Amazon’s details on COVID-19 infections aren’t good enough, workers and officials say

Courtenay Brown, who puts together grocery orders for online shoppers, says she is afraid to get to work in her Amazon Fresh warehouse in New Jersey.

“It’s chaos for me in the warehouse, it’s terrible,” she said, wearing a neon-colored safety vest and an Amazon brand hat. She spoke on May 21 as part of an Amazon-based online webinar hosted by the CtW Investment Group, part of the Change to Win coalition. “There is really no transparency.”

She asked her company to provide more detailed information Corona virus Cases and deaths that Amazon has previously declined. The company sends text messages and robocalls to its employees about new coronavirus cases in local facilities and has confirmed to reporters the death of warehouse workers related to coronaviruses. However, there are no national or national statistics on these numbers. No other details, such as the shift of an infected worker or his department, are disclosed.

According to Brown, Amazon employees must independently gather the information the company distributes in dribs and drabs to compute nationwide coronavirus statistics so they can assess the risk of going to work and finding hotspots on Amazon’s logistics network.

And not only employees asked about these numbers. Last month, 13 attorneys general asked Amazon to disclose a breakdown of coronavirus infections and deaths among its workforce by state.

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On the same CtW call, New York State comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who invests in Amazon through the state pension fund, criticized Amazon’s decision, saying that “its employees and investors remain in the dark about the effectiveness of its COVID-19 response” . The United Food and Commercial Workers union, a frequent critic of Amazon, has also condemned Amazon for not publishing these numbers.

Amazon’s refusal to provide further details on coronavirus cases and deaths has become the most recent issue in an ongoing dispute between Amazon’s leadership and its employees, backed by activist groups and unions.

The situation is sowing more Distrust among Amazon employeesthat is not unionized in the United States. Many more employees are already protesting Amazon’s health and safety measures against the virus and criticizing the decision to reset risk payments and unlimited unpaid free time during the pandemic. More employees may be afraid to get to work – as DiNapoli said – and slow down Amazon’s ability to run and maintain its business Packages to its millions of customers. In the worst case scenario, this lack of more information could potentially spread the virus.

Amazon is not the only company facing the same problem. After all, this is a global pandemic triggered by a virus that has killed more than 100,000 Americans. And although Amazon has been subjected to a great deal of research and criticism for its virus response in the past few months, its position on the publication of these statistics does not appear to be clear.

Walmart, Target, Instacart and CVS said in statements to CNET that they also do not publish nationwide numbers. The New York Times wrote about it last week Meat producers, including Smithfield Foods, who also refuse. Some of these companies raised privacy concerns, others said these numbers could easily be misinterpreted. Four US Democratic Senators have asked Walmart to publish its statistics.

In the meantime, Kroger, Domino’s, Walgreens, McDonald’s, Costco, Dollar General and Dollar Tree did not respond to requests from CNET for comments on whether to publish these statistics.

The fact that many large companies do not disclose these figures or do not respond to a reporter’s question does not offer comfort to people like Brown, the Amazon employee in New Jersey, who feels they are at risk, to take on customer orders fulfill.

Amazon texts and calls

Amazon spokeswoman Lisa Levandowski said that infection rates in the camp “depend almost entirely on the communities in which our employees live,” adding that the rates are “at or below” the community distributed across nearly all facilities . A Walmart spokesman said his company’s infection rates are generally lower than community rates as well. This general trend shows that efforts by both companies to keep jobs clean have had a positive impact.

“We see that in our quarantine rates too,” said Levandowski of Amazon. “Quarantine rates are a critical factor in understanding what is going on in the workplace. This shows that our hard work in the area of ​​social distance is paying off.

“Unlike others who hide behind the HIPAA, we alert everyone on site when a confirmed diagnosis is available,” she continued, referring to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a federal privacy law Health information. “This warning to employees is a direct text message that indicates when the person with the confirmed diagnosis was last in the building.”

Dave Clark, Amazon Global Business Director, sat at 60 minutes last month to explain why his company will not publish its national statistics. (CNET and 60 minutes are both owned by ViacomCBS.) He said of the total number of worker infections that “it is not a particularly useful number”, adding that the statistics take into account spreads in the community and the number of employees in a particular facility got to . Amazon said that the number of restores where workers are back from work after their illness should also be considered to avoid misunderstanding the gross amounts.

When asked why the company would not publish the numbers with these adjustments, Amazon said it was incredibly difficult to summarize all of these factors and reservations in an easily digestible text message to employees or websites for the general public.

That being said, Amazon added that the numbers will be published when required by law, but said that it would be inappropriate to share it elsewhere.

Ashley Conway, an expert on health and safety at work at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, disagreed with Amazon’s position, saying that information about a job hazard should be accessible to everyone, including workers and the communities where they live.

“The assumption is that people can’t take hard information, so it’s kind of a worst paternalistic stance that people can’t handle,” said Conway, former director of the Department of Health’s Department of Health Monitoring and Response at Calvert County , Maryland.

Without Amazon providing these statistics, employees have made it their business to put together the company’s text messages and robocalls to get a total. The latter figures are over 1,000 cases nationwide nine deaths. Reports of worker deaths have been included piece by piece Messages appear every now and then to announce a new death, often after the workers have been informed. Amazon, the second largest private employer in America, employs over 500,000 people in the country.

A separate action by United for Respect, a non-profit organization founded by UFCW, reported 805 coronavirus cases and 22 deaths among Walmart employees. New York magazine said last week. Walmart, the largest private employer in the United States, employs over 1.5 million people in the country.

“They’re afraid to tell the truth to the world”

Several other retailers have taken roughly the same position as Amazon in terms of their own statistics.

A Walmart spokesman said he does not report nationwide coronavirus cases and deaths, in part because of worker privacy concerns and because it is difficult to determine the source of an infection. CVS and Target also raised privacy concerns. All three inform employees about infections. A spokesman for Target added: “We provide information that every health agency requests from us.”

Walmart’s US workers, the company spokesman said, “are not immune to the effects of COVID-19,” and admitted that employees were diagnosed with the disease or suspected of having been diagnosed with the disease. “Unfortunately, employees have also died and we feel their loss deeply,” he added.

While these companies don’t offer much details about coronavirus infections, they talk a lot about their security protocols. For example, Instacart said it supports workers by providing face masks and hand sanitizers, paying hazards to workers, and paid free time for infected workers.

Walmart also emphasized his work to protect customers and workers by installing plexiglass screens, providing masks and gloves for workers, and thoroughly cleaning facilities.

Amazon said it is delivered over 100 million masks48 million ounces of hand sanitizer and 34 million gloves for its workers and more than 2,000 hand washing stations in its facilities. As part of its $ 4 billion virus-fighting effort, Amazon is developing its own corona virus testing capabilities.

All of this work should help reduce new infections and reduce the likelihood that Amazon warehouses will become hotspots for the virus.

Jordan Flowers, an employee of the Amazon camp, who is actively involved in labor protests, said Amazon is hiding the information to protect its business and ensure that new employees work in its camps.

“It’s blood money everywhere that doesn’t reveal their nationwide cases,” he said. “They are afraid to tell the truth to the world because customers will stop ordering and business will decline, and Amazon will do everything possible to keep its business going during a pandemic like COVID-19.”