On December 16, Senator Sanders, Chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, released another report on the Committee’s investigation into Amazon’s workplace safety and health practices. No other members of the HELP Committee are involved in the report or investigation. Amazon’s response to the report is available here.
The following statement can be attributed to CWS spokesperson Ed Egee:
“Once again, Senator Sanders is wasting committee resources to attack a single corporation that he does not like. It is inappropriate, misguided, and an abuse of power. He relied on faulty allegations to open his investigation and has now completely ignored a recent ruling by a Washington state judge who threw out those same allegations for being ‘unpersuasive for several reasons.’ If the facts do not fit the narrative, Senator Sanders simply ignores them.
“Sanders and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration are both aggressively targeting the warehousing industry, but data demonstrates that the industry – and Amazon specifically – are focused on improving workers’ safety and health. Between 2019 and 2023, Amazon, for example, invested over $1 billion on workplace safety, not including its COVID-19-related initiatives, and in that same time span, the company’s injury rate and lost time incident rate both fell. These efforts should be applauded, not ignored to fit a preconceived notion or for political gain.
“Other industries, and the US Postal Service in particular, have disastrous safety and health records year after year and cannot boast such efforts. If Sanders wants to improve safety outcomes for workers, he should focus on those industries that have routinely failed to protect their workers. Instead, he is using his position to target specific companies at the behest of the unions he serves.”