AMAZON'S MODERN SLAVER BILLIONAIRE JEFF BEZOS AND THE COVID VIRUS - PROFITS FIRST!

The Amazon conglomerate took advantage of cheap borrowing costs to raise $10 billion in the corporate bond market last week, according to a report in the Financial Times. Meanwhile, Amazon sits on a cash hoard valued in the tens of billions, which it will use to gobble up businesses and entire industries that flounder in the present turmoil and expand its reach globally.

Former Amazon worker Jana Jumpp says the nearly 1,600 COVID-19 cases she has counted in warehouses are “just the tip of the iceberg”

22 June 2020

Former Amazon worker Jana Jumpp recently spoke to the International Amazon Workers Voice about the statistics she has been gathering and distributing on social media regarding infections and deaths from the coronavirus among Amazon workers. To date, she has counted 1,573 reported COVID-19 cases at Amazon, and she has been able to specifically confirm 1,400 of those.

The cases she has tracked are spread out across 244 locations worldwide, including 236 in the US. She has tracked at least nine Amazon worker deaths in Ohio, California, Missouri, New York, Texas, Illinois, and Indiana. But she says, “I think this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

The statistics she has gathered show alarming numbers of infections at many workplaces, including 70 at EWR9 (Carteret, New Jersey), 48 at EWR8 (Teterboro, New Jersey), 48 at LGA9 (Edison, New Jersey), 90 at JFK8 (Staten Island, New York), 74 at AVP1 (Hazleton, Pennsylvania), 29 at HOU2 (Houston, Texas), 10 at PHX6 (Phoenix, Arizona), 18 at RIC2 (Chester, Virginia), 23 at BDL2 (Windsor, Connecticut), 35 at BDL2 (North Haven, Connecticut) and 10 at DMI3 (Miami, Florida). She also counted 16 at MDW2 (Joliet, Illinois), 14 at MDW7 (Monee, Illinois), 20 at IND1 (Whitestown, Indiana), 14 at CVG2 (Hebron, Kentucky), 12 at DCA1 (Sparrows Point, Maryland), 11 at BOS5 (Stoughton, Massachusetts), 19 at DTW1 (Romulus, Michigan), and 14 at SDF8 (Jeffersonville, Indiana where Jana worked) among hundreds of other workplaces.

“Texas is blowing up right now,” she said. Some warehouses are “hotspots.”

Her spreadsheets and statistics, while not a scientific study, are the only serious effort to date to make a comprehensive tally of the numbers of Amazon workers who have fallen ill or who have died from the virus during the pandemic.

Amazon refuses to report these statistics, despite growing popular demands for this information to be made public. The $1.3 trillion international conglomerate, which profited enormously from the beginning of the pandemic on account of increased demand for online shopping, is seeking to keep workers and the public in the dark about the deadly risks involved with working during the pandemic.

With Amazon refusing to disclose these numbers, Jana’s statistics have been widely reported in the US and around the world, including in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, the Seattle Times, the Intercept, and others, as well as on CNBC, CBS News, and National Public Radio.

Jana, 58, worked for Amazon for four and a half years at the SDF8 facility in Jeffersonville, Indiana. She also works as a dental assistant and a massage therapist.

“When this all started, I was getting shocked,” she said. “The only thing they offered me was to stay home without pay.”

“Around the end of March, we started having multiple cases,” she continued. “We started having cases in the facility, confirmed cases.”

She became involved in social media groups online, one of which she later found out was run by United for Respect, which in turn is backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) union. Through this connection, she was asked to speak at a press conference, she said. “Along with some Wal Mart employees, I wrote a statement and said what I really thought.” She recalled hearing part of her statement later played on National Public Radio.

It was around this time she decided to begin gathering statistics. “I had the time to do it, and I knew this would be important data,” she said. “Amazon was not going to be forthcoming with their data. Somebody needed to track it.”

However, as time went on, she said, “It started getting harder.” At first, she was “just doing it on notepad and paper.” She was later contacted by a student journalist from Berkeley. “He got me set up with my current spreadsheet.”

For each report of infections among Amazon workers, Jana tracks the name of the Amazon facility involved, the city and state, the source of the information, the number of reported infections, and the number of reported deaths, among other information.

It is Amazon’s practice to send out text or voice messages to workers at particular warehouses after a coronavirus infection is confirmed. Jana gathers and saves these messages, forwarded from workers, which she uses to confirm each and every reported case. In her spreadsheets, the word “confirmed” means, “I have a text or a voicemail from the facility confirming it.” She also takes pains to ensure that there are no duplicate entries on her lists.

Active on social media, including in the Facebook group “Amazon Facilities COV19 Reporting Page,” she has become a central hub to which workers are gathering and sending information. Jana works to separate fact from rumor and suspicion and to independently verify each report. She may receive a report, for example, that a worker has died, but the fallen worker’s co-workers do not know why. She usually receives 10 to 15 reports per day, many from workers who request to remain anonymous out of fear of management retaliation.

During the invasion and occupation of Iraq, beginning in 2003, the US military refused to provide body counts of Iraqi victims. In the early years of the war there were independent efforts to gather statistics based on media reports and accounts of individual atrocities. These studies arrived at sums in the tens of thousands of people, but they were eventually dwarfed by a Johns Hopkins study applying epidemiological methods that estimated 650,000 Iraqi war dead as of 2007.

Likewise, Jana freely concedes that the true numbers of Amazon casualties are likely much higher than the numbers her study has been able to compile. Amazon, for example, does not report infections and deaths among employees of third-party contractors, such as security or technicians. “All of the robotics facilities have technicians that are not Amazon employees.”

Indeed, Amazon workers in contact with the International Amazon Workers Voice reported higher numbers of suspected cases at their own facilities than the figures confirmed on Jana’s spreadsheets.

Asked about United for Respect, Jana said she was not aware of the connection to the UFCW. But thus far, she says, she has resisted efforts to bring her project under the wing of the unions or other organizations in the orbit of the Democratic Party. She said, “I consider myself a freelancer. I don’t want anyone telling me what to do.”

As the numbers of infections and deaths mount at Amazon, the company is cracking down on dissent within the workforce. Workers are being told that they will be terminated for speaking publicly about the company, including on social media.

Amazon has hired as many as 175,000 new workers during the pandemic to meet high demand and to replace workers who fell ill or who could not work during the lockdown on account of childcare and other responsibilities.

While doing little to nothing to actually protect workers from the spread of the deadly disease, Amazon is aggressively using its “social distancing” policies to isolate workers and prevent any discussions in the workplace. According to Wired magazine, the company has recently unveiled an “artificial intelligence system that analyzes images from security cameras in Amazon facilities and alerts management of potential social distancing violations.”

This dystopian system is called Proxemics. According to the report in Wired, one feature of Proxemics “alerts managers in a building immediately if a camera sees 15 or more people at the same time and a reviewer confirms it.”

Workers in the US are also being told that they cannot have information about the total number of infections and deaths because that would violate the privacy of the sick workers and HIPAA (the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). This is false.

Amazon’s disclosure of the total number workers infected and killed at its warehouses would not involve disclosing any of the personal health information of individual workers, such as names, social security numbers, email addresses, medical record numbers, or other information protected by HIPAA. In addition, the HIPAA laws and regulations acknowledge that its provisions can be relaxed or waived during a pandemic, for example, “as necessary to avert or mitigate a serious and imminent threat to the health and safety of other individuals.”

Indeed, last month, the attorneys general of 13 US states formally demanded that Amazon and Whole Foods provide detailed statistics on the number of workers who have been infected and killed. But Amazon blew off this request, correctly predicting that nothing would come of it. Indeed, instead of taking legal action against Amazon executives for recklessly endangering lives in the pursuit of profit, the state authorities have taken no meaningful measures in response to the company’s flagrant refusal to cooperate with public health authorities.

On Friday, it was reported that the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) was investigating complaints at Amazon warehouses in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where at least 60 workers have fallen ill. “I get one text nearly every day from that facility,” Jana said. “At least one. Every day.”

Amazon will not be deterred by the belated interventions from OSHA, a toothless institution decimated by decades of budget cuts. Joining the Trump administration’s drive to “reopen” the economy last month, Amazon eliminated the $2 pay increase it implemented in the early stages of the pandemic and also terminated its policy of allowing unpaid time off.

Confronted with incompetence, inaction, and willful neglect on the part of the entire political establishment from top to bottom, the International Amazon Workers Voice [link] is assisting Amazon workers in forming workplace committees to put forward their own demands and interests. The formation of these committees is a basic question of workers’ collective self-defense.

Workers have every right to demand detailed, accurate, and prompt information about infections and deaths in their facility and worldwide. Management’s refusal to disclose such information is completely unacceptable and should not be tolerated under any pretext.

Jana took pride in her work at Amazon before the pandemic, she said, although she did experience the physical toil and psychological stress. “It was annoying. Physically annoying. But after this. . .,” she said, leaving the sentence unfinished.

“They are endangering people. They are bringing it home to their families. To their roommates, fiancées, spouses,” she said.

As for her statistics, she reiterated, “I truly believe this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

“The cops have no concern for the people they’re shooting at”

Amazon workers declare support for mass protests as management imposes pay cut

By Tom Carter
8 June 2020

Starting on May 30, Amazon workers began working without the temporary $2 per hour “hazard pay” raise that was implemented as anger over the spread of the COVID-19 disease in workplaces peaked in mid-March. Management announced last month that the pay raise and increased overtime pay, which had been used to coax workers back into the warehouses, would be eliminated.

Amazon has also eliminated its policy of allowing unlimited unpaid time off for sick workers, which will have the effect of forcing sick workers to continue working despite the danger to themselves and co-workers. With the elimination of the unpaid time off Amazon is working in conjunction with US President Donald Trump, who is forcing employees back into dangerous workplaces under the threat of the loss of income and economic destitution.

Like other corporations, Amazon’s management has responded to the wave of mass protests following the murder of George Floyd by issuing hypocritical statements about its supposed opposition to racism and inequality. “The inequitable and brutal treatment of black people in our country must stop,” Amazon’s single statement begins.

In reality, Amazon has no intention of disturbing its extensive contracts with police agencies around the country, to which it promotes its brand of face-recognition software called Rekognition.

According to Amazon’s own advertisements: “With Amazon Rekognition, you can identify objects, people, text, scenes, and activities in images and videos, as well as detect any inappropriate content. Amazon Rekognition also provides highly accurate facial analysis and facial search capabilities that you can use to detect, analyze, and compare faces for a wide variety of user verification, people counting, and public safety use cases.”

Not only is this a frightening tool in the hands of America’s authoritarian and militarized police, who are no doubt using it at this very moment to monitor and suppress protests, but it can be used directly alongside discriminatory racial profiling.

“I’m in full support of the protesting,” said Mona Williams, who was injured at Amazon fulfillment center Coppell, Texas, speaking to the International Amazon Workers’ Voice. “I have voiced my opinions and views online,” she added. “My son has been on the front lines protesting in Nebraska.”

She warned that Amazon management would not look kindly on any effort to bring the demands of Amazon workers for safer working conditions into the ongoing mass protests. “You are just a number at Amazon,” she said, describing how she used to see ambulances lined up outside her warehouse to pick up workers who were injured or dropped from exhaustion.

“When I was injured, I was treated like a nobody,” she explained. “I just decided to leave.”

“It’s time for a change,” she said. “It’s time for them to realize that our lives are important. If it wasn’t for us blue-collar workers, this world would not be moving the way it’s moving.”

Julius, an Amazon sortation worker at Teterboro, New Jersey, was recently fired for leaning on the edge of a mechanical conveyor belt at the end of a shift. It was hot in the warehouse, and he was exhausted.

“I think the protests themselves are warranted, considering how badly the cops treat the people,” Julius said. “The fact that they’re using pepper spray and rubber bullets is ridiculous. They have no concern for the people that they’re shooting at. They’re getting away with it, even when they attack foreign reporters.”

Julius pointed to the international character of the protests. He was happy to see workers in different countries stand by each other, “but I don’t think the leaders of those [other] nations are happy about what’s happening.”

In the US, the Democrats are “complicit in it all,” he added. “They see some cops ram through protesters in a wide-open street,” he said, and do little or nothing in response. “The Democrats aren’t doing anything for us. They had the chance to, but they’re not calling [Trump] out on it.”

The number of Amazon workers who have contracted the deadly coronavirus continues to rise, although Amazon is deliberately covering up the extent of the infections.

The company has acknowledged eight deaths reported by the news media but has refused to cooperate with local authorities or provide national or statewide statistics on the number of workers who have fallen sick or died. In 13 states, the attorney general’s office has formally requested these numbers, which Amazon has not made publicly available.

According to statistics that have been assembled second-hand by Amazon workers on social media, workers have contracted the virus at as many as three-fourths of US warehouses. A study carried out by the Louisville Courier Journal, which was limited to Kentucky and Southern Indiana, uncovered at least six cases at SDF9 (Shepherdsville) and at least four cases at SDF4 (also in Shepherdsville). It also found at least 12 cases and one death at SDF8 (Jeffersonville, Indiana), at least nine cases at LEX1 (Lexington), and at least eight cases at LEX2 (also in Lexington).

Given the current state of testing in the United States and the lack of information directly from Amazon, the true numbers are certainly much higher.

Meanwhile, the fortune of Amazon oligarch Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, has soared. While workers were pushed to make rate without adequate safety equipment, gloves, or masks, Bezos’s net wealth climbed tens of billions of dollars. It is now over $150 billion.

Amazon worker Barbara Chandler, who contracted the virus in March at Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse in New York, recently filed a lawsuit alleging that Amazon’s lax safety practices put her at risk. Amazon workers, the lawsuit states, “were explicitly or implicitly encouraged to continue attending work and prevented from adequately washing their hands or sanitizing their workstations.”

The Amazon conglomerate took advantage of cheap borrowing costs to raise $10 billion in the corporate bond market last week, according to a report in the Financial Times. Meanwhile, Amazon sits on a cash hoard valued in the tens of billions, which it will use to gobble up businesses and entire industries that flounder in the present turmoil and expand its reach globally.

In order to pay back the bondholders, Amazon will ramp up the exploitation of workers throwing whatever minor safety precautions that have been put into place out the window.

It was reported Friday that a distribution center in Redlands, California was engulfed in a massive fire that caused the roof to collapse. The distribution center was focused on extra-large items. No injuries among workers have been reported, and the cause of the fire remains under investigation.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is rescinding a $2-an-hour hazard pay increase for his warehouse workers at the end of the month, led the pack, increasing his personal wealth by $34.6 billion since the onset of the pandemic. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was close behind, adding $25 billion to his fortune. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who reopened his California auto plant in defiance of state regulators and with the support of President Trump, saw a 48 percent increase in his wealth to $36 billion in just eight weeks as the stock market rebounded from its collapse. All told, the nation’s 620 billionaires now control $3.382 trillion, a 15 percent increase in two months.

US unemployment claims approach 40 million since March

22 May 2020

The United States Department of Labor reported on Thursday that more than 2.4 million Americans applied for unemployment insurance last week, bringing the total number of new claims to 38.6 million since mid-March, when social distancing measures and statewide stay-at-home orders were first implemented in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Even with the push by the Trump administration since then to reopen the economy and the easing of lockdown orders in all 50 states—despite a continued rise in COVID-19 infections and deaths—the US marked its ninth straight week in which more than 2 million workers filed for unemployment. While this is down from the peak at the end of March when 6.8 million applied for unemployment insurance, it still dwarfs the worst weeks of the Great Recession in 2008.

It is expected that the official unemployment rate for May, which is to be reported by the federal government in the first week of June, will approach 20 percent, up from 14.7 percent last month. This is a significant undercount, with millions of unemployed immigrants unable to apply for benefits, and many other workers who are not currently looking for work and therefore are not counted as unemployed.

A man looks at signs of a closed store due to COVID-19 in Niles, Ill., Thursday, May 21, 2020. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

Fortune magazine estimates that real unemployment has already hit 22.5 percent, which is nearing the peak of unemployment reached during the Great Depression in 1933, when the rate rose above 25 percent. Millions more are expected to apply in the coming weeks, pushing the numbers beyond those seen during the country’s worst economic crisis.

But even these figures do not capture the extent of the crisis now unfolding across the country. Millions have been blocked for weeks from applying for unemployment compensation because of antiquated computer systems, and a significant share of those who have applied have been denied any payments. On top of this there are significant delays in processing applications in multiple states, including Indiana, Missouri, Wyoming and Hawaii. Meanwhile, Florida, which has some of the most stringent restrictions, has refused to extend its paltry three-month limit on payments for the few who manage to qualify.

Sparked by the pandemic, the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s is already having a devastating impact on the millions who have seen their jobs suddenly disappear, while millions more will see wages, benefits and hours dramatically curtailed whenever they are able to return to work. Optimistic projections that the US economy would quickly bounce back once stay-at-home orders were lifted are now becoming much gloomier.

A University of Chicago analysis from earlier this month projects that 42 percent of lost jobs will be permanently eliminated. At the current record number, this will mean a destruction of 16.2 million jobs, nearly double the number of jobs which were lost during the Great Recession just over a decade ago.

“I hate to say it, but this is going to take longer and look grimmer than we thought,” Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist and one of the co-authors of the study, told the New York Times.

A survey by the Census Bureau carried out at the end of April and beginning of this month found that 47 percent of adults had lost employment since March 13 or had someone in their household do so, and 39 percent expected that they or someone else in the home would lose their job in the next month. Nearly 11 percent reported that they had not paid their rent or mortgage on time and more than 21 percent had slight or no confidence that they would do so next month.

With millions missing their rent or mortgage payments, tens of thousands of families will be thrown out on the street in the coming weeks and months, leading to a dramatic rise in homelessness even as the coronavirus continues to spread. While many states took steps in March to place a moratorium on evictions, and eviction notices were unable to be filed due to court closures, those measures are now expiring and courts are reopening.

The Oklahoma County Sheriff announced Tuesday via their Twitter page that the department would resume enforcing evictions on May 26. Nearly 300 eviction cases were filed in Oklahoma City between Monday and Tuesday. This process is being repeated in cities and counties across the country. Evictions are also set to resume in Texas next week, where many families were ineligible for aid due to the undocumented status of one or another parent. The CARES Act provision, which blocks evictions from properties with federally subsidized mortgages, expires on July 25; in Texas this only accounts for one-third of homes.

Meanwhile, another wave of layoffs and furloughs is expected by the Congressional Budget Office at the end of June, when the multi-billion-dollar Payment Protection Program (PPP) expires. Sold as a bailout which would help small businesses keep workers on their payroll in the course of necessary shutdowns, the PPP was in fact a boondoggle for large corporations, their subsidiaries and those with connections to the Trump administration. Many small business owners have not seen any aid, and many do not qualify for loan forgiveness.

Amid historic levels of social misery in the working class, times have never been better for those at the heights of society, with America’s billionaires adding $434 billion to their total net worth since state lockdowns began. Financial markets have soared, underwritten by $80 billion per day from the Federal Reserve.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is rescinding a $2-an-hour hazard pay increase for his warehouse workers at the end of the month, led the pack, increasing his personal wealth by $34.6 billion since the onset of the pandemic. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was close behind, adding $25 billion to his fortune. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who reopened his California auto plant in defiance of state regulators and with the support of President Trump, saw a 48 percent increase in his wealth to $36 billion in just eight weeks as the stock market rebounded from its collapse. All told, the nation’s 620 billionaires now control $3.382 trillion, a 15 percent increase in two months.