Amazon sues New York to claim immunity from state COVID-19 safety regulations
On Friday, Amazon filed a lawsuit in federal district court against New York state attorney general Letitia James, claiming that the company is not subject to “state oversight” and is not required to comply with New York’s workplace health and safety laws and regulations as they relate to the coronavirus pandemic.
The lawsuit is a display of boundless arrogance befitting a conglomerate controlled by one of the world’s richest megabillionaires, Jeff Bezos. Amazon’s legal theory is that it is not required to comply with New York safety laws or regulations because those are allegedly superseded or “preempted” by more lenient federal regulations.
Until recently, the federal regulations at issue were promulgated by the Republican Trump administration, which ferociously opposed any measure that would protect workers’ lives at the expense of corporate profits. This policy has been continued in all essential respects by the new Democratic Biden administration, which is currently engaged in an intensifying campaign to reopen schools, carried over without interruption from the Trump administration. Schools are known to contribute dramatically to the spread of the deadly virus.
Amazon seeks a declaratory ruling that it is immune from New York labor laws relating to health and safety regarding the coronavirus and that it is not required to comply with the instructions of New York’s attorney general, which included modest demands that “Amazon disgorge profits, subsidize public bus service, reduce its production speeds and performance requirements,” reinstate employees Amazon had retaliated against, “retain a health and safety consultant to oversee safety and production,” and adopt other safety-related policies.
The tone of Amazon’s 64-page complaint is one of indignation and outrage. Amazon, according to its lawyers, is the real victim, having been subjected to government “overreach” by state authorities who were “usurping” powers purportedly reserved to the federal government. Amazon claims that its rights are being violated by the state’s safety regulations and that the federal court must intervene to protect Amazon.
Amazon is represented in the lawsuit by Gibson Dunn, a global law firm with 1,400 attorneys and 20 offices around the world. Gibson Dunn partners earn an average yearly salary of $308,000, or around 10 times the average wage of an Amazon warehouse worker.
Despite the length of the complaint and its tone of supreme moral indignation, Amazon’s legal theory is contrary to all common sense. It is not unusual, for example, for states and local municipalities to enact minimum wage laws that are higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, such as New York’s minimum wage of $12.50 per hour. According to the logic of Amazon’s theory, those higher minimum wage laws would constitute illegal attempts to “usurp” the federal minimum.
However, in the American legal system, the fact that a legal theory is fanciful and absurd is no guarantee that it will be rejected, especially if powerful profit interests and an army of corporate lawyers are behind it. Indeed, Amazon is likely emboldened by recent decisions of the US Supreme Court. In November, for example, the far-right majority on the Supreme Court struck down New York state health and safety regulations on the grounds that they supposedly violated “religious liberty.”
Citing a favorable ruling it obtained in a previous lawsuit brought by Amazon employees at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York, Amazon argues that the “JFK8 facility is not the source of COVID-19,” that “the public at large cannot avoid COVID-19 simply by avoiding JFK8, its immediate surrounding area, and its employees,” and that “the public risks exposing themselves to COVID-19 nearly anywhere in the country and the world.”
In other words, according to Amazon’s lawyers—Amazon did not cause the coronavirus, and people are going to get the coronavirus whether they work at Amazon or not, so Amazon should not be “penalized” by being subjected to safety requirements that would protect workers’ health and the health of their families.
Even by the degraded standards of American public discourse at present, it is remarkable to watch a giant corporation awash with tens of billions of dollars of profits walk into court in broad daylight and whine about being forced to take the most basic precautions to prevent workers from being infected by a deadly virus.
Among the measures that Amazon complains about being asked to implement are providing employees with adequate hand sanitizer and other cleaning agents, providing suitable time to engage in regular and frequent hand washing, reconfiguring employee stations to permit social distancing, and providing employees with accurate and complete information concerning their possible exposure to COVID-19. According to Amazon’s theory, these basic legal requirements constitute outrageous government “overreach.”
Amazon’s lawsuit appears to have been an effort to get out in front of a civil lawsuit against the company for its flagrant violation of state health and safety laws during the pandemic, which was filed by New York’s attorney general’s office on Tuesday.
Amazon’s race to the courthouse on Friday was in that sense as much a “public relations” maneuver as a legal strategy, as the 64-page complaint extolls at great length Amazon’s supposedly excellent implementation of coronavirus safety measures. Amazon also points to the lack of enforcement actions against other companies, and similarly inadequate measures taken to protect New York state employees, as evidence that it is being singled out for “inconsistent” enforcement of the applicable regulations.
The Democratic Party, which controls the state of New York from top to bottom, doubtless has its own political reasons for taking Amazon to court, including its anxiety not to be perceived as being rendered totally irrelevant by a giant corporation that considers itself free to ignore state laws and regulations. But no confidence can be placed in the Democratic Party and its appointees to wage any principled struggle against unsafe working conditions at Amazon, especially given the fact that the same party is now leading the national charge to reopen schools.
Even so, the complaint against Amazon by the New York attorney general’s office paints a devastating portrait of Amazon’s indifference to workers’ lives as the pandemic progressed.
“Since at least March 2020 when the COVID-19 outbreak began to devastate New York City,” the attorney general’s complaint states, “Amazon failed to comply with requirements for cleaning and disinfection when infected workers had been present in its facilities; Amazon failed to adequately identify and notify potential contacts of such infected workers; and Amazon failed to ensure that its discipline and productivity policies, and productivity rates automated by line-speeds, permitted its employees to take the time necessary to engage in hygiene, sanitation, social-distancing, and necessary cleaning practices.”
The complaint continues: “When Amazon employees began to object to Amazon’s inadequate practices and to make complaints to Amazon management, government agencies, and the media, Amazon took swift retaliatory action to silence workers’ complaints.”
“Amazon’s response to the pandemic continues to be deficient,” the complaint continues, pointing to failures “to close all or a portion of its facilities for the requisite ventilation, cleaning, and disinfection when an infected worker has been present in the facility within seven days.” By Amazon’s own account, according to the complaint, “it has failed to undertake these measures on at least eighty occasions” at one facility alone.
The complaint concludes that “Amazon has cut corners in complying with the particular requirements that would most jeopardize its sales volume and productivity rates, thereby ensuring outsize profits at an unprecedented rate of growth for the company and its shareholders.”
Indeed, the attorney general’s complaint points to the fact that “Amazon netted more $130 billion in profits from online sales—representing 35 % growth from its pre-pandemic earnings and a 10% higher growth rate than in prior years—at the expense of its frontline workers who have experienced significant risks of COVID-19 infection while working at Amazon.”
The complaint filed by the New York attorney general vindicates completely the exposures of working conditions at Amazon by the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) and the International Amazon Workers’ Voice (IAWV) from the earliest days of the pandemic, which promptly raised demands for basic safety measures based on the first-hand accounts of Amazon workers of inadequate cleaning and disinfection, inadequate safety equipment, the refusal to stop non-essential production, and management’s refusal to slow down rates and line-speeds.
The WSWS and IAWV has reported extensively on company surveillance of workers and the crackdown against workers who challenged working conditions during the pandemic, as well as the cover-up by Amazon of the extent of infections at its warehouses.
The civil complaint by the state of New York is in that sense remarkably late, as the violations it describes began in March of last year, nearly an entire year ago. The New York authorities have no credible explanation for why Amazon was permitted to engage in this dangerous and illegal conduct for so long, raking in enormous profits, without any action being taken even though workers’ lives were on the line.
Nevertheless, the facts laid out in the complaint filed by the New York state authorities only underscore that the fight of Amazon workers against management should not be limited to demanding better pay and safer working conditions, as important as these demands are. Workers must also demand accountability and consequences for all those oligarchs and corporate executives—and their accomplices in the Democratic and Republican parties—who deliberately exposed workers to the risk of infection in pursuit of profit.
The conduct of these individuals led directly to the deaths of workers and their family members and contributed to the spread of a disease that has already claimed almost half a million lives in America alone. The reprehensibility of this conduct is aggravated by the fact that it was motivated by purely pecuniary interests. In other words, there is no reason Amazon could not have implemented adequate safety measures—the company was in no danger of going bankrupt—but greed for profits was prioritized above human life.
All of the ill-gotten gains piled up during the pandemic should be seized, together with control of Amazon itself. With their callous and homicidal conduct, Bezos, his fellow oligarchs, and their accomplices have forfeited any right to run the company. These crimes demonstrate the necessity of workers control, a key demand raised by rank-and-file committees among teachers, autoworkers, and Amazon workers. Workers have now seen what happens when control is left in the hands of the oligarchs.
Amazon workers should reject any demands that they “move on” from these monstrous crimes. The investigation, exposure, and indictment of every responsible individual should not be entrusted to the Democratic Party, but must be taken up by rank-and-file committees of Amazon workers as well as by committees of similarly situated “essential” workers throughout the economy.
Sister denounces Amazon after death of Poushawn Brown, COVID tester at Virginia warehouse
Christina Brown, a former Amazon worker, recently spoke with the World Socialist Web Site about her sister, Poushawn Brown, and their experiences working at the DDC3 warehouse in Springfield, Virginia. Poushawn, 38, died suddenly on January 8 of unexplained causes after working as a coronavirus tester at the Amazon facility.
“It hurts how the company has treated us,” Christina says. “There’s no medicine that can help with this situation. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts.”
Christina and Poushawn worked together as Amazon delivery drivers before taking jobs inside the DDC3 warehouse.
The sisters stopped working as delivery drivers after Christina’s car slid on ice into a barrier while she was under pressure to deliver groceries in winter, and her manager pressured her to make the delivery anyway. Once they began working inside the warehouse, Christina broke two different fingers on her right hand, on two separate occasions, while working as a picker. Amazon’s warehouses are notorious for their high rates of injury, with workers constantly under pressure to work at high speeds at the expense of their physical and mental health.
Christina has three sons that she is working to support, and who she wants to help achieve a college education. One wants to be a veterinarian. Another is studying to be a psychiatrist and plans to graduate next year. She also has a younger son who wants to be a neurologist. Poushawn leaves behind a twelve-year-old daughter.
Christina and Poushawn were very close, speaking by phone every day, often numerous times per day. “She never missed a graduation. She never missed a party, she was always there when I had my babies,” Christina says. The name Poushawn comes from the name of a village in Vietnam where, during the Vietnam War, her father was treated after he stepped on a land mine.
“Every holiday she cooked dinner,” Christina says. “Everything had to be perfect. She cooked dinner at least twice a week. She would make buttermilk chicken, pot roast, chicken noodle soup, all kinds of cakes, red velvet, pineapple upside down cakes, white cakes, coconut cakes. She could make anything. She was the best mother anyone could ask for. She was also an outstanding daughter.”
Together, Christina and Poushawn cared for their mother, who is 63 years old and has been confined to bed at home since 2017. At that time, Poushawn quit her job as an administrative assistant began working for Amazon Flex to make sure that she could adjust her schedule to care for her mother. Christina also went to work for Amazon Flex in 2018.
Christina decided to quit working for Flex after the car accident. In an effort to avoid rear-ending another car on an icy road, her car slid into a ditch and hit a guardrail. When she called her supervisor, she was threatened with pay deductions if she did not complete her route and deliver the packages on time. She recalls saying to herself that her children could not lose their mother “for $15 to $40.” The next day she and Poushawn quit Amazon Flex.
The sisters began working instead inside the DDC3 warehouse in Springfield, Virginia, which forms part of a giant industrial complex that includes warehouses for Amazon Fresh, Amazon Prime, and Whole Foods.
Christina worked as a picker, which involves gathering products to be packaged and loaded onto the trucks for delivery. She recalls that her shift began at 5:15 in the morning, and she worked until 10:15. During that time she was expected to pick between 2,000 and 3,000 packages, which would consist of 6 to 8 delivery trips—or around one package every six to nine seconds.
She described this work as physically and spiritually harrowing. She recalls numerous incidents involving other workers being injured, and how these workers were denied meaningful compensation in the absence of witnesses. “When you work for Amazon, you pay for it emotionally, physically, and mentally.”
She recalls a young worker who broke her back while working as a picker, and Christina later found out that the worker was being paid only $104 per week in compensation. “This woman literally broke her back! She has to walk with a limp and bent over for the rest of her life!”
Christina also remembers a man working next to her hurt himself. She had to run and get someone to help. He was escorted away and never returned.
When Christina was working as a picker she was injured twice. The first time, her pinky finger on her right hand was broken she while reaching onto a high shelf and her glove was caught on a protruding piece of metal while she was pulling out a heavy bag that weighed 80 to 100 pounds. The sensation was “intense,” she said, and she went to her doctor and the finger was re-set. After she was able to return to work, her ring finger of the same hand was broken in a similar manner.
In March of last year, Christina started wearing a mask on her own, but Amazon did not start providing masks until later, and temperature checks were not in place until June. She said, “There were no face shields, no suits, nothing!’ She said she could talk for “three days” about “what happened during the pandemic with Amazon!”
Christina was working at Amazon after the police murder of George Floyd sparked widespread protests against police brutality. She was talking to another worker about what had happened when a manager came up to her and said: “You can’t talk about that here. If you do, you will be fired.”
Christina responded, “I was not speaking to you or saying anything about Amazon in relation to the murder of George Floyd or the Black Lives Matter movement. I have the right of freedom of speech.” The manager replied, “Well you can’t speak about those things in here.”
Not long after, Christina requested permission to leave work early one day to see her grandmother whose health was seriously deteriorating. Her supervisor told her she could not leave until her shift was over, saying, “I understand that people die all the time, but you just can’t leave until your shift is over!” That was the day Christina’s grandmother died. This was the last straw and Christina decided at that point to quit.
However, Poushawn continued to work at Amazon, and was assigned to work in the COVID testing department beginning in October. The position was offered in connection with a $250 bonus that Christina does not believe that Poushawn ever received. Christina spoke with another worker who was also promised the bonus, who likewise has not received it.
This work was a source of friction between the sisters, which was extremely rare in their lifelong relationship. Christina was concerned that it increased the risk of their mother, whose condition remained critical, to infection from the coronavirus. Christina remembers telling Poushawn, “You have no business working in there.” The only PPE that was provided was a black mask with a check mark on the side and some black gloves, Christina said.
“She had no previous medical training,” Christina told her. “You’re not a doctor, a nurse, never been to medical school, never been an RN, an LPN, or any kind of medical professional of any kind.”
Christina recalls the events of January 6 well. As the fascistic mob incited by President Trump descended on the Capitol building in Washington D.C.—only a dozen miles from the warehouse—Christina called her sister in alarm and told her to come home immediately.
Poushawn said, “I just have a couple of people to test and then I’m coming home.” Christina replied, “That riot is happening just a couple of miles away from you. You never know what they’re going to do. They could come to that facility. You need to leave now,” she told her sister and Poushawn agreed.
The next morning, Poushawn got up and got her daughter ready for school. She then got breakfast for everyone and laid down, never to wake up again.
Christina later called Poushawn’s house and did not get an answer, which was unusual, so she asked her oldest son to go check on her. Her son called her to tell her that Poushawn was “asleep,” but when she did not respond to “Pou wake up,” he shook her, and she fell off the bed.
Christina told him to call 911 and raced to her sister’s house, driving her car barefoot, to find paramedics and police cars already there. Paramedics performed CPR, but it was too late. After a doctor pronounced Poushawn’s death, Christina and her son, in extreme distress, attempted to perform CPR themselves.
After it became clear that nothing could be done, Christina lay down on the floor next to her sister. Then she dressed her sister’s body in her favorite clothing, got in her car, and followed the vehicle containing the body to the funeral home.
Christina naturally suspected that her sister might have died from the coronavirus, since she had been working in a COVID testing unit at Amazon, but she was unable to get a clear answer. Because the death was not a homicide or a suicide, no official autopsy was performed, and the death was deemed the result of natural causes. A private autopsy would have cost $7,000 to $10,000, which she could not afford, and the time during which an autopsy would have yielded any helpful information quickly came and went.
Christina appealed to Amazon for help for an autopsy and a funeral, given that both sisters had worked for the company for years. But weeks went by without any reply from the company, which has a market capitalization of over $1.6 trillion. Christina was “beyond hurt, sad, and disgusted,” she said.
After Christina turned to social media for help and received a warm response from fellow Amazon workers, management called her to offer “condolences” and two months of free grief counseling for her and for Poushawn’s daughter.
“Amazon didn’t get in touch with me until last Monday, which is February 1.” By then, the funeral had already taken place, and Christina suspects that management was coming under criticism from other workers for its callous indifference to the fact that a fellow worker had died.
Christina was gratified by the warm response of fellow Amazon workers on GoFundMe, who have contacted her privately with messages of sympathy and support. However, there is a culture of fear within the warehouses, she says, and workers afraid to speak out. “They’re scared. They’re terrified.”
The death of Poushawn Brown is a terrible tragedy, one with devastating and incalculable consequences for all of the people who loved her—and one in which the callous demand for unlimited profits at the expense of human life finds a particularly brutal expression. But Christina tells her fellow workers to find the courage to fight back—in memory of Poushawn.
“If you had her as a friend, you had her for the rest of her life,” Christina says. “She was an outstanding daughter. She was a hell of a mother. She was the best sister anyone could have had.”
Jim Banks: Coronavirus Bill Loaded with ‘Special Interest Pork,’ Liberal Goodies
Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), chairman of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), wrote in a memo to RSC members Monday that the Democrats’ coronavirus bill is stuffed with “special interest pork and other liberal goodies.”
Republicans across the political spectrum have sounded the alarm over the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion coronavirus bill, including Banks and House Budget Committee ranking member Jason Smith (R-MO).
For instance, during a hearing in February, Smith noted that only nine percent of the $1.9 trillion coronavirus bill goes towards vaccinations.
“Democrats are rushing to pass a nearly $2 trillion spending bill that will enact bailouts for state governments that lock down their citizens and radical policies that will destroy jobs and raise the cost of living for working-class Americans,” Smith said in a statement to Fox News on Sunday.
“But this is clearly where any sort of urgency on their part ends,” he added.
“This is all just further proof that COVID-19 is more the pretext than the purpose behind what Democrats are proposing. Their approach is the wrong plan, at the wrong time, for all the wrong reasons,” the Missouri conservative added.
In his letter to RSC members, Banks wrote that Democrats have been hoping the public has been too preoccupied on the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump to notice the Democrat majority in Congress loaded the bill with leftist carveouts.
He said the Democrat coronavirus bill is filled with “special interest pork and other liberal goodies.”
In Banks’ memo to RSC members, he noted the many ways the Democrat coronavirus bill contains leftist carveouts, including:
- Institutes a $15 per hour minimum wage, which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) contended would result in 1.4 million job losses.
- Unemployment benefits would rise to $400 per week on top of regular payments. This would last for up to roughly a year and a half. The RSC contended that, under the plan, over half of Americans would get a raise for being unemployed, meaning that this might hurt employment.
- Democrats blocked an amendment that would ensure that federal benefits from COBRA health insurance are not used for abortion services.
- Stimulus checks could go to families in which a parent is an illegal alien.
- Allows subsidies for COBRA premiums to go to illegal immigrants.
- “Unconscionably” gives labor unions, including teachers unions that are fighting against school reopenings, access to Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funding up to $10 million per union.
- Allows funding to go to colleges that have partnerships with owned or controlled companies by communist China. Democrats rejected a Republican proposal to fix this.
- Allows funding to go to colleges and universities that have partnerships with Confuscious Institutes.
- Provides $1.5 billion to Amtrak, even though the transportation company is sitting on “roughly $1 billion of unspent aid.”
- Provides a $350 billion bailout for state and local government despite limited declines in overall revenue in 2020.
- Eliminates the income restriction that prevented wealthy Americans from qualifying for the Obamacare premium subsidies.
- Expands eligibility for PPP funding for large nonprofits, labor unions, country clubs, and publicly-traded internet news organizations. Banks contended that this would crowd out small businesses’ access to PPP loans.
- Provide $50 million in funding for Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) environmental justice grants, which the RSC believes is a “thinly-veiled kickback” to leftist environmental groups.
- Extends PPP funding to violent criminals, including those who have been found guilty of assault on a police officer and consensual sexual crimes.
- Grants $800 million in additional foreign food aid.
Smith told Axios Sunday the coronavirus bill amounts to a “Biden bailout bill.”
“Instead of stimulus, I call it for what it is — the Biden bailout bill. It’s an abusive process and a lot of reckless spending,” he said.
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
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