SB Airport Communities Meet Amazon Vice President Heather Macdougall & Demand Safe Jobs — March 5, 2020
The following message was featured on a leaflet passed out at the American Bar Association Section of Labor and Employment Law, 2020 Midwinter Meeting, Occupational Safety and Health Law Committee Meeting, Rancho Mirage, CA. The committee meeting was sponsored by Amazon and featured Amazon Health & Safety VP Heather MacDougall on a panel. SB Airport Communities visited the meeting during MacDougall’s appearance. Please visit this website to learn more about Amazon’s injury rates.
Amazon and USDOL/OSHA Hazards to Warehouse Workers
Amazon is the second largest private employer in the country and the largest in the Inland Empire, with over 20,000 workers in warehouses in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. Amazon’s growth in the region has come with a human cost, however: high rates of workplace injuries in an already hazardous sector.
At the same time, the US Department of Labor under President Trump has been dismantling critical rules and standards that benefit Amazon workers: repealing the electronic reporting rule for detailed injury records from large employers like Amazon; taking positions on misclassification more favorable towards classifying “on-demand” workers, such as Amazon Flex drivers, as independent contractors, despite multiple lawsuits by these workers claiming they were misclassified; and issuing a new joint employer rule that makes it easier for big companies like Amazon to avoid responsibility for workplace violations that occur with subcontracted employees.
In response to evidence of high injury rates at Amazon, in December 2019 federal lawmakers demanded to see Amazon's annual injury logs. OSHA has failed to comply with this simple request. Amazon also has yet to disclose its full injury records on its own, despite recent demands for this transparency from U.S. Senators.
This toxic combination directly affects Amazon workers in Southern California and the communities where these warehouses are based. Analyses of injury data reported in Amazon’s OSHA 300A records from facilities across the nation show injury rates almost double the industry average for warehousing, and three times the average rate across all private employers. These injuries reflect the kinds of dangers bringing standards down across the industry and our region.
In response, workers and community members in the Inland Empire are organizing and demanding higher standards at warehouse facilities in the region, including the planned Eastgate Air Freight Terminal, a facility sources indicate is being developed for Amazon in San Bernardino. We believe our community has not benefited from Amazon’s presence in the past decade. We are fighting to change these conditions by demanding community benefits agreements for warehouse and logistics operations doing business in our region. Workplace safety and community health must be key parts of a logistics sector that truly benefits our community.
Amazon is sponsoring and participating in the ABA’s Occupational Safety and Health Law Committee Midwinter Meeting, a conference with a long history dedicated to workplace safety. The experiences of many Amazon workers, findings of OSHA investigations, and even the company’s own injury logs, however, raise serious questions about Amazon’s own safety record, in light of growing evidence of high and persistent rates of serious injury and ruthless production quotas.
An important opportunity for discussing such critical questions at this conference was lost when Debbie Berkowitz, one of the nation’s preeminent worker health and safety experts, faced pressure to withdraw from participating in a panel alongside Heather MacDougall, Amazon’s vice president of employee health and safety, after Berkowitz helped to author a report critical of Amazon’s safety record. We should all be outraged if the voices of our leading experts are excluded from discussions about the safety records and community impact of major companies such as Amazon.
The Department of Labor, Amazon and the American Bar Association all play key roles in the enforcement and implementation of standards intended to protect the health and safety of hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers. These standards are declining and we and our allies around the country will continue to hold you accountable for these conditions.