Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq:AMZN) remains mum in the number of Canadian workers who’ve tested positive for COVID-19.
The e-commerce giant revealed Thursday (October 1) that 19,816 of its U.S. frontline employees have so far tested positive or presumed positive for COVID-19.
But is has yet to release any similar data for its Canadian operations and multiple inquiries from BIV have gone unanswered since last week.
Last year the company opened its third distribution centre in Metro Vancouver, where it was initially hiring 800 workers for the 450,000-square-foot warehouse (it also has a 200,000-square-foot warehouse in Delta and a 650,000-square-foot warehouse in New Westminster, where workers pack and ship items to customers).
Since then, the pandemic has accelerated trends in online shopping to the point Amazon announced in September plans to hire 100,000 more workers in Canada and the U.S. to keep up with demand.
But in May, a high-level Vancouver executive at Amazon Web Services (AWS) quit his job over how he believed his former parent company was treating workers amid the COVID-19 crisis.
“I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of COVID-19,” Tim Bray, a former AWS vice-president and distinguished engineer, said in a blog post.
The Vancouver-based executive was referencing dismissals that unfolded in April, when warehouse workers reached out to the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ) organization for support raising awareness over what they considered to be unsafe working conditions during the pandemic.
One warehouse worker had already been dismissed in the wake of internal company protests.
Some AECJ members in turn promoted a petition and organized a video call to bring attention to the issue.
They were subsequently dismissed for what Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq:AMZN) described as violating internal policies on commenting on the company publicly without authorization.
Amazon has previously stated all necessary safety precautions were being met at its warehouses.
“And at the end of the day, the big problem isn’t the specifics of COVID-19 response. It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st century capitalism is done,” Bray said in his post.
“Amazon is exceptionally well-managed and has demonstrated great skill at spotting opportunities and building repeatable processes for exploiting them. It has a corresponding lack of vision about the human costs of the relentless growth and accumulation of wealth and power.”
After revealing last week nearly 20,000 U.S. frontline workers had tested positive or presumed positive for COVID-19, Amazon said its goal was to conduct 50,000 tests daily across 650 sites by November.
The company has distributed 100 million face masks to workers and conducts temperature checks at its facilities.
“We've eliminated stand-up meetings during shifts, moved information-sharing to bulletin boards, staggered break times and spread out chairs in breakrooms, among other steps. Cleaning occurs across each site about every 90 minutes to sanitize door handles, stairway handrails, lockers, elevator buttons and touch screens,” the company stated in a blog post.
Amazon said based on its own calculations, the infection rate among its workers is lower than that of the general U.S. population.
