Bezos reacts to Amazon union fight
After a union battle at an Alabama warehouse, founder Jeff Bezos acknowledged that Amazon has to do better for its workers and vowed to make it a safer place to work.
Bezos, who will be stepping down as CEO later this year and will become executive chair of the online shopping giant, made the promise Thursday in his annual letter to shareholders.
Workers who were seeking a union in Bessemer, Ala., said they spent 10-hour days on their feet packing and unloading boxes, with only two 30-minute breaks and not enough time to eat lunch, go to the bathroom or recover from the back-breaking work.
Bezos disputed the portrayal of Amazon workers and how they are treated.
“If you read some of the news reports, you might think we have no care for employees. In those reports, our employees are sometimes accused of being desperate souls and treated as robots,” Bezos wrote. “That’s not accurate. They’re sophisticated and thoughtful people who have options for where to work.”
Bezos said about 40 percent of injuries are sprains and strains caused by repeating the same motions and are more likely to happen during a worker’s first six months on the job. He said training may help those “working in a physical role for the first time.”
And he said the company is deploying technology this year that will change up a worker’s job so they’re not using the same muscles over and over again.
Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which organized workers at Bessemer, said that the letter from Bezos proves what it had been saying about poor conditions at Amazon’s warehouses.
“Workers need a union — not just another Amazon public relations effort in damage control,” Appelbaum said.