Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the Congressional Oversight Committee have sent a letter to Amazon CEO Adam Jassy informing him they are investigating whether Amazon forces employees to work during dangerous weather events. In the letter, the Congressional Oversight Committee committee expresses concern over recent and past reports that Amazon employees and contractors are threatened with job loss if they seek shelter during extreme weather conditions. Specifically, the letter points to the deadly tornado strikes in Edwardsville, Illinois, in December 2021, in which six Amazon workers at a local warehouse were killed. As the letter points out: Before he died in the Amazon warehouse collapse, Amazon employee Larry Virden texted his girlfriend, “Amazon won’t let us leave.” According to dispatcher messages, a contract delivery driver located outside the Edwardsville facility, who expressed concern about the growing storms, was told by her supervisor to “just keep delivering, we can’t just call people back for a warning unless amazon [sic] tells us to do so.” When the driver reported continued tornado alarms and asked permission to seek safety, she was told such a choice “will ultimately end with you not having a job come tomorrow morning.” The letter also inquires about reports of Amazon workers being required to keep working during wildfires in California in 2018 and flooding caused by Hurricane Irma in 2017 and Hurricane Ida in 2021, among other events. “The Committee seeks to fully understand the events that led to the tragedy at Amazon’s Edwardsville facility,” the letter reads. “We also seek information about Amazon’s workplace policies or practices that may have prevented the workers from seeking safe shelter, as well as Amazon’s actions in responding to other severe weather incidents and natural disasters.” The Congressional Oversight Committee is giving Amazon until April 14 to hand over documents and communications related to the extreme weather events noted as well as Amazon’s policies on working during extreme weather events. We’ve reached out to Amazon for comment and will update this post if we hear back.
Login to add comment
Other posts in this group
Think you’ve got game? Time to put it to the test with Tinder’s latest launch in collaboration with OpenAI.
On Tuesday, Tinder rolled out The Game Game—a new experience designed to help
The old Tesla can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, ‘cause she’s dead.
Over the past few days, a new trend has emerged on TikTok: people are posting their Tesla trade-ins accompani
Despite a ">triumphant world premiere at Cannes last May, the politically unsparing Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice was stuck in
Countless hours, days—perhaps even weeks—of my life have been spent creating Sims characters, building them houses, marrying them off, and making babies. Now, there’s a new life-simulatio
A bitcoin investor who bought a SpaceX flight for himself and three polar explorers blasted
Spatial intelligence is an emerging approach to deploying AI in the physical world. By combining mapping data with artificial intelligence, it aims to deliver “smart data” tied to specific locatio
Ukraine’s war with Russia—sparked by Russia’s invasion in the spring of 2022—is now entering its fourth year. So t
