While Amazon’s founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos continues to play space cowboy in a hot race with Tesla’s Elon Musk and heir collective billions, 6 workers at his Edwardsville, Illinois, Amazon warehouse lost their lives late Friday night to the deadly string of catastrophic, mid-December tornadoes that ripped a path of destruction over 200 miles long, across 6 different states in the Southeastern and Midwest US.
And now, the company has found itself under brutal fire after workers who survived revealed that Amazon’s strict phone ban for employees on the clock in their warehouses likely led to their inability to get to safety in a timely manner when the tragic weather came tearing through, according to a new report from Bloomberg.
According to the report, Amazon has had a long-standing, strict no-phone policy in their warehouses across the country, requiring workers to leave their mobile devices in their cars or their company lockers before passing through metal detectors at the security check on their way into the building. Amazon had gotten a little lax on their phone policy during the pandemic, but have lately begun to tighten things back up once more at their various facilities across the states.
But now, after Friday night’s fatal events, 5 employees, including 2 who work at a facility across the street from the warehouse that collapsed, are pushing back against the company’s strict phone ban, saying they want Amazon to butt out and allow them access to their phones for information and updates on deadly weather events like the one just experienced.
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Not only will their phones allow them to stay up to date on weather alerts, access to their mobile devices will also allow them to call for help in instances such as this, the workers say.
“After these deaths, there is no way in hell I am relying on Amazon to keep me safe,” one employee from a neighboring Amazon facility in Illinois said. “If they institute the no cell phone policy, I am resigning.”
Another employee from a warehouse in Indiana made it clear that she will be using her paid time off to stay home the next time Amazon decides to keep going with business as usual when warnings of catastrophically severe weather have been made.
“I don’t trust them with my safety to be quite frank,” the worker stated. “If there’s severe weather on the way, I think I should be able to make my own decision about safety.”
Amazon has unsurprisingly declined to respond to their workers’ concerns regarding their phone ban policy, stating that they’re instead staying focused “on assisting the brave first responders on the scene and supporting our affected employees and partners in the area.”
The phone ban policy at Amazon facilities and the company’s refusal to even acknowledge their possible role in putting their employees in direct danger highlights one of the biggest problems in this nation where Capitalism is the rule of law — top their executives are clearly willing to risk the health, safety, and even lives of their employees who often aren’t even paid a living wage, so long as it increases productivity, efficiency, and gives them a cutting edge in the market. Frankly, workers know good and well that their literal lives come second rate when stacked up against the productivity charts of them men up top who wouldn’t know warehouse work if it smacked them in the face.
Jeff Bezos made things all the worse for himself when he spent the majority of his day on Saturday celebrating a celebrity space launch by his company Blue Origin — all while his employees mourned their losses and emergency personnel dug through the rubble of what was left of one of his warehouses, searching for survivors and bodies.
Only at 8 PM Central Time did Bezo even acknowledge the tragedy with a tweet:
(2/2) All of Edwardsville should know that the Amazon team is committed to supporting them and will be by their side through this crisis. We extend our fullest gratitude to all the incredible first responders who have worked so tirelessly at the site.
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) December 12, 2021
“After this, everyone is definitely afraid of not being able to keep their phones on them,” one Amazon worker said in the wake of the tragedy. “Most employees that I’ve talked to don’t keep their phones on them for personal conversation throughout the day, It’s genuinely for situations like this.”
You can read the full report from Bloomberg here.
Featured image via screen capture
