Thursday, April 30, 2020

MODERN SLAVER JEFF BEZOS FACES GLOBAL STRIKE OF AMAZON WORKERS


Amazon Walkouts Are Spreading


Photo: Paul Sancya/AP/Shutterstock
Hafsa Hassan lives at home with her parents and seven siblings. Out of her family, she is the only person currently able to work. But Hassan, who works at an Amazon warehouse in Shakopee, Minnesota, took a professional risk early on Sunday morning: She joined dozens of others in a spontaneous walkout to protest the firing of Faiza Osman, a co-worker. Though Amazon’s rationale for firing Osman remains unclear, local activists say she had been staying home from work to avoid sickening her two children.
The Minnesota protest is a flash point amid a growing wave of national worker unrest. Amazon associates like Hassan have real reason to fear retaliation at work. On Monday, New York attorney general Letitia James sent a letter to the e-commerce giant warning it that it may have violated whistleblower protection laws by firing Chris Smalls hours after he led a protest at his Staten Island warehouse. In the same letter, James said her office was also investigating other, unspecified “cases of potential illegal retaliation,” NPR reported. In addition to Smalls, three Amazon employees in other states lost jobs after participating in protected organizing activity at work.
Amazon denies that it has retaliated against any employees for their activism. But the company’s stringent anti-union stance threatens to undermine its defense of its actions, and so does its haphazard response to the pandemic. Osman wasn’t fired after leading a protest. She simply stayed home from work, which company policy theoretically allowed her to do. Under Amazon’s unlimited unpaid time off policy, which it instituted as a response to the pandemic, Osman had the freedom to stay home if she felt uncomfortable about working, said the Awood Center, which organizes East African workers in the Twin Cities region of Minnesota. Business Insider had previously reported that Amazon told associates in Indiana by text that “absences would not be penalized” as a result of the policy.
Osman also had good reason to worry about infection, Hassan told Intelligencer. Many, including Hassan, had worked the same shift as an associate who had left work ill on Friday evening. After several watched a manager spray down the area where the associate had worked, “we were all very suspicious,” Hassan said. Workers later received text messages informing them of three new coronavirus cases at the warehouse.
“One thing led to another, kind of like how a spark starts the whole forest fire,” she added. News of Osman’s firing pushed frustrated night-shift workers into action. “Firing someone for staying home, where we are supposed to be having unlimited unpaid time off for that specific reason, is just incredible,” said Tyler Hamilton, an associate who also participated in the protest. Hamilton, Hassan, and their co-workers punched out and filed into the parking lot, where Hassan says a member of the facility’s safety team berated them for protesting. Organizers said 50 associates participated in the protest. Amazon, in a statement to Vice News, claimed the number was half that many, but it did reinstate Osman.
That probably won’t be enough to prevent new walkouts. In fact, Amazon seems determined to push workers over the brink and into a pit. On May 1, the company will discontinue the very same unlimited unpaid time off policy Osman used to stay home. “That shows me that they value their bottom line more than our lives,” Hamilton said. “The only reason that they have to roll that back is to force attendance up.” Workers like Osman, who want to avoid risky conditions on the job, now face a higher risk of termination. In normal circumstances, Hamilton continued, associates who run out of time off get fired. “So if someone does not feel safe going to work in the middle of a pandemic, Amazon will fire them for that,” he explained. Associates will still be able to apply for a leave of absence, but on a press call organized by the Athena coalition, a campaign demanding better working conditions at Amazon, associates said that the guidelines are unclear. “I was not even able to complete the form and answer the questions that it requires to formally file for a leave of absence,” said Rachel Belz, who works at a New Jersey facility.
In a statement to Intelligencer, Amazon spokesperson Jen Crowcroft said the company is simply transitioning a universal policy into a more targeted program. “We’ve extended the increased hourly pay through May 16. We are also extending double overtime pay in the U.S. and Canada. These extensions increase our total investment in pay during COVID-19 to nearly $700 million for our hourly employees and partners,” she said. “In addition, we are providing flexibility with leave-of-absence options, including expanding the policy to cover COVID-19 circumstances, such as high-risk individuals or school closures. We continue to see heavy demand during this difficult time, and the team is doing incredible work for our customers and the community.”
Documents obtained by Recode on Wednesday also show that Amazon is cracking down on internal communications among corporate employees in what resembles a draconian, and probably doomed, attempt to prevent them from organizing. Employee moderators must now approve messages to listservs with over 500 subscribers. While Amazon told the website that the rule has always existed, sources said it had not been regularly enforced. As Recode explained, the company’s listservs have “become places for workers to critique the company’s operational handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in how it treats warehouse workers, who have asked for higher pay and more safety protections.”
As matters pertain to the associates in its warehouses, Amazon has been eager to downplay the protests, positioning them in statements to the press as the acts of a few disgruntled employees. But those arguments are losing their power. The Shakopee warehouse has long been a place where the cracks in Amazon’s anti-organizing campaign are acutely visible. Associates, many of them Somali immigrants, have repeatedly and successfully protested against unreasonable work quotas and for time to pray at work. The facility’s Sunday-morning protest is also the latest in a series that affected facilities in New York, Chicago, and Detroit. Meanwhile, other stressors burden associates. Since the start of the pandemic, they have consistently complained that, although the company now requires them to practice social distancing in sorting facilities, an influx of new employees makes it difficult to follow the guidelines. And Hamilton worries the new rules create opportunities for managers to retaliate further against troublesome employees. When Amazon fired Smalls, it cited as its justification his alleged failure to follow a quarantine order.
“Realistically, everyone violates [social distancing] constantly. All it takes is going down the wrong staircase because you’re in a rush, or passing too close to someone. And there’s cameras everywhere in the facility,” Hamilton said. “If they don’t like you, they just have to pick out those moments, and they can use those to write you up.”
Amazon disputes this. “That’s simply not true. We respect the rights of employees to protest and recognize their legal right to do so, but these rights do not provide blanket immunity against bad actions, particularly those that endanger the health, well-being, or safety of their colleagues,” Crowcroft told Intelligencer.
In these circumstances, associates may, like Hassan and Hamilton, continue to protest despite the risk to their jobs. May Day, the international labor holiday, is on Friday, and workers have planned protests to mark the occasion. The Intercept reported on Tuesday that Amazon workers will join others from FedEx, Walmart, Target, and the Amazon-owned Whole Foods in a nationwide walkout. Daniel Steinbrook, a Whole Foods employee, told the Intercept that organizers act “in conjunction with workers at Amazon, Target, Instacart, and other companies for International Workers’ Day to show solidarity with other essential workers in our struggle for better protections and benefits in the pandemic.”
“All the workers who have protested are doing so out of concern for their safety and the well-being of their loved ones,” Hassan said by text. “If we are retaliated against by Amazon then they prove that our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech are no concern of theirs. And that profit is more important than the basic human rights of U.S. citizens.”

Exclusive — Amazon Warehouse Whistleblower Fired by Bezos: Management ‘Told Me not to Tell the Employees’ of a Coronavirus Outbreak

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MARCH 30: Amazon employees hold a protest and walkout over conditions at the company's Staten Island distribution facility on March 30, 2020 in New York City. Workers at the facility, which has had numerous employees test positive for the coronavirus, want to call attention to …
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
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Amazon hid information of a coronavirus outbreak from employees at one of its distribution centers in New York City, said Chris Smalls, who was fired by Amazon after he blew the whistle on the outbreak at his warehouse and helped organize a walkout to protest the unsafe working conditions there.
Smalls spoke with SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight host Rebecca Mansour about the conditions at his warehouse that led to the walkout and his termination.
“At the beginning of March, we were unprotected,” said Smalls. “We didn’t have any facial masks, we didn’t have any cleaning supplies. We didn’t have the right type of gloves that protect our skin. My associates, my employees that I supervised were falling ill in a domino effect, one by one [with] flu-like symptoms. Some of them were even vomiting at their stations. It was very alarming to me. I started to raise my concerns to my local HR department.”
Smalls added, “We didn’t have any confirmed cases at the time, but I wanted to be proactive instead of reactive [in] dealing with something that we’d never dealt before, this virus. I was concerned. They pretty much swept it under the rug because we didn’t have any safety guidelines implemented at the time. We didn’t have any cases; we were nonchalant about it.”
“So I fought behind the scenes,” Smalls continued. “I sent emails out to the CDC, to the health department, to the government of New York try to get the building closed down, quarantined for two weeks, because what I’d seen hand-in-hand and face-to-face was my employees and my colleagues around me begin to fall sick.”
“I had to go back to work,” Smalls remarked. “I took some time off to protect myself, protect my family, my kids. After a while, I was like, no, this unpaid policy that Amazon’s offering is basically you don’t get paid time [off]. You can stay home as long as you want, but you don’t get paid for it. It wasn’t really an option for me. I had to pay my bills.”
LISTEN:
Smalls continued, “I returned back to work on March 24th. When I returned that day, my colleague — who’s a supervisor in the same department — she was sick. Her eyes were bloodshot red. She was sluggish. I said, ‘What’s going on?’ She told me she went for testing the night before. We all know you can’t get the test unless you’re showing severe symptoms. I said, ‘Yeah, you should go home immediately.'”
Smalls stated, “The policy for Amazon is you’re allowed to come to work sick as a dog, even if you have the virus, until they receive physical documentation from the doctors, which could take a number of days or weeks. Obviously, it being the epicenter [in] New York, it takes a while.”
“But she went home,” Smalls recalled. “Thank God, because she did test positive. Two hours later, we had a management meeting, and that’s where we learned about our first case. The [infected] associate was in the building on March 11, so I was expecting us to do what the Queen’s New York building did a week prior and close down, sanitize, send everybody home with pay, [and] everybody return back to work. They didn’t do that. They told me not to tell the employees. ‘We don’t want to cause a panic.’ That was my last time working for Amazon right there.”
Smalls went on, “I walked out of the building. I came back to the building every day that week off the clock of my own free will, sat in the cafeteria for eight hours a day to tell the employees the truth — what management was hiding, the fact that we were exposed to somebody, my colleague, for ten hours a day, multiple days in a row. I was only around for five minutes that day, but my employees were around her for ten hours.”
“We all should have been quarantined with pay,” said Smalls. “The building should have been shut down immediately. But that didn’t happen. By the end of the week, Saturday, March 28th, they decided to quarantine me and only me, none of the employees, not even the person I ride to work with every day. So that tells you right there, they put a target on my back to silence me, but what I did was I mobilized a walkout on March 30th that resulted in my termination.”
“We know that they targeted you because VICE media got copies of leaked notes from an internal meeting of Amazon leadership,” Mansour replied. “Jeff Bezos himself was at the meeting.”
On April 2, VICE News obtained the leaked notes from a meeting of Amazon executives, including CEO Jeff Bezos, that revealed that the company’s public relations strategy towards Smalls was to smear him as “not smart or articulate” and make him “the face of the entire union/organizing movement.” VICE News reported:
“He’s not smart, or articulate, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position than simply explaining for the umpteenth time how we’re trying to protect workers,” wrote Amazon General Counsel David Zapolsky [about Smalls] in notes from the meeting forwarded widely in the company.
“We should spend the first part of our response strongly laying out the case for why the organizer’s conduct was immoral, unacceptable, and arguably illegal, in detail, and only then follow with our usual talking points about worker safety,” Zapolsky wrote. “Make [Smalls] the most interesting part of the story, and if possible make him the face of the entire union/organizing movement.”
“They want to make me the face of the whole union organization,” said Smalls, when Mansour asked him about the leaked Amazon notes. “I wasn’t that. I was just a concerned supervisor. I’d been with the company since 2015. I was a loyal, dedicated employee — nothing more than just a father of three with a retirement date of 2053. But when they dropped the ball on our health and safety, I put my career on the line. It cost me my career, but I have no regrets.”
Smalls continued, “For them to have that meeting about me, that tells you that I’m speaking truth to power, and that I’m not lying. All I can say is it’s a shame that Jeff Bezos has these people around him. We know what type of people they are now. We know what types of conversations they have, so it’s never going to be Amazon versus Chris Smalls. It’s going to be Amazon versus the people.”
Mansour asked is if any legal action is being taken against Amazon related to its firing of Smalls.
“Yeah, absolutely,” replied Smalls. “The New York attorney general’s office, Letitia James, sent out their demand letter on my behalf, the whistleblower laws, and my only legal team. I have my own personal claims and demand letter that’s been shipped already. So yes, legal actions have been taken.”
Smalls has said that the objectives of the walkout’s organizers is to get Amazon to temporarily shut down the New York City warehouse where the outbreak is, sanitize it, and provide pay to furloughed workers who can’t work while the warehouse is being deep cleaned.
“We only want transparency and honesty from the company,” Smalls told Breitbart News Tonight. “How many [coronavirus] cases are in these buildings that we’re walking into every day? We want to make sure that [personal protective equipment] is provided at all times, cleaning supplies [provided] by the company at all times. We shouldn’t have people bringing their own cases of sanitizer to the job. This company is the richest company in the world. There’s no way that should be happening.”
Smalls continued, “All these colleagues of mine haven’t been to work in over a month because they’re terrified. They use an unpaid policy like I did in March. They all need to be retro paid, including myself. They shouldn’t be out of work right now, at home, unpaid, [with] underlying health conditions. You’ve got young adults that are living with their parents, [and] their parents are telling them not to go to work.”
“These people deserve to be retro paid,” determined Smalls. “Every building that has a [coronavirus] case in it — including JFK, my former building — needs to be shut down for a minimum of 14 days for that 14-day incubation period, because you can’t stop the spread of the virus in these types of buildings. These type of facilities are breeding grounds for the coronavirus. JFK alone has 5,000 employees that go in that building weekly from all five boroughs in New York and parts of New Jersey. This virus spreads into two and a half people.”
“You’ve got to think about your communities and your family,” Smalls said. “That’s what we’re doing this for. That’s what I orchestrated this alliance for with all these other companies, because we all have one common goal right now, and that’s just to save our communities and our families and make sure our coworkers are protected at all times.”
Union organizers are conducting a walkout of employees from various companies, including Amazon and its subsidiary Whole Foods, as part of a broader campaign on May Day, otherwise referred to as International Workers’ Day.
All of Amazon’s facilities in New York are still open, said Small. “It’s a sad situation, because when I was protesting a month ago, it was only a few cases at the time, somewhere around ten or less, but now we’re talking about 50 or 60 cases in that building within a matter of three [or] four weeks,” he remarked. “That’s pretty much every building across the entire Amazon network, across the nation, [having] multiple confirmed cases.”
Smalls went on, “We have 5,000 employees in and out of that building weekly. At least 2,000 people there daily, in and out. The sanitizer was depleted. It was scarce. Everybody in the country needed sanitizer once the coronavirus hit the [United] States. Everybody ran and they cleared those shelves, and they hoarded. The same thing was going on in the building.”
Smalls continued, “People were afraid. They didn’t know what they were dealing with, so it disappeared. There used to be an abundance of it, then you couldn’t find one bottle anywhere, and then you’ve got to think the third-party cleaning crew that they hired are human beings, as well. They’re hearing rumors about people testing positive [and] getting sick, they weren’t showing up to work. So if they don’t show up to work, Amazon can’t replace them on the spot. They expected them to be there, but if they don’t show up, they have no control over that.”
Small added, “These were just the things that we were dealing with. We were literally unprotected for an entire month.”
Mansour asked Smalls about the reported union-busting tactics Amazon and its subsidiaries use to keep workers from organizing to collectively bargain for better working conditions.
Smalls said, “They literally preach to the employees, ‘If you receive any text from any type of weird numbers, don’t respond,’ or, ‘If anybody talks to you outside the building, don’t communicate with them.’ They tell them that all the time. To my knowledge, there have been training videos that are actually out there on YouTube are other platforms that are showing them how managers are to be trained to pretty much single out and terminate or reprimand somebody who’s trying to unionize.”
Business Insider reported on a “heat map” used by Whole Foods to estimate risk of unionization among its employees:
Some of the factors that contribute to external risk scores include local union membership size; distance in miles between the store and the closest union; number of charges filed with the National Labor Relations Board alleging labor-law violations; and a “labor incident tracker,” which logs incidents related to organizing and union activity.
Other external factors include the percentage of families within the store’s zip code that fall below the poverty line and the local unemployment rate.
“This is what they do,” said Smalls of Amazon’s measures to block unionization of its employees. “They are an anti-unionized company, and they continue to retaliate against people who speak out. There have been a number of firings since I’ve been fired now. They fired [and] pretty much dismantled my whole crew, one by one.”
Smalls recalled, “There [was] another associate in my crew that protested; he’s been terminated, and then they put another one on a final [notice]. So it’s only a matter of time before they get him out of there. Those are the things — the tactics — that they use. It’s intimidation, retaliation, and discrimination. So, it’s a shame to work for them at this moment. I thought they were a good company, but it turns out that this virus exposed a lot, and it exposed who they really are.”
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.

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