Portside

Employees at the snack giant’s facility in Kansas demand an end to unpredictable hours and what they call hazardous conditions amid soaring profits.

“It is so disrespectful of the agencies and the employers to shunt these cases aside and not do everything possible to investigate the exposures,” said Peg Seminario, a retired union health and safety director.

Amazon uses such tools as navigation software, item scanners, wristbands, thermal cameras, security cameras and recorded footage to surveil its workforce in warehouses and stores.

Workers are facing perilous conditions as states reopen. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration could have protected them.

The secretive titan behind one of America’s largest poultry companies, who is also one of the President’s top donors, is ruthlessly leveraging the coronavirus crisis—and his vast fortune—to strip workers of protections.

This holiday season, Amazon will move millions of packages at dizzying speed. Internal injury reports suggest all that convenience is coming at the expense of worker safety.

"Too often, when workers raise concerns about health and safety hazards on the job, employers retaliate with reduced hours or dismissal, even though doing so is clearly illegal," says Katie Weatherford, regulatory policy analyst at the Center for Effective Government.

In cities all across the country, workers stand on street corners, line up in alleys or wait in a neon-lit beauty salon for rickety vans to whisk them off to warehouses miles away. Some vans are so packed that to get to work, people must squat on milk crates, sit on the laps of passengers they do not know or sometimes lie on the floor, the other workers’ feet on top of them.