This revelation follows months during which the management evaded, ignored and refused to meet demands by rank-and-file workers for the release of this information.
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In a statement on April 23, the World Socialist Web Site’s International Amazon Workers Voice urged workers to form rank-and-file committees to demand the release of infection statistics at Amazon as a question of basic safety, pointing out that the company “systematically refuses to provide information to workers as to the number of cases” of workers who have gotten sick.
In the intervening months, workers who demanded this information were variously told that management did not track the information at all, that management could not answer workers’ questions because of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) or other laws, and that management was supposedly concerned for workers’ privacy. Workers were told that the total number of infections was not “particularly useful,” but that Amazon’s safety precautions in the warehouses were “working” and “paying off.”
In May, Amazon senior vice president of global operations Dave Clark claimed—despite working for a company that tracks every second of every worker’s day in a warehouse—that he did not know the total number of infections. In an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Clark also said, “I don’t have the number right on me at this moment because it’s not a particularly useful number.”
In May, a dozen state attorneys general demanded that Amazon disclose the total number of infections, but Amazon refused to make that information public.
While hiding the true number of infections, Amazon claimed that its countermeasures to the virus were “working” in the warehouses. Amazon spokesperson Lisa Levandowski told CNN Business in May that “our hard work around social distancing is paying off,” implying that workers were safe from infection.
Now that it suits the company to release the information on its own terms and at the time of its choosing, it turns out that all of the excuses that workers were given were lies.
With management refusing to disclose basic data necessary for employees’ safety, workers attempted to gather the data themselves on social media, with one count reaching 2,000 cases. Former Amazon worker Jana Jumpp, who was interviewed in June on the World Socialist Web Site regarding her efforts to compile these statistics, acknowledged at the time that the available information was “just the tip of the iceberg.”