Google's influence expands beyond web search results. More than 2 billion people use the Google-owned YouTube each month (just counting logged-in users), and it is often considered the number one platform for online advertising.

Although YouTube is as ubiquitous to video-sharing as Google is to search, YouTube users have an option to avoid ads: paying for a premium subscription. However, only a minuscule fraction of users take the paid option.

Evolving needs

The complexity (and expectations) of search engines has increased over their lifetime, in line with our dependence on technology.

For example, someone trying to explore a tourist destination may be tempted to search "What should I do to visit the Simpsons Gap".

The Google search result will show a number of results, but from the user perspective the information is distributed across multiple sites. To obtain the desired information users need to visit a number of websites.

Google is working on bringing this information together. The search engine now uses sophisticated "natural language processing" software called BERT, developed in 2018, that tries to identify the intention behind a search, rather than simply searching strings of text. AskJeeves tried something similar in 1997, but the technology is now more advanced.

BERT will soon be succeeded by MUM (Multitask Unified Model), which tries to go a step further and understand the context of a search and provide more refined answers. Google claims MUM may be 1000 times more powerful than BERT, and be able to provide the kind of advice a human expert might for questions without a direct answer.

Are we now locked into Google?

Given the market share and influence Google has in our daily lives, it might seem impossible to think of alternatives. However, Google is not the only show in town. Microsoft's Bing search engine has a modest level of popularity in the United States, although it will struggle to escape the Microsoft brand.

Another option that claims to be free from ads and ensure user privacy, DuckDuckGo, has seen a growing level of interest—perhaps helped through association with the TOR browser project.

While Google may be dominating with its search engine service, it also covers artificial intelligence, healthcare, autonomous vehicles, cloud computing services, computing devices and a plethora of home automation devices. Even if we can move away from Google's grasp in our web browsing activities, there is a whole new range of future challenges for consumers on the horizon.DuckDuckGo search engine increased its traffic by 62% in 2020 as users seek privacy

Provided by The Conversation 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

'The algorithm fired me': California bill takes on Amazon's notorious work culture

by Margot Roosevelt, Los Angeles Times

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

California lawmakers are taking aim at Amazon.

The bill, the first such legislation in the nation, would require warehouses to disclose quotas and work speed metrics to employees and government agencies. It would ban "time off task" penalties that affect health and safety, including bathroom use, and prohibit retaliation against workers who complain.An Assembly-passed bill is expected to reach the Senate floor this week or next to crack down on the opaque, algorithm-led and harsh warehouse work conditions often attributed to the Seattle technology behemoth.

Amazon dominates online shopping across the nation amid a surge in e-commerce fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic. With 950,000 U.S. employees and $368 billion in revenue in 2020, it is the nation's second-largest employer after Walmart, and is under growing pressure to address worker injuries in its supply chain.

"Amazon has set the pace, creating a market for next-day delivery of consumer goods," said Assembly member Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), the bill's author. "We see Walmart and other large warehouses following suit. We need to make sure our laws catch up with that."

California's workplace laws often influence other states and the federal government, experts say. The state Senate vote on the bill, AB 701, is expected to be close, amid heavy opposition from retailers and other industries.

Scholars see broad implications for the future of work. "In the U.S., we are at an inflection point on the question of how technologies are used in workplaces and what rights workers have to data collected about them," said Beth Gutelius, research director at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Center for Urban Economic Development and an authority on logistics.

"Warehouses are where the dark sides of work surveillance are being revealed."

In analyzing the legislation, the Senate Judiciary Committee cited studies showing Amazon's injury rate to be nearly twice that of the warehouse industry generally. One study compared Amazon's 2020 injury rate (6.5 injuries for every 100 workers) to Walmart's (three injuries).

"Amazon, at least, may have made the market-based decision that avoiding workplace injuries is more costly than maintaining the delivery speeds for which it is famous," the committee suggested.

Amazon and Walmart declined to comment on the legislation or to answer questions on their respective injury rates.

Amazon spokeswoman Rachael Lighty wrote in an email: "Like most companies, we have performance expectations for every employee, and we measure actual performance."

Amazon offers coaching to workers who don't meet targets, she said. "The truth is, terminations for performance issues are rare—less than 1%. The health and safety of our employees is our No. 1 priority."

In a letter to shareholders in April, Chief Executive Jeff Bezos wrote, "We need to do a better job for our employees." News reports portraying them as "desperate souls and treated like robots" are inaccurate, he asserted.

To address employees' sprains and strains from repetitive motions and prevent forklift and other industrial vehicle collisions, he wrote, Amazon will invest more than $300 million in safety projects this year.

Consumer demand is fueling rapid growth in warehouse work. In California, where imports from Asia flow through the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland to giant distribution centers, 209,700 warehouse workers were employed in July, nearly double the number five years ago.

The Inland Empire, spanning Riverside and San Bernardino counties, is the nation's biggest warehouse center. Amazon is the region's largest employer, with an estimated 40,000 logistics workers.

The state legislation ratchets up the pressure Amazon already faces from an energized labor movement. The company crushed a campaign in April to unionize 6,000 workers at one of its warehouses in Alabama. In June, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters announced a nationwide push to organize Amazon's delivery and warehouse employees, calling the company an "existential threat" to workers across the logistics industry.

Chanel Hawkes, 33, lost her job at a call center when her company closed during the pandemic. "Amazon was the only company that was hiring and thriving," she said.

At Amazon's Eastvale complex with 6,000 employees, she packed boxes of mouthwash, books and toys from 6 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. four or five days a week. She earned $15 an hour.

"I like a challenge," she said. "But it was like sprinting on your feet for 10 hours."

Soon, she felt intense pain in her wrist. Her supervisors, she said, told her to "eat more protein," do wrist stretches and get back to work.

Warehouse computers, which she checked three times a day, told her to make a "rate" of 70 to 80, a speed measure she said was never explained—and which Amazon declines to define publicly. She was working at a "rate" of only 50 to 60.

Hawkes asked for an easier job, telling supervisors "my nerves are hurting." It didn't happen. She was not referred to workers' compensation doctors, she said. And in March, after seven months, she was terminated.

Now she can't drive or push a grocery cart without feeling pain, she said. An art major in community college, she wonders when she will be able to paint again in her spare time.

"I was just a working woman," Hawkes said. "Especially being African American, I didn't know how to fight a big system."

Amazon did not respond to questions about Hawkes' experience.

Race is part of the debate over AB 701. Latino and Black employees constitute 66% of warehouse staff, although workers of color account for just 37% of the total U.S. labor force, according to a UC Berkeley study.

"These backbreaking conditions have significant implications for communities of color," the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and other bill supporters wrote lawmakers this summer. "Many … feel they must accept unsafe conditions to keep a roof over their heads. [They] are least likely to have adequate health insurance or any safety net."

Yesenia Barrera, a former Amazon worker in Rialto, told an Assembly committee, "We are carrying, bending, reaching, twisting and packing items from 30 to 60 pounds for hours a day with no proper rest time."

After just one warning, she said, "The algorithm fired me, and other workers like me, though we were working as hard as we could."

Barrera, 22, has since gone to work as an organizer for the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, a foundation-funded nonprofit in Ontario that is backing AB 701.

"Workplace quotas have been around for centuries," said Sheheryar Kaoosji, the center's executive director. "We've seen high injury rates at Walmart too. But Amazon makes it much more burdensome with surveillance. Other companies would love to do what Amazon does—wire their facilities wall to wall."

California's general ergonomic standard is weak and rarely enforced, he said. At unionized warehouses, covering roughly 10% of workers, safety issues are bargained with management, but at Amazon and other nonunion facilities, "workers have no recourse, and they just feel lucky to have a job," Kaoosji said.

In a class-action lawsuit that Amazon settled in December, Trevion Sherman and 26 other California plaintiffs described how the company's "production clock does not stop when employees need to use the restroom" so they went without bathroom breaks for fear of termination.

Amazon declined to reveal the terms of the settlement.

A coalition of industries led by the California Chamber of Commerce has spent months lobbying against AB 701. "Productivity standards are not inherently punitive," the group wrote lawmakers Aug. 3. Nonetheless, after several clarifications to the bill, the chamber softened its opposition, removing it from its annual "job killer" list—a tag that often dooms legislation.

In further compromises last week, backers amended the measure to cut out a requirement for Cal/OSHA, the state's workplace safety agency, to adopt a warehouse-specific injury rule. Backers said the bill remains strong because it steps up enforcement by the state labor commissioner. New language also exempts farm facilities to prevent spoilage before shipping.

Republican lawmakers continue to oppose the legislation, saying it will raise consumer prices and burden companies with litigation.

Sen. Brian Jones (R-Santee) called it "part of a campaign to tip the scales to coerce employees to unionize," noting that AB 701 is backed by the Teamsters. Democrats, he said, should not be trusted to "micromanage private warehouses."

Amazon points to benefits that nonunion warehouses don't always offer, such as health insurance from the first day of employment.

That's what drew Nathan Morin, 33, to work in an Amazon warehouse in Redlands for three years as a packer, forklift driver and truck loader until December. He didn't have health insurance and was able to immediately sign on to a plan through Kaiser Permanente.

Another benefit was Amazon's policy of adjusting his schedule to fit around his college classes while he was a student at Cal Poly Pomona.

From the first day, Amazon "said it's a very physical job, but they never told us about the quotas," he recalled. "You were allowed 30 minutes 'time off task' a week. But the bathrooms are at the far ends of the warehouse. If you took 10 minutes to go once a day when you weren't on break, you would be written up at the end of the week."

Morin's packing quota was at least 70 items an hour during Amazon's peak seasons. "Cameras were at workstations, in break rooms, in locker rooms," he said. "Devices would flag managers if you took 'time off task.' It was dehumanizing."

Morin said he saw about a dozen workers get injured, including a woman who was told by an Amazon workers' comp doctor that she had pulled a muscle, only to find out later, she reported, that she had fractured her knee. "To this day, she can't walk right," Morin said.

At one point, Morin worked as a "learning ambassador" coaching struggling workers with tips to avoid a write-up. If injured employees were granted accommodations with lower-stress tasks, "It was like two weeks and then you were expected to go back to work," he said.

"You hoped they could work faster," he said. Otherwise, it was termination.

Amazon did not respond to questions about Morin's experiences.

Looking back, Morin said, "I don't want to think Amazon deliberately injures people. It is a product of the work culture—getting things done as quickly as possible."

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