Amazon employees across the country are seizing on the coronavirus to demand the world’s largest online retailer offer more paid sick time and temporarily shut warehouses with infections for deep cleaning. nanditab1 and readkrystalhu report
Former Amazon employee, Christian Smalls, stands with fellow demonstrators during a protest outside of an Amazon warehouse as the outbreak of the coronavirus disease continues in the Staten Island borough of New York U.S., May 1, 2020. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
Reuters spoke with 16 unions and labor groups targeting Amazon. They included established organizations such as the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations , the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union , as well as newer worker advocacy groups like Warehouse Workers for Justice and Athena, a coalition of labor and social justice groups that have criticized Amazon’s business practices.
In labor’s latest efforts targeting Amazon, organizations are helping workers create online petitions, connect with elected officials, contact media and file labor complaints with the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The initiative puts public pressure on Amazon to respond, several groups said, while laying the groundwork for unions to recruit card-carrying members in the future.
Central to the organizing effort, union officials said, is fear among some frontline Amazon workers over the spread of coronavirus in the company’s warehouses. At least six Amazon workers have died of COVID-19, which the company confirmed publicly after each incident. Amazon’s Lighty would not disclose to Reuters the total number of Amazon employees who have tested positive for coronavirus in the United States. She said the company’s efforts to quarantine infected workers are helping to slow the spread, and rates of infection “are at or below the communities we’re operating in at almost all of our facilities.
Amazon had nearly 600,000 U.S. employees in 2019, according to its latest annual report, making it one of the largest employers in the country. He said unions have resorted to public relations as a tool to pressure companies as worker protections such as “collective bargaining and employment rights enforcement have weakened.”Amazon has resisted unionization within its workforce since its founding in 1994. It defeated unionizing efforts in Seattle in 2000 and in Delaware in 2014 by a wide margin.
“There is a lot of frustration on how Amazon is handling the issue of workplace safety,” Cunningham said. She said she has been in touch with the AFL-CIO about the sickout, and a local affiliate of the union called MLK Labor has offered support to continue the fight on working conditions. MLK Labor confirmed it is working with employees that Amazon fired in Seattle.
The company is also running television advertisements thanking warehouse workers. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in April showed up at a Texas distribution center and met workers to show his support.Amazon worker Mario Crippen led an April 1 walkout at a Michigan warehouse to protest what he said was a lack of transparency from the company about the number of infections. He said about 40 workers participated in that action at the facility in Romulus, about 24 miles southwest of Detroit.
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