Teaching Tip #2 Oct | Related to Video 1 “Unions Rise Again: Versus Amazon”): “Amazon Worker Groups Urge Congress to Summon CEO
More than 30 groups, including Amazon worker coalitions, labor organizations and community groups, sent a letter to members of Congress.
For additional information regarding the Amazon labor dispute, please refer to the following article:
“Amazon Worker Groups Urge Congress to Summon CEO for Hearing on Warehouse ‘Safety Crisis’”
According to the article, more than 30 groups, including Amazon worker coalitions, labor organizations and community groups, sent a letter to members of Congress recently, urging them to convene a hearing on warehouse safety and summon Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and other company executives to testify.
The letter comes as Amazon faces heightened scrutiny over the protocols and policies at its warehouses and other fulfillment facilities. In New Jersey, three workers have died in as many weeks in July. One of them died amid the rush of the company’s famous Prime Day, before two more deaths followed in different facilities. The incidents are under investigation by the US Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Meanwhile, workers at Amazon facilities across the country suffered 34,000 serious injuries last year, according to a report that analyzed OSHA data.
“It is time for Amazon to learn, once and for all, that it is not above the law,” the letter reads. “[W]e write to strongly urge your committees to exercise your oversight responsibility by convening a public emergency congressional hearing and asking questions of the individuals responsible for the dangerous labor practices that are causing these injuries and deaths, including Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.”
The letter was sent to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the heads of two congressional committees: Patty Murray and Richard Burr of the Senate’s Health, Labor and Pensions committee, and Bobby Scott and Virginia Foxx of the House Committee on Education and Labor. Organizations that signed the letter include Athena, a coalition of groups that fight for the rights of Amazon workers; the Alphabet Workers Union, which represents employees and contractors at Google and its parent company; and the Open Markets Institute, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit focused on antimonopoly policy.
A hearing over what the letter signatories describe as Amazon’s “safety crisis” would put Jassy in the congressional hot seat for the first time, after his predecessor, company founder Jeff Bezos, testified in 2020 over antitrust issues. At that hearing, Bezos fielded questions about Amazon’s private-label business, and the data the company gathers on other sellers on its platform.
Workers at Amazon warehouses have been making more noise recently about their working conditions. Last month, a group of workers at KSBD, an air freight hub in San Bernardino, California, walked out on the job to demand higher wages and better safety measures. The group specifically called out heat risks, in a region where the temperature topped 95 degrees or hotter for most of July.
The letter also says that the high temperatures can cause heatstroke, fatigue, and “a number of other heat stress symptoms that increase worker injuries like falling from ladders, vehicle accidents and accidents with machinery and tools.”
"The thing with Amazon is, it’s first and foremost a data company," said Sheheryar Kaoosji, executive director of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, the labor group that helped the San Bernardino workers organize the walkout. "They of all people should know what’s going on, and why their injury rates are so high."
Kaoosji said he hopes Congress can force Amazon to share internal data about its safety operations, including information on specific injuries, what kinds of practices correlate with certain injuries, and how the injury rate fluctuates when the company changes productivity requirements.
The letter ratchets up a tense situation between Amazon and the legion of workers that make sure the company’s deliveries get packed and delivered. The note also calls out Amazon’s dominance as the second-largest employer in the country, demanding that company leadership answer directly to lawmakers at a time when big tech companies are under an intense regulatory microscope.
Meanwhile, Amazon workers’ unionization efforts have garnered national attention, capped off by a successful union election in Staten Island in April. Amazon has tried to get the election results thrown out and has been accused of retaliation after firing activist workers. Warehouse safety has been a key issue in that battle as well.
The letter specifically says the tech giant’s attitude toward its organizing workers has contributed to an unsafe environment. “Workers at Amazon have long known what regulators and legislators are realizing about the cause of these injuries and deaths: they are a direct result of Amazon’s unsafe pace of work and anti-union stance,” the letter says.
It's important for policymakers and regulators to understand the details of Amazon's worker surveillance systems and productivity metrics as they pertain to safety, said Frank Kearl, an attorney at the Center for Popular Democracy, who has been representing the terminated workers.
"It's overdue for somebody to step in and do something about this," he said. Amazon has "time and again been able to elude regulation and been able to elude enforcement of the law."
The full text of the letter is as follows:
September 1, 2022
Dear Leader Schumer, Speaker Pelosi, Chair Murray, Ranking Member Burr, Chair Scott, and Ranking Member Foxx:
Following the tragic deaths of 3 workers in just 3 weeks in New Jersey Amazon facilities last month, as well as 34,000 serious injuries among Amazon workers across the country just last year, we write to strongly urge your committees to exercise your oversight responsibility by convening a public emergency congressional hearing, and asking questions of the individuals responsible for the dangerous labor practices that are causing these injuries and deaths, including Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
Despite Amazon Founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos’ public commitment to make Amazon “Earth’s Safest Place to Work”, injuries among Amazon workers have increased year over year: by 20% from 2020 to 2021 across the country, and acutely in states like in New Jersey, where injury rates at the company’s fulfillment centers increased by 54% from 2020 to 2021.
In fact, year after year, Amazon leads in workplace injuries. A 2019 report found that workers at Amazon suffered serious injuries at rates 5 times the national average for all private industries. In 2020, an investigation in Minnesota found that no industry in Minnesota had a higher average injury rate than an Amazon fulfillment center in Shakopee.
This is all the more concerning because as the second largest private employer in the country, Amazon and its labor practices have an outsized impact on our economy, and in the warehousing industry in particular. A report from the Strategic Organizing Center found that while the corporation employed one-third of the country’s warehouse workers in 2021, the company was responsible for nearly one-half (49%) of all injuries in the warehouse industry. In fact, the serious injury rate at Amazon warehouses in 2021 was more than twice as high as the rate at non-Amazon warehouses across the country.
Workers at Amazon have long known what regulators and legislators are realizing about the cause of these injuries and deaths: they are a direct result of Amazon’s unsafe pace of work and anti-union stance. Regulators in Washington state found a “direct connection” between injuries at warehouses and Amazon’s insistence that workers “maintain a very high pace of work.” Public health experts have also found that Amazon’s productivity quotas and constant surveillance exerts a dangerous physical and mental toll on its workers.
Additionally, concerns about high temperatures inside of Amazon facilities have been raised by workers, not just in connection to the passing of Rafael Reynaldo Mota, but across the country from California to Tennessee to Washington. High ambient temperatures at a workstation, compounded by productivity quotas and limited breaks, increase the danger of heat-related illness, injury and death. Under these conditions, workers can develop heat exhaustion, muscle death, acute kidney injury and fatal heatstroke, and overheating can also trigger other events like renal failure, stroke, COPD, and cardiac arrest. Workers can experience fatigue, dizziness, distraction, loss of balance and coordination, fainting, muscle cramps and a number of other heat stress symptoms that increase worker injuries like falling from ladders, vehicle accidents and accidents with machinery and tools.
In response to these dangerous and deadly conditions, Amazon workers across the country have been organizing for better conditions and to protect their colleagues. Yet at every step, Amazon has aggressively attempted to undermine those efforts with retaliation, union-busting, and by creating a climate of fear.
For years, Amazon has intentionally misrepresented the health and safety crisis its workers face — to workers, the public, shareholders, and lawmakers alike. In 2020, Reveal News found internal records that show Amazon executives intentionally hid its safety crisis from the public and lawmakers. In June, members of the House Oversight Committee alleged that Amazon obstructed a Congressional investigation into the death of 6 workers due to the company’s negligence during a tornado that caused the Amazon facility in Edwardsville, Illinois to collapse. In July, the Strategic Organizing Center requested that the Securities and Exchange Commission investigate CEO Andy Jassy’s false and misleading statements about the company’s injury rates to shareholders. And just three weeks ago, Amazon attempted to pass off responsibility in Rafael’s death by claiming it was due to a “personal medical condition.”
It is time for Amazon to learn, once and for all, that it is not above the law. We are hopeful that the federal investigations by OSHA and the Department of Justice will hold Amazon accountable, and mandate significant changes to Amazon’s unsafe management practices. At the same time, we call on your leadership in Congress to protect the health and safety of workers by bringing Amazon and Andy Jassy before Congress to answer for the well-documented health and safety crisis at the company’s fulfillment centers.
Thank you for your consideration, and your leadership on the Senate Committee on Health, Labor & Pensions and the House Committee on Education and Labor. At this time when workers across the country are speaking out and fighting for better pay, improved working conditions, and more dignity on the job, Americans are looking to you to fulfill your mandate to protect and empower workers.
Sincerely,
Athena Coalition
Action Center on Race and the Economy
ALIGN: The Alliance for a Greater New York
Alphabet Workers Union-CWA
American Muslim Bar Association
Backbone Campaign
Center on Policy Initiatives
Center for Popular Democracy
Community Labor United
Demos
Fight for the Future
Grassroots Collaborative
Human Impact Partners
Illinois Green New Deal Coalition
Jobs With Justice
Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE)
Make the Road New Jersey
Mijente
Missouri Workers Center
Muslim Counterpublics Lab
National Council for Occupational Safety and Health
National Employment Law Project
New York Communities for Change
NJ Work Environment Council
OLE
Open Markets Institute
Peoples Collective for Environmental Justice
PowerSwitch Action
Queer Crescent
Surveillance Technology Oversight Project
United for Respect
Warehouse Worker Resource Center
Worksafe
CC: All Members of the Senate Committee on Health, Labor & Pensions and House Committee on Education and LaborBottom of Form
