Hidden Pandemic: Amazon’s Secrecy And Obstruction During The COVID-19 Crisis
A new report released by the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC) shows that Amazon, despite having announced publicly in October 2020 that it had identified nearly 20,000 COVID cases nationally among its employees, subsequently reported only 27 cases of “respiratory conditions” (the category in which COVID cases are reported) to OSHA for all of 2020. This means that Amazon claimed to OSHA that almost none of the tens of thousands of COVID-19 infections among its workers were work-related, an accomplishment so extraordinary as to be unbelievable.
Amazon, the nation’s second largest private employer, put workers’ lives at risk by depriving OSHA of information about COVID-19 cases in its facilities, undermining the agency’s ability to identify workplace hazards and to hold the company accountable for unsafe conditions. The SOC, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Warehouse Workers Resource Center and the Awood Center sent a complaint to Assistant Secretary of Labor Douglas Parker, urging OSHA to investigate Amazon’s disturbing pattern of misleading or grossly incomplete information provided to authorities around COVID-19 cases in its warehouses.