Amazon obstructs congressional investigation into deadly Illinois tornado disaster
The United States House Committee on Oversight and Reform has accused Amazon of obstructing its investigation into the deadly collapse of the company’s DLI4 warehouse facility in Edwardsville, Illinois during a massive tornado last December.
From the evening of December 10 into the morning of December 11, enormous tornadoes rampaged from Arkansas to Kentucky, killing over 100 people and leaving hundreds of miles of rubble. It was the deadliest December tornado outbreak in US history.
Amazon’s DLI4 warehouse, which employed 190 people, was struck by an EF-3 (winds of 158-206 mph) tornado, which caused the building to cave in on the people inside. Plant managers at the fulfillment center disregarded days of advance storm warnings from local and national weather forecasts and refused to cancel the December 10 evening shift to ensure continued operation during the immensely profitable holiday season.
Warehouse workers and delivery drivers who raised concerns about the storm were threatened with severe reprimand and immediate termination. An Amazon delivery driver who asked permission to seek safety from the impending storm was informed by her boss via text message that such a decision, “will ultimately end with you not having a job come tomorrow morning.” Numerous warehouse workers texted family and friends, “Amazon won’t let us leave.”
As a result of this criminal decision, dozens of workers were injured and six killed as the poorly constructed facility collapsed on top of them. Meanwhile, Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos, the world’s second richest person worth over $170 billion, hosted a luxurious party and oversaw the launching of his BlueOrigin spacecraft.
Democratic members of the House Oversight Committee announced at the beginning of April the opening of an investigation into Amazon’s “labor practices.” Democratic committee members — including committee chairperson Carolyn Maloney (New York), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York) and Cori Bush (Missouri) — wrote that the inquiry was being undertaken following concerns over “recent reports that Amazon may be putting the health and safety of its workers at risk, including by requiring them to work in dangerous conditions during tornadoes, hurricanes, and other extreme weather.”
The House Oversight Committee’s initial April 1 letter-of-inquiry to Andy Jassy, President and Chief Executive Officer of Amazon, requested that Amazon provide documents and communications about the tragedy at the DLI4 facility and documents regarding the company’s “workplace policies and practices that may have prevented workers from staying safe,” and “actions in responding to other severe weather events and natural disasters” since 2017.
The letter stated, “Our investigation into Amazon’s response to the events in Edwardsville and other extreme weather events seeks to determine whether Amazon’s corporate practices put employee safety first, or whether your company, which now employs nearly one million people in the United States, is merely paying lip service to this principle.”
The evidence already available makes the answer to this question crystal clear. More than two months since the launching of the investigation, Amazon has failed to provide any key documents to the House Oversight Committee.
Jassy never publicly responded to the Committee’s April 1 letter. Instead, the CEO wrote a letter to shareholders, published April 14, in which he falsely claimed that the company’s “injury rates are sometimes misunderstood” and were “about average relative to peers.” These are bald-faced lies. Extensive, regular studies have exposed that injury rates at Amazon are far higher than the national average in the warehouse industry.
In a follow-up letter to Jassy, dated June 1, the House Oversight Committee members write, “Amazon’s failure to provide key documents has obstructed the Committee’s investigation.” They continue, “Nearly seven weeks have passed since the April 2022 deadline, yet Amazon still has not produced any of the key categories of documents identified by Committee staff, let alone the full set of materials the Committee requested.” Amazon has also refused to provide documents from its internal investigation of the DLI4 warehouse disaster, ridiculously citing “work-product and attorney-client privileges.”
Workers have seen this before. It is clear that Amazon is responsible for the deaths and injuries in Illinois. More broadly, it is responsible for the mass injury and deaths of workers at its facilities across the country and internationally. The WSWS has documented countless examples of the company’s ruthlessness in the pursuit of profits.
Instead of penalizing the multi-trillion dollar company for clear obstruction of an official inquiry, the House Oversight Committee demonstrated its toothlessness by simply granting, “as an additional accommodation,” an extension until June 8, 2022, which expired yesterday. The Committee lamely warned that if Amazon fails to meet this new deadline, “it will have no choice but to consider alternative measures to obtain full compliance.” Amazon responded by essentially brushing off the Committee, stating that it has provided over a thousand pages of information and will “continue to work with committee staff on further document production.”
The “alternative measures” pathetically threatened by the House Committee will most likely not go beyond the Committee issuing subpoenas for a hearing on Amazon’s “labor practices.” This hearing, or series of hearings, will feature empty speeches about the moral failures and “unprofessionalism” of Amazon and result in nothing more than a slap on the wrist for the multi-trillion-dollar company.
The entirely avoidable disaster in Illinois and the dismissive response of the corporate giant demonstrate, more broadly, the indifference of the capitalist ruling class to workers’ lives. To them, workers are expendable, worth less than basic machinery and equipment. If one dies, another can quickly be hired to continue production.
Over the last two years, this subordination of life to the production of profit has been on full display with the criminal policies pursued in regards to the COVID-19 pandemic. The ruling class and its political representatives have scrapped all public health measures to stop COVID-19, demanding that the population “learn to live with the virus.”
Amazon continues to conceal the number of infections and deaths among its workforce. However, reports from workers indicate that the virus has taken a heavy toll. Now, the ruling class threatens death and suffering on a far greater scale by recklessly and relentlessly driving towards nuclear world war with Russia and China.
The Democratic Party — the political party of Wall Street spearheading the drive to world war, the pandemic policy of herd immunity, and the cutting of vital social programs and spending — will ultimately do nothing to hold Amazon accountable for its criminality and ensure better working and living conditions for Amazon workers. Neither will the pro-corporate trade unions, which have overseen the decay of working and living conditions for decades and strangled any attempt by workers to fight back.
In late April, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), found that the DLI4 facility “met minimal safety guidelines for storm sheltering,” and announced that it would not hold Amazon liable for the deaths of the six workers in Illinois. OSHA simply recommended that Amazon “voluntarily take the necessary steps to eliminate or materially reduce your employees’ exposure to the risk factors described above.” The agency remains significantly understaffed and underfunded, playing a key role in ensuring the unrestrained criminality of the capitalist class. As of 2021, the agency had issued less than 300 health violations throughout the pandemic for violations of health and safety practices.
Workers must take matters into their own hands by forming independent rank-and-file safety committees and waging a serious struggle against the profit system. A fight for justice for the lives destroyed by capitalism and to prevent these kinds of tragic events requires an independent mobilization against the entire rotten social order.
How Amazon Engages in Sanctioned Trade With Iran
Retail giant facilitates sale of computer hardware to subsidiary of Iranian government, documents show
Retail giant Amazon is reportedly busting U.S. sanctions on Iran by facilitating the sale of computer hardware to a foreign subsidiary controlled by the Iranian government and tied to the country’s terrorism enterprise, according to documents posted this week by WikiIran.
Amazon allowed a Turkish subsidiary of Iran’s Petrochemical Commercial Company, which is sanctioned by the United States, to purchase materials from an American supplier, according to leaked Iranian government documents. The United States has since 2010 sanctioned that company, which provides services to Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the country’s paramilitary fighting force, a designated foreign terrorist organization.
This is not the first time Amazon has been caught violating U.S. sanctions on Iran. The online retail giant paid the U.S. government $134,523 in 2020 as part of a settlement for violating sanctions on Iran, Syria, and Crimea. Amazon said in government filings it may be civilly liable "for apparent violations of multiple [U.S.] sanctions programs" administered by the Treasury Department. This included providing "goods and services" to sanctioned Iranian entities. The sanctions violations were of particular interest to the U.S. foreign policy community due to Amazon’s standing as a government contractor that performs work worth tens of billions of dollars.
The latest information on Amazon’s potential sanctions violations was posted by WikiIran, a web portal that leaks internal Iranian government documents. The "original confidential documents" published by the site purport to show "how major Iranian petrochemical companies circumvent sanctions in order to fund Iran's Ministry of Defense [and the] IRGC's Quds Force."
The government documents center on Iran’s Petrochemical Commercial Company and an alleged network of shell firms that help it evade U.S. and international sanctions. The trade facilitated by Amazon is disclosed in one of the documents obtained by the site. The Washington Free Beacon could not independently verify the authenticity of the government documents.
The information indicates that Amazon facilitated purchases, primarily of computer hardware, from an American company that ultimately went to the petrochemical company via a Turkish subsidiary controlled by Tehran.
United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), a watchdog group that tracks violations of U.S. sanctions on Iran, said the government documents corroborate its own research about "the ease with which Amazon is used to evade U.S. sanctions." The organization has documented how Amazon is "complicit in allowing products available for sale on its marketplace to flow into Iran for years."
In 2020, for instance, UANI informed Amazon officials that several Iranian websites were promoting their ability to get Amazon goods into Iran by having them first delivered to an address in the United States. "One of the more egregious perpetrators, Iranicard, features the Amazon logo prominently and extensively on its website, including the landing page," UANI reported at the time.
Amazon has not responded to the organization’s alerts about these potential sanctions violations. Amazon also did not respond to a Free Beacon request for comment.
Daniel Roth, UANI’s research director, said Amazon has the ability to police these sales but has turned "a blind eye."
"Amazon undoubtedly has the capability and resources to ensure its platform is protected from being hijacked by bad actors attempting to subvert sanctions, and it has a clear responsibility to do so," Roth said in a statement. "By turning a blind eye and allowing these transactions to occur, they are helping to strengthen sanctioned Iranian entities to the detriment of the U.S. government’s efforts to hold Iran accountable, all while profiting from the illicit sales. Amazon can and should take responsibility and control of its platform to ensure these activities by Iranian firms do not continue."
Amazon’s former CEO Jeff Bezos clashes with Biden on social media, denounces taxes on the wealthy and stimulus payments
In a widely publicized feud on Twitter, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos denounced President Joe Biden over the latter’s social media comments which claimed that making sure “the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share” of taxes was a good way to lower inflation.
Bezos, the second wealthiest man on earth, denounced Biden, claiming his administration “tried hard to inject even more stimulus into an already over-heated, inflationary economy and only Manchin saved them from themselves,” a reference to Biden’s failed social spending bill from last fall which the Democratic West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin had refused to support.
“Raising corp taxes is fine to discuss,” Bezos added, but “taming inflation is critical.” Perhaps sensing these callous denunciations of stimulus measures which kept millions out of poverty and destitution during the first year of the pandemic would not be popular, Bezos concluded his tweet by declaring, “Inflation is a regressive tax that most hurts the least affluent.”
Both sides of this public debate are engaged in self-serving lies. First of all, there is the outrageous claim by Bezos, which triggered an angry response from Twitter users, that he is even the least bit interested in the fortunes of the “least affluent.” Bezos’ net worth, currently at $165 billion, is based upon the brutal exploitation of more than a million workers in Amazon’s warehouses worldwide. Amazon is a pioneer in the use of robotics and electronic surveillance to enforce unsafe levels of work rates which have led to widespread injuries among its workforce, who earn poverty wages.
Bezos denounces Biden for “stimulus money,” but almost all the of the pandemic stimulus has gone not to workers or to social programs but to benefit Wall Street and wealthy individuals such as Bezos. Even the corporate press was compelled to acknowledge this. In its report on the exchange, CNN noted, that “Bezos certainly knows” that the Fed “unleashed a flood of easy money while cutting interest rates to near zero to prevent an economic collapse” in the initial stages of the pandemic. Amazon was “arguably the largest beneficiary of” this policy, which the article states “neither [Bezos or Biden] seems keen to mention.”
Indeed, neither can acknowledge this because this would be admitting that the entire policy in response to the pandemic, first under Trump and then under Biden, has been to funnel trillions of dollars into Wall Street while rejecting as “too costly” elementary public health measures, carried out successfully in China, to stop the pandemic. Over a million Americans have been sacrificed to private profit, while hundreds of thousands continue to get sick every day in large workplaces such as Amazon warehouses.
At any rate, that small sliver of stimulus which went to keep workers out of poverty has long since been allowed by the Democrats to dry up. In its place a new policy is under way aimed at attacking workers’ living standards.
Bezos’ reference to the burden of “inflation,” currently at 40-year highs, is disingenuous. The type of inflation which Bezos and the American oligarchs are concerned with is not the rising cost of food, fuel and rent but the far more modest rise in wages, which have risen by 4 percent over the course of the last year. This is why the Biden administration has shut off stimulus money to workers and, through the Federal Reserve, is raising interest rates. They are deliberately emulating the “Volcker Shock” of the 1970s, when then-Fed chair Paul Volcker hiked interest rates in order to trigger mass unemployment, to use as a weapon against workers’ wage increases.
Biden’s self-serving demagogy about corporations “paying their fair share” is aimed at covering up the fact that his administration is pursuing policies aimed at forcing workers to bear the cost of the crisis by reducing them to the level of industrial serfs.
The Biden administration is a government of, by and for the capitalist ruling class. Biden himself is a longstanding capitalist politician from the state of Delaware, which is so heavily used as a tax haven by US corporations that there are more registered businesses in the state than residents.
But this class finds itself increasingly isolated from and hated by the broad mass of the population. Capitalism is incompatible with a progressive solution to a single major social problem. None of the policies offered by either party have any popular support outside of more privileged layers, and therefore cannot even be presented in an honest way to the public. Instead, official politics is dominated by lies and backroom conspiracies.
Millions are coming to understand that it is the capitalists’ selfish profit interests which have caused massive and avoidable suffering during the pandemic, and which are driving the reckless provocations against Russia and the danger of nuclear war. This creates the possibility of a mass movement centered in the working class which can escape their weakening control over the situation.
The central domestic problem which the Biden administration faces is how to develop a basis, if not genuine popular support for pro-corporate policies, at least to prevent and contain the outbreak of opposition to them. A central element of this strategy is the promotion of the corrupt, pro-capitalist trade unions and the growing together between the union bureaucracy and the government. Over the past year, the unions have played a central role in suppressing strikes and enforcing sellout contracts. As a result, wages for unionized workers increased only 3.3 percent last year, far lower than for nonunion workers.
As part of his pledge to be the “most pro-union president in American history,” Biden has deliberately singled out Amazon, whose massive, exploited and increasingly restive workforce occupy a critical position in the American economy. Over the last year, Biden has publicly endorsed campaigns to unionize the company.
Recently, he met for a photo-op with Chris Smalls, the head of the Amazon Labor Union, which won a recent union election at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, which he hopes to use to provide his corporatist union strategy with a veneer of credibility. Biden has supplemented this with several verbal attacks on Amazon and Jeff Bezos such as that which prompted the recent exchange.
As the World Socialist Web Site has written, Amazon, “doubtless intoxicated by wealth and profits hardly precedented in world history … resents what it must view as trespassing by the Biden administration and the union bureaucracy on its property.” Despite this, “if a union were to be brought in, Amazon would adapt and integrate the union into its apparatus, just as it has in Europe.”
For Biden, more is involved at Amazon than getting in front of opposition from Amazon workers, as important as this is. Amazon occupies a major and central role in the American economy and Bezos is a figure so wealthy that he is an economic ecosystem unto himself, placing him and other super-rich individuals, such as Elon Musk, outside of any meaningful political control.
On Bezos’ supposed “right” to hoard massive levels of wealth, Biden has no quibble. But under conditions of mounting economic crisis, the growing threat of opposition from below and preparations for world war, the last of which requires the full mobilization of America’s economic industrial resources, the capitalist ruling class as a whole needs to be able to bring even powerful individual members of its class into line. Biden hopes to be able to accomplish through the development of a corporatist labor-management-government structure at Amazon, the type that already exists in other critical infrastructure, such as on the docks and the railroads.
The working class cannot take one side or another in this conflict between Bezos and the Biden administration, but must develop its own independent policy in opposition to the entire structure of capitalist rule. This requires the development of a revolutionary socialist program, which bases the fight against Amazon not on fruitless appeals to the government but on the mobilization of the working class in a broader fight against capitalism and inequality.
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