Bernie Sanders within the Senate HELP Committee. Picture Credit score: Anna Moneymaker through Getty Photographs
Senator Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Well being, Schooling, Labor and Pensions (HELP), is launching an investigation into “harmful and unlawful” circumstances at Amazon warehouses, in line with an announcement on Tuesday. The investigation is the most recent in a sequence of federal actions taken towards Amazon, together with citations and fines by the Division of Labor at six warehouses across the nation.
Sanders despatched a letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on Tuesday to provoke the committee’s investigation into the circumstances that the corporate’s employees face. “Amazon is nicely conscious of those harmful circumstances, the life-altering penalties for employees injured on the job, and the steps the corporate might take to cut back the numerous dangers of damage,” Sanders wrote. “But the corporate has made a calculated resolution to not implement ample employee protections as a result of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, and also you, his successor as Chief Government Officer, have created a company tradition that treats employees as disposable.”
Motherboard has beforehand extensively reported on the circumstances confronted by Amazon employees, which one worker described as “grueling.” In 2022, the corporate’s annual turnover charge was reported to be 150 p.c for warehouse and storage workers. Sanders’ letter references a report by the Strategic Organizing Heart (SOC) that discovered Amazon employees within the U.S. suffered round 39,000 accidents in 2022, over 36,000 of which have been severe sufficient that the employees have been unable to carry out their common jobs or needed to lose time.
“Mr. Jassy, there is just one rationalization for Amazon’s repeated failure to guard its warehouse employees: unacceptable company greed,” Sanders wrote.
The letter provides Jassy a deadline of July 5 to supply explanations for the corporate’s damage charges regardless of having been given “simple measures” to enhance employee security, its increased reported damage charges in robotics-equipped warehouses, and the estimated value per warehouse of including security options like vacuum lifts and height-adjustable carts to assist employees in transferring heavy objects throughout their roughly 10-hour-long shifts.
For every of those security measures not presently in use in not less than half of Amazon’s warehouses, the corporate should “present a written rationalization of why Amazon has chosen to not totally implement the protection measure,” the letter continues. It then asks for information from AMCARE, the title given to Amazon’s in-house pressing care clinic, which was reported to hazard employees with its employees’s incompetence, the letter states.
“We acquired Chairman Sanders’ letter and are within the early phases of reviewing it,”Amazon spokesperson Steve Kelly advised Motherboard in a press release. “We take the protection and well being of our workers very critically. There’ll all the time be methods to enhance, however we’re pleased with the progress we’ve made which features a 23 p.c discount in recordable accidents throughout our U.S. operations since 2019. We’ve invested greater than $1 billion into security initiatives, initiatives, and applications within the final 4 years, and we’ll proceed investing and inventing on this space as a result of nothing is extra essential than our workers’ security.”
Kelly additionally stated that Amazon had appealed all citations from the Division of Labor, and that it disagreed with the SOC’s report, noting that it was a coalition of three labor unions.
This marks the HELP committee’s second investigation into an organization well-known for anti-union exercise. Earlier this yr, it referred to as on former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz to testify about his firm’s exercise in response to employee organizing. When requested by the Washington Submit if he deliberate to name on Jassy to testify, Sanders stated it was an “absolute risk.”
