WASHINGTON—Move over, Howard Schultz: Andy Jassy, successor CEO to Amazon czar Jeff Bezos, may succeed you, the former Starbucks chief, in Bernie Sanders’s witness chair.
That’s because Amazon is the second installment of the Vermont senator’s promise to rake corporate chieftains over the coals for their misdeeds, oppression, and labor law-breaking against workers. Senate Labor Committee Chairman Sanders has opened an investigation into the monster retailer and warehouse firm and its horrifying job safety record. “Unsafety record” may be more accurate.
Sanders grilled Schultz over Starbucks’s constant labor law-breaking against union organizing. Schultz, under oath, denied it, repeatedly saying the giant coffee chain never broke the National Labor Relations Act against the grass-roots organizers among Starbucks workers, aided by Starbucks Workers United.
Workers following Schultz to the witness chair proved he lied. So did the NLRB. It’s repeatedly ordered Starbucks to return illegally fired workers to their jobs, with back pay and with discipline wiped off the books. The latest to return: Jayson Saxton, in Augusta, Ga. He testified against Schultz.
Now Sanders demands Amazon answer for another form of worker repression: Rampant injuries on the job, all in the name of the firm’s “endless pursuit of profits.”
“The company has made a calculated decision not to implement adequate worker protections because Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, and you, his successor…created a corporate culture that treats workers as disposable,” Sanders wrote to Jassy.
“At every turn—from warehouse design and workstation setup, to the pace of work requirements, to medical care for injuries and subsequent pressure to return to work—Amazon makes decisions that actively harm workers in the name of its bottom line.”
“The company’s quest for profits at all costs has led to unsafe physical environments, intense pressure to work at unsustainable rates, and inadequate medical attention for tens of thousands of Amazon workers every year,” Sanders wrote.
The only record Sanders didn’t ask for in his missive is how many Amazon workers have died on the job, and the Dirty Dozen report from the labor-backed National Council for Occupational Safety and Health answered that: At least seven in 2022 alone.
And that’s not including the worker who collapsed and died, despite colleagues’ efforts at revival, in the bathroom at Amazon’s monster warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., during the first Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) organizing drive there the year before.
Amazon tardily called an ambulance, but the worker was DOA at a Bessemer hospital. And Amazon recorded would-be rescuers taking “time off task,” and later refused to give them time to grieve, RWDSU noted. Too much “time off task” gets you fired from Amazon.
It also doesn’t list workers who died during the coronavirus pandemic, even while being forced to work.
Amazon not only didn’t tell federal officials, it didn’t tell their colleagues on the line, either.
He seeks records
Sanders’s letter seeks records, by July 5, on how Amazon responds—or doesn’t. The missive, with detailed examples, shows Amazon literally treats its warehouse workers as beasts of burden. They, not worker-driven machines, often push or pull heavy carts laden with merchandise.
Bad working conditions at Amazon warehouses are a key talking point for both RWDSU and the independent Amazon Labor Union. It broke through Amazon’s expensive union-busting drive to decisively win an NLRB-run election at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, N.Y.
That drive, and ALU, began when Amazon illegally fired Chris Smalls for leading a lunchtime walkout to protest the lack of protection, and lack of information, about the coronavirus risk.
Amazon’s injury rate is 6.6 per 100,000 workers, double the national rate for warehouse workers. And it suffers an annual turnover of up to 150% among warehouse workers, Sanders noted.
The turnover is so high that one document Sanders seeks is an internal Amazon forecast that by 2024 it will have exhausted the available national pool of workers willing and able to do all its heavy lifting, pushing, tugging, hauling—and to suffer the consequences.
Sanders’s letter presented examples of job safety and health abuses its workers have already suffered. In one of the worst cases Sanders cited, a heavy box fell on a warehouse worker’s head and the worker went to the company clinic with blood running out of one ear.
Staff at the clinic—which like other Amazon in-house clinics, is not staffed by doctors or registered nurses—told the worker there was nothing wrong and ordered the worker back to the job.
The worker later consulted an outside MD and learned what was obvious: Blood running from your ear indicates a skull fracture.
And when the clinics are forced to tell workers to take time off for job injuries, Amazon denies workers’ comp claims and drags its feet when asked to respond.
Though Amazon’s clinics not only mistreat injured workers on the job, and underreport injuries, the firm still accounts for 53% of all injuries which force warehouse workers to take time off to heal, according to the Dirty Dozen report. Amazon employs one of every three warehouse workers.
“Amazon is one of the most valuable companies in the world, worth $1.3 trillion, and its founder, Jeff Bezos, is one of the richest men in the world worth nearly $150 billion,” Sanders continued. “Amazon should be one of the safest places in America to work, not one of the most dangerous…It can afford to treat all of its workers with dignity and respect, not contempt.
“The time has come for Amazon to stop willfully violating workplace safety laws with impunity and commit to changing its operations to protect the health and safety of its workers.”
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