Risks in return to work
Deaths of Amazon employees brought back sound alarms,
LOS ANGELES— When Harry Sentoso got called back to work at an Amazon delivery centre in Irvine, Calif., in late March, he was excited. He had been working in Amazon warehouses on and off for two years, always hoping to get a full-time position but always laid off after seasonal demand died down. Just a few weeks earlier, at the beginning of March, his bosses had told him they didn’t need him anymore. He had spent most of the month cooped up at home in Walnut, looking for other work.
Sentoso saw the warehouse job as a last chance to earn some cash before settling down to retirement. A small business he had started with a friend a few years earlier selling forklift tires hadn’t taken off, and he didn’t want to touch his savings if he didn’t have to.
He had applied to dozens of jobs in recent years, but Amazon was the best the 63-year-old could find.
Before dawn on March 29, he left home in his Honda Civic, radio tuned to classic rock, and made the drive down to Orange County to work the early morning shift hauling and sorting packages before they went out to customers’ homes.
Two weeks later, in the early morning hours of April 12 — his 27th wedding anniversary — Harry Sentoso would be dead.
Sentoso’s return to work was a part of a massive wave of hiring Amazon has undertaken in response to the coronavirus crisis. In mid-March, the company announced plans to hire 100,000 new workers to deal with a surge in online orders.
In April, it began hiring 75,000 more to keep up with demand as it resumed shipping more non-essential items to customers. With that human wave came the virus. The same week that
Sentoso was called back into work, new cases of COVID-19 were reported at six warehouses across Southern California.
Until now, no cases at the Irvine facility, known as DLA9, have been made public, and Sentoso’s death had gone unreported. Across the U.S., Amazon workers have documented more than 1,000 cases among warehouse workers as of May 20, and 7 deaths. Sentoso is the eighth.
Thousands of businesses have had to close and more than 38 million Americans have lost their jobs since the lockdowns began. But Amazon is hiring. The company has put new measures in place to make its warehouses safer for employees, but the number of cases at its facilities keeps rising.
Sentoso moved to Southern California in the 1970s, fleeing anti-leftist violence and persecution in his native Indonesia that targeted his family for its Chinese ancestry. His legal name was Sukoyo, but he chose to go by the short version of his middle name, Hariyadi, in his new home.
After a few hard years scraping by in downtown L.A., he worked in sales for a doll company, then started his own small business, an import-export operation moving construction materials between
California and Indonesia. Along the way, he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and an MBA from Cal Poly Pomona, met his wife, Endang, and started a family. In his 40s, he landed a steady job as the warehouse supervisor at an oxygen sensor manufacturer, and worked there for over a decade.
By the end of his career, he had socked away a healthy retirement fund, bought a house in Walnut, raised two sons, and taken up day trading as a hobby and a passion.
He was devoted to his family, gracious and kind — former coworkers recall his upbeat attitude and insistence on paying for lunch. He loved good food, dad jokes, and, according to his 20-year-old son, Evan, Mini Coopers.
In short, Harry Sentoso had lived the kind of life that can flourish for immigrants and refugees, if everything goes right, in Southern California’s sunbaked suburban soil.
But things began to go wrong after Sentoso returned to work in late March. He worked from Sunday to Thursday, then started to feel a little under the weather on Friday, the first of his two days off.
On Sunday, April 5, he went back to work, anxious not to miss a shift so soon after getting his job back and convinced he could shake what he thought was a cold, or maybe just bad indigestion.
But on the same day, his wife started feeling sick. Sentoso worked four more days, hauling and sorting boxes for delivery to their final destination, but then started to feel worse.
His wife, a pharmacy technician who made sure he brought and wore a mask to work every day, got tested at her workplace on Wednesday. Her results came back positive, and the family doctor said it was safe to assume her husband was, too. They both began to quarantine.
Three days later, close to midnight on April 11, Sentoso was having trouble getting any oxygen at all. His wife and older son, Dylan, 22, tried to get him to the car to take him to the hospital, but Harry fell unconscious on his driveway. She called an ambulance, and called her other son.
Evan, a student at UCLA, borrowed a classmate’s car and raced across the empty freeways, hoping he might be able to see his dad before things got worse. But he was too late. The EMTs had managed to briefly raise a pulse on the way to the hospital, but it had disappeared again by the time they arrived.
His father was gone. Hospital staff allowed Evan 10 minutes in the ICU, standing a few feet away from his father’s body, to cry and say his last goodbyes.
In a statement, Lisa Levandowski, a spokesperson for Amazon, said: “We are mourning the loss of an associate at our site in Irvine, Calif. His family and loved ones are in our thoughts, and we are supporting his fellow colleagues in the days ahead.”
Evan started getting calls from Amazon HR. There was someone from the Leave of Absence team asking where Harry Sentoso was. After Evan told them, he got a call from the company’s Employee Resource Center, asking to confirm his father had died. Then someone from Amazon’s Global Security Operations called for confirmation. An Amazon employee called from Chile for the same reason. Finally, the local HR team finished up the phone chain.
That same week, Amazon announced that it was going to expand shipments of non-essential items and was hiring a second wave of 75,000 new workers to process the flood of orders.
Amazon also fired two tech workers who had publicly criticized safety and working conditions at the company’s warehouses.
His outrage growing, Evan called the local HR rep back to ask some questions.
“Why are you hiring people if you’re shipping out non-essential goods?” Evan asked. “Someone’s life is not worth less than some person’s board game.” He wants to know why Amazon isn’t being more transparent with its workers and the public.
Reached for comment, Amazon said that it never received confirmation that Sentoso’s death was linked to COVID-19.
Hundreds of workers at Amazon’s facilities in Riverside County have signed and submitted petitions asking the company to close the facilities for two weeks after infections for thorough cleaning and send workers home with quarantine pay.