Today in Evil

It's Amazon's turn, and Amazon has been so bad about protecting its workers, and giving any information to its employees about outbreaks at warehouses, that its employees have set up trackers so that they can know when they are being endangered by the company:

Usually Jana Jumpp works nights loading trucks at an Amazon facility the size of 28 football fields in Jeffersonville, Ind. Now, she spends them shut in her room, clacking away on her sluggish computer.

The emails and Facebook messages from Amazon workers at warehouses across the country tumble in.

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Jumpp has a counterpart at Amazon-owned Whole Foods, Katie Doan, who has been collecting cases since April 2. The two women have never spoken, but they describe nearly identical work fielding a torrent of private messages, searching Facebook groups, Reddit, Twitter and news outlets for reports of infections, and meticulously updating Google documents with the numbers.

Jumpp and Doan, who until this week worked at a store in Tustin, a city in Orange County, say they do this because their co-workers don’t feel safe; they aren’t able to gauge the risk of reporting for work to their warehouse or store because Amazon won’t tell them how many people are believed to have gotten infected there.

As of Wednesday, 343 Whole Foods workers had tested positive, according to crowdsourced data in a publicly available Google document. Of those, 44 cases are in 24 store locations across California. At least Four Whole Foods employees have died, including a manager at a store in Pasadena.

Amazon's response is typical corporate bullsh%$

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Yet Amazon has challenged the notion that it should be providing fuller data. An Amazon spokesperson said the company does track the information at a site level but does not release the aggregate numbers because those numbers might contain outdated information — cases that were resolved weeks or months ago — and thus are not informative to workers.

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Dr. David Eisenman, director of the Center for Public Health and Disasters at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, disagreed. He said that type of data, correctly gathered, is crucial for reducing future infections of employees and understanding which kinds of job sites and occupations carry elevated risk of contracting COVID-19.

“Saying aggregate data is not useful is like pulling wool over your eyes. Of course it’s useful, we’re using it to open the country up again,” Eisenman said.

Yet another reason to hate Amazon.