Federal investigators revealed Friday that one of the nation’s largest food sanitation companies illegally employed at least 102 children in dangerous jobs at 13 meatpacking facilities across eight states, leading to $1.5 million in fines. The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) said its Wage and Hour Division “found that children were working with hazardous chemicals and cleaning meat processing…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Over the course of just one year ending at the beginning of the pandemic, Amazon issued thousands of disciplinary notes against workers for what seem like nearly inconsequential mistakes in a warehouse that’s now the only unionized Amazon warehouse in the U.S., new reporting finds.
Reuters reports that, in the year ending in April 2020, the company issued 13,000 “disciplines” in the Staten Island, New York JFK8 warehouse. This adds up to an average of about 2.5 disciplines for every one of the roughly 5,300 workers employed then at the warehouse, which voted earlier this year to unionize with Amazon Labor Union (ALU).
The disciplines, which were issued over things like meeting 94 percent of the company’s punishing productivity quotas instead of 100 percent, reveal just how closely Amazon monitors and tracks its workers’ movements – and how quickly the company will threaten its employees with termination if they make small errors just a handful of times.
Other reasons that the company disciplined workers, according to court documents, are also seemingly trivial. Amazon cited one worker for being off task for six minutes during an overnight shift in New Jersey; another worker for exceeding their break time by four minutes, despite Amazon’s supposed five minute grace period for breaks.
Meanwhile, in New York City, another worker was issued a violation notice for erring four times in one week in 2019 while picking items for order fulfillment, despite the fact that the same worker picked over 15,800 products correctly during that time.
The company claims that the majority of the supposed feedback relates to attendance, like when an employee takes a break that exceeds limits. It says that its productivity goals are “fair,” though labor advocates have said that Amazon’s quotas often lead to injury or even death, playing a role in the company’s warehouses being one of the most dangerous places in the industry to work.
These supposed violations were documented in internal company records that were released as part of the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) legal actions against Amazon, which includes the board’s complaint over former JFK8 employee Gerald Bryson’s termination in 2020. At one point in 2018, Bryson had supposedly made 22 errors while counting thousands of products, and was disciplined by a manager. Five more infractions like this in a year and he would be fired, the disciplinary note said.
“You’re sitting there worried about whether you’re going to have a job tomorrow because your rate is not where it’s supposed to be,” Bryson told Reuters. “It was horrible.” He was disciplined multiple times over the course of a month, even as he sped up his pace at the behest of management and the work began to wear down his body.
Bryson was involved with labor organizing efforts in the warehouse at the time and was fired after he helped lead a walkout by JFK8 workers in April 2020. After finding that Amazon illegally fired Bryson, the NLRB ordered the company to reinstate him and pay him lost wages in April.
In a separate lawsuit concerning the JFK8 warehouse, the NLRB has also been seeking to stop the company’s “flagrant unfair labor practices,” as the board refers to them.
Other warehouses also saw similar numbers of disciplinary notices in a similar period of time, court papers show. In Robbinsville, New Jersey, the roughly 4,200 workers were issued over 15,000 notices in the year ending in April 2020, or about 3.5 notices per employee. Another warehouse in North Haven, Connecticut, issued more than 5,000 disciplinary notes to its roughly 4,800 employees in the same time period.
According to a recent report, during the first nine months of the Covid-19 pandemic the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) received more complaints but performed far fewer inspections than usual. Between February 1 and October 26, 2020, OSHA received 15 percent more complaints but performed 50 percent fewer inspections when compared to a similar period in 2019. To make matters worse, most of these inspections were not conducted on-site, even as U.S. coronavirus deaths skyrocketed and many outbreaks were linked to workplace transmission.
OSHA is responsible for the safety and health of 130 million workers employed at eight million worksites. However, the agency has long been criticized for having too few inspectors and for issuing penalties that were too soft to alter employer behavior.
According to the report from the Department of Labor’s Inspector General, OSHA issued 295 violations for 176 Covid-related inspections during this nine-month period, while state-related reviews resulted in 1,679 violations for 756 COVID-19 related inspections. (There are now 22 state OSHA plans which cover both private and state and local government workers and six state plans that cover only state and local government workers.)
Meanwhile, the agency received 23,447 complaints — 3,056 more than in 2019 — and only performed 13,010 inspections — 13,164 less than 2019.
The use of remote inspections drew special attention from the Inspector General. Because inspections are remote rather than on-site, the report said that “hazards may go unidentified and unabated longer, with employees being more vulnerable to hazardous risk exposure while working.”
While remote inspections might help mitigate potential transmission of Covid by those involved in the inspection process, the report determined that reduced on-site inspections could result in more worksite accidents, injuries, deaths, or employee illnesses.
“The lack of on-site inspections may impact OSHA’s ability to observe employer practices, quickly mitigate any potential hazards, and issue violations sooner to control the spread of disease to other employees,” the Inspector General said.
The report also observed that on-site inspections historically result in prompt corrective action for at least a portion of hazards identified. A 2017 Inspector General review, for example, reported that for approximately one-third of the OSHA-issued citations reviewed, “employers abated the hazard during the inspection or with 24 hours of OSHA identifying the hazard.”
While the report provided no breakdown of Covid deaths by industry, the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting reports that as of February 26, there have been at least 45,000-reported positive cases related to meat and poultry processing. In that industry, there were at least 483 outbreaks in 38 states, with at least 243 reported worker deaths in 62 plants in 27 states.
In addition, a recent University of California-San Francisco study of Californians aged 18-65 in the March through October 2020 period found that cooks had the highest risk of mortality, followed by packaging and filling machine operators, agricultural workers, bakers and construction workers.
The Inspector General’s report says that the healthcare industry accounted for 24 percent of COVID-19 related complaints, followed by retail trade (11 percent), restaurants and other eateries (6 percent), construction (3 percent), general warehousing and storage (2 percent), automotive repair (1 percent), and “other,” (53 percent).
The Inspector General recommended four actions:
Brian Michael Doherty is a freelance writer and a retired AFGE Member.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.