On July 15, 2024, Senator Sanders, Chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, released an interim report on the Committee’s investigation into Amazon’s workplace safety and health practices.
The following statement can be attributed to CWS spokesperson Marc Freedman:
“This report and investigation are inappropriate uses of committee resources to target a single employer the Chairman does not like. Over and over again, Chair Sanders uses his position to attack the companies he dislikes. The first target was Starbucks, and Amazon is now the latest victim.
“Chair Sanders and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration are aggressively targeting the warehousing industry – and Amazon specifically – despite the fact the other industries have significantly higher fatality and serious injury rates, and the warehouse industry, and Amazon in particular, have shown continuous improvement following the COVID-19 crisis. As data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics has shown, while the warehousing industry workforce has grown immensely over the last 5 years, the incident rate of nonfatal injuries in the industry has remained flat.
“If the Chairman wants to improve safety for delivery workers, he should start with the US Postal Service, as OSHA’s own data shows the USPS by far has the highest percentage of investigations resulting in citations compared to other large employers in the industry. What this report really shows is the Chairman’s unyielding obeisance to the Teamsters and other unions.”