Bernie Sanders launches Senate investigation into Amazon labor practices
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, launched an investigation this week into the nation’s second-largest employer, Amazon, and the working conditions in its warehouses. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight In a letter to Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy, Sanders demanded information about the company’s “systematically underreported” injury rates, employee turnover, productivity targets and adherence to federal and state safety recommendations. Sanders often has castigated Amazon in fervent speeches on income inequality and corporate greed in the United States.
“Amazon sets an example for the rest of the country,” Sanders told The Washington Post in an interview about his decision to focus on the e-commerce giant. “What Amazon does, their attitude, their lack of respect for workers, permeates the American corporate world.”
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post. Interim Post chief executive Patty Stonesifer sits on Amazon’s board.
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Sanders’s Amazon probe is the latest investigation that the two-time presidential candidate has launched since assuming his role as chairman of the Senate HELP Committee in January. The position has given him vast authority to direct national attention to the practices of some of the country’s most powerful companies, such as Starbucks and Moderna, and to interrogate their corporate leaders.
An investigation into workplace health and safety practices at Amazon — the e-commerce giant that has drawn attention for opposing union organizing efforts and for injury rates roughly double the warehouse-industry average — gives Sanders an outlet to push for accountability from one of the country’s most influential employers in a divided Congress.
Steve Kelly, a spokesman for Amazon, responded that the company had “received Chairman Sanders’ letter this evening and are in the early stages of reviewing it.” He said Sanders had an open invitation to tour one of Amazon’s warehouses.
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The HELP committee’s previous major target was Starbucks. In January, Sanders wrote a similar letter to Starbucks founder and former CEO Howard Schultz, accusing the company of refusing to bargain a contract with workers who voted to unionize. In March, Schulz testified before the Senate committee under threat of subpoena from Sanders. “Over the past 18 months, Starbucks has waged the most aggressive and illegal union-busting campaign in the modern history of our country,” Sanders said at the hearing.
A Starbucks representative said at the time that Starbucks had not tried to delay bargaining and that the company had come to the table as legally obligated at stores that voted to unionize.
On whether he would call Amazon’s Jassy or founder Bezos to testify in a similar hearing, Sanders said, “That’s an absolute possibility.”
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In his letter to Jassy, Sanders describes Amazon’s warehouse conditions as “uniquely dangerous.” He pointed to a recent report compiled by a coalition of labor unions using federal data that found Amazon’s serious-injury rate was double the warehouse industry average in 2021. He also cited government investigations that found health and safety violations at Amazon facilities, and his own conversations with Amazon warehouse workers.
“Amazon is one of the most valuable companies in the world, worth $1.3 trillion and its founder, Jeff Bezos, is one of the richest men in the world worth nearly $150 billion,” Sanders wrote. “Amazon should be one of the safest places in America to work, not one of the most dangerous.”
Kelly, the company spokesman, said Amazon has recorded a 23 percent reduction in injuries since 2019 and pointed to a past company statement about Amazon’s critics’ splicing the data “to suit their narrative.”
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“We’ve invested more than $1 billion into safety initiatives, projects and programs in the last four years, and we’ll continue investing and inventing in this area because nothing is more important than our employees’ safety,” Kelly said.
Sanders has long slammed working conditions and pay at Amazon. After a campaign led by Sanders, Amazon in 2018 made a surprising announcement: It would raise its base hourly pay rate to $15, more than twice the federally mandated minimum wage.
“We listened to our critics, thought hard about what we wanted to do and decided we want to lead,” Bezos, who was CEO of Amazon at the time, said in a statement. “We’re excited about this change and encourage our competitors and other large employers to join us.”
Sanders said he was “appreciative” of Amazon’s decision to raise its starting wage in his interview with The Post. But said he had been “extremely upset by their vehement anti-union behavior” and workplace safety record.
“The proof is in the pudding,” Sanders said, noting Amazon’s high level of worker attrition. A 2021 New York Times investigation found that the company’s turnover rate was roughly 150 percent a year.
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The senator has repeatedly reprimanded Amazon for campaigns to stamp out union organizing efforts in its facilities; efforts to unionize company warehouses have spread across the country.
Last year, Amazon workers won a surprise victory when warehouse employees in Staten Island voted to join the independent Amazon Labor Union. Amazon has repeatedly appealed the results of that election and successfully delayed the contract bargaining process. Delivery drivers who work for a third-party contractor in Southern California joined the Teamsters union in April, but Amazon terminated their employer’s contract.
Kelly, the Amazon spokesman, said that “Amazon strongly disagrees with the outcome” of the union election in Staten Island and that the federal labor board and the union had “improperly influenced the outcome of the election.”
He said the Amazon delivery drivers who had unionized with the Teamsters did not work for Amazon but for a contractor that “had been notified of its termination for poor performance well before the union announcement.”
Sanders has requested that Jassy and Amazon respond to his letter by July 5.
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Source: The Washington Post
