New York — Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has launched a Senate investigation into Amazon’s warehouse safety practices, the latest in a series of investigations launched against the big corporation in his role as chairman of a committee overseeing health and labor issues.
Sanders, who has run for president twice and led a political career fighting corporations and spending money on policies he believes hurt the working class, on Tuesday sent a letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, accusing the e-commerce giant of “serious health and safety lapses”. Violation.
“The company’s pursuit of profits at all costs has created unsafe physical environments, intense pressure to work at unsustainable rates and inadequate medical attention for thousands of Amazon workers each year,” said Sanders, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor ” And the pension committee has written in the letter.
The 81-year-old progressive senator also accused the company, which operates a vast network of warehouses across the country, of failing to adopt “adequate employee protections” because of a corporate culture that treats workers as disposable.
Amazon spokesman Steve Kelly said the company has received Sanders’ letter and is in the early stages of reviewing it.
“We take the safety and health of our employees very seriously,” Kelly said. “There will always be ways to improve, but we are proud of the progress we have made, which includes a 23% reduction in recordable injuries across our US operations since 2019.”
Kelly also said that the company has invested more than $1 billion in security initiatives over the past four years and will continue to invest in this area.
Injuries at Amazon have generally been higher than those of its peers in the industry, which critics and labor safety experts blame on the company’s fast-paced warehouses that track productivity and allow customers to receive their packages quickly. Are. Labor groups have seized on the issue in an effort to organize workers, some of which have borne fruit but have not resulted in a widespread wave of unionization.
In his letter, Sanders pointed to citations Amazon received from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for workplace safety violations, which the company says it has appealed. He pointed to another investigation by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York into what that office called “potentially fraudulent conduct” by Amazon in hiding injuries from OSHA and others.
According to the company, injuries at its US operations — including lower back injuries, strains and sprains — declined marginally last year — at a rate of 6.7% per 200,000 work hours. But those figures were still higher than in 2020.
In his letter, Sanders also cited a report by a coalition of three labor unions that said serious injuries in Amazon were twice as high as in the rest of the warehouse sector last year. Amazon disputes some of the findings.
“Our critics will always have ways of dissecting the data to suit their narrative, but the fact is we have made progress and our numbers clearly show that,” Kelly said.
The Amazon investigation follows similar investigations from a Senate committee into Starbucks and pharmaceutical giant Moderna. As part of the Amazon investigation, the committee is asking Amazon employees to submit stories about their time at the company through a website. The committee says that the submissions will remain confidential.
