Amazon fires worker after he organized a walkout protesting unsafe work conditions from coronavirus cases inside the warehouse

FOX News

Amazon has fired a worker at its Staten Island, N.Y., warehouse after he helped organize a walkout over the company's coronavirus responses, alleging he put others at risk.

Christian Smalls had demanded that the Jeff Bezos-led company close its Staten Island fulfillment center for a deep cleaning after a worker tested positive for COVID-19 in mid-March. Smalls, along with allegedly more than 100 workers walked off the job at approximately 12:30 p.m. Monday, the New York Post reported.

"There's 10 cases confirmed here and the media only knows about one," Smalls told the news outlet. 

"They have to shut this down. That's all we want."

“Somebody needs to be held accountable,” Smalls added in his interview with the Post. “I saw people get sick every single day. I’ve sent people home with different symptoms, dizziness, vomiting, blood-shot eyes, puffy eyes. I’ve seen it all.”

In a statement obtained by Fox News, an Amazon spokesman said Smalls was terminated because he violated several terms of his employment.

"Mr. Smalls received multiple warnings for violating social distancing guidelines and putting the safety of others at risk," the spokesman said. "He was also found to have had close contact with a diagnosed associate with a confirmed case of COVID-19 and was asked to remain home with pay for 14 days, which is a measure we’re taking at sites around the world. Despite that instruction to stay home with pay, he came onsite today, March 30, further putting the teams at risk. This is unacceptable and we have terminated his employment as a result of these multiple safety issues."

Amazon also disputed that 100 workers walked out. The spokesman said 15 people participated in the demonstration, adding that their employees are "heroes fighting for their communities."

They are calling them heroes. Like they are soldiers in a battle to fulfill prime orders.

Let's hear from an actual one.

Jacobin

Christian Smalls, from Newark, New Jersey, is a thirty-one-year-old assistant manager at the Staten Island Amazon warehouse. The facility, called JFK8, employs nearly five thousand people — and more with each passing week, as mass layoffs send workers onto the job market and Amazon puts them to work delivering packages to those staying home during the economic shutdown.

What’s going on at your workplace?

CS: It’s horrendous. Let me just start from the beginning.

Before we had any confirmed cases in my building, I had pretty much foreseen what was going to happen. I’ve been with the company five years. I opened up every major building in the Tristate — in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. This is my third building over the course of those five years. 

I’ve been with this building since it opened almost two years ago.
So at or around the beginning of March, we had some managers that returned back from Seattle. Seattle is where Amazon has its headquarters, and it was one of the first hot spots in America for the coronavirus outbreak. One of the managers came back, and shortly after that she left because she was sick.

From that point forward, it was just a domino effect. Supervisors were calling out sick. My colleagues were calling out sick. I was sending associates home left and right because they were sick.

Three weeks ago, I took a stand and brought it up to leadership. Like, “Hey, there’s something wrong here. We need to shut this building down and quarantine everyone for two weeks with pay.” They didn’t listen. At that point, I walked out. I said, “I’m not gonna sit here and watch people get sick and y’all do nothing about it.”

I’ve been unpaid ever since, and I’ve been fighting behind scenes. I’ve been calling the health department and the CDC. I’ve sent out numerous emails to the press. I’m trying the best I can to build awareness of this situation.

So fast forward to this week, I decided to go back to work one day to see how things were shaping up, see if they made any safety changes. As soon I got there, around 8:30 in the morning, I ran into my colleague. She looked horrible. Bloodshot red eyes, all puffy. I said, “What are you doing here? You look sick.” She informed me that she went and got tested last night for the coronavirus.

I said, “Wait, you got tested for the coronavirus and they allowed you to come back in the building?” We all know you don’t get the test unless you’re showing severe symptoms. So I sent her home.
Less than an hour later, we had a small managers’ meeting and they informed us that we have one confirmed case. That wasn’t the person I’d run into, she was confirmed later. Instead it was a confirmed case of a person who had started to feel sick the week before. I found this out a little after eleven in the morning, and I was out the door by twelve. On my way out the door, I told as many people as I could to go home.

At this point, I’ve heard of at least seven people who have tested positive.

Why are sick people coming into work?

CS: Because Amazon is not offering paid sick leave. They’re offering unlimited unpaid time off, which is ridiculous because people shouldn’t be forced to sit at home without getting paid for choosing to be safe in quarantine. Since I’ve been off the job, I’ve been taking money out of my 401k just to get by. I shouldn’t have to do that.

 
The way the policy works is that you only get paid quarantine if you get tested and it comes back positive. But we know you can’t even get a test unless you’re really sick, and even then it takes a while to get the results. So you get people who are obviously sick as a dog coming into work.
 
My colleague I told you about before, she’d been to work for the last eight days in a row. There are about 150 people in that department daily. She’d been in contact with the whole entire department. I sent her home on Tuesday and she tested positive on Wednesday.
She’d been in contact with so many people, and the only person they ended up giving quarantine to was me.

Wait, you haven’t tested positive for the virus. Why did they quarantine you?

CS: Because I’m being rebellious right now. I’ve been coming to the building, bringing groups of ten or twenty people to the general manager’s office to voice our concerns. They decided to cut off the head of the snake. They quarantined me as of yesterday. So I’m getting paid now, but I don’t even care about the money. At this point I’m just trying to organize. I’m just doing what I feel is right.

I’m looking at a quote from an Amazon spokesperson who says, “We are following all guidelines from local health officials and are taking extreme measures to ensure the safety of employees at our site.” Is that true?

CS: That’s absolutely false. These spokespeople that they have talking to the press are sugarcoating everything. They don’t know a damn thing about what’s going on in these buildings. They’re even downplaying the number of positive cases confirmed.

 
Everything the company is doing is reactive, not proactive. The tables were still together two weeks ago. They just started separating them when I brought it up to their attention. Now they want to start taking temperatures at the door. The virus has been in the building for weeks, and now you want to take temperatures?
 
What is the purpose? What is it that we’re doing that’s worth the risk? Jeff Bezos is saying we’re like the Red Cross, but we still have a large amount of inventory that is being sold to the public that is non-essential. Even on essential items, if we’re all carrying the virus while we’re handling all these packages, I’m not really sure we’re helping people. We’re touching metal, plastic, and cardboard all day long, all things we know the virus can survive on, and shipping out packages to thousands and thousands of people.
 
Jeff Bezos says we’re helping the community. We’re keeping business going, but that’s all. We’re putting our lives on the line for that. My job description says have a high school diploma and lift fifty pounds. It doesn’t say risk my life working during a pandemic.
 
I always thought Jeff Bezos was a good CEO up until this point. He dropped the ball. These Amazon buildings need to be shut down immediately. We have almost 5,000 people at JFK8. You do the math. If they don’t shut it down, this is the epicenter of the next coronavirus wave right here.

Amazon paid no taxes and got hundreds of millions of dollars in rebates in the last two years.

Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy

Amazon, the ubiquitous purveyor of two-day delivery of just about everything, nearly doubled its profits to $11.2 billion in 2018 from $5.6 billion the previous year and, once again, didn’t pay a single cent of federal income taxes.
The company’s newest corporate filing reveals that, far from paying the statutory 21 percent income tax rate on its U.S. income in 2018, Amazon reported a federal income tax rebate of $129 million. For those who don’t have a pocket calculator handy, that works out to a tax rate of negative 1 percent. 

The fine print of Amazon’s income tax disclosure shows that this achievement is partly due to various unspecified “tax credits” as well as a tax break for executive stock options.
This isn’t the first year that the cyber-retailing giant has avoided federal taxes. Last year, the company paid no federal corporate income taxes on $5.6 billion in U.S. income.
ITEP has examined the tax-paying habits of corporations for nearly 40 years and has long advocated for closing loopholes and special breaks that allow many profitable corporations to pay zero or single-digit effective tax rates. When Congress in 2017 enacted the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and substantially cut the statutory corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, proponents claimed the rate cut would incentivize better corporate citizenship. However, the tax law failed to broaden the tax base or close a slew of tax loopholes that allow profitable companies to routinely avoid paying federal and state income taxes on almost half of their profits.

 In fact, the Trump Administration and its congressional allies included lavish new giveaways such as immediate expensing of capital investments. Multiple analysts scored the tax law as a huge revenue loser, giving away far more to big corporations in rate cuts than it takes in loophole-closers.

 Amazon is no stranger to tax controversies. Last year the company, in a staggering act of hubris, engaged in a year-long aggressive push for huge new relocation subsidies for its “HQ2” headquarters. A year later, Amazon appears to have won its two-front battle against fair taxes by continuing to altogether avoid federal taxes and obtaining lucrative packages of local tax breaks for not one but two new HQ2 locations, in New York and Virginia as well breaks for an operations center in Nashville, Tenn.

And #PoorBezos has the unmitigated gall to demand subsidies from this state and city and to go after Trump with the national/his personal newspaper that he owns. What a insecure and sad greedy little miser.

Rally at NYCHA Queensbridge Houses supports Amazon's HQ2

 

QNS

Bishop Mitchell Taylor and Queensbridge residents rallied on Monday to support employment opportunities that the online retail giant could possibly provide to Long Island City and beyond.

Taylor told reporters that negativity from opponents of the proposal does not represent the wants or needs of NYCHA residents or the involvement of their leaders in discussions about Amazon coming to their community. But more than anything, they spoke out against perceived outsiders stoking discontent within the confines of the housing complex.

“I’m incensed when I see people from Connecticut, from other boroughs, from other places, convene upon Queensbridge, knocking on doors telling people because of Amazon, because of this, you’re going to lose your apartment,” Taylor said. “Let me tell you something: if you’re concerned about gentrification, that happened 15 years ago … You cannot speak for us. You haven’t lived here.”

Taylor’s roots in Queensbridge go deep with his father, also a pastor, first serving a northwest Queens congregation in 1960 and Taylor himself leading worship for 28 years. He is a founder of Urban Upbound, an organization which works to break cycles that keep families in poverty and serves on the Community Advisory Committee for the implementation of Amazon.

 “We are negotiating. We are talking. We are trying to figure out what is the best possible outcome for the residents of northwestern Queens and New York City,” Taylor said. “Twenty-five thousand jobs, possibly 40,000 jobs coming to this neighborhood and we want to know how that’s going to happen, how that’s going to benefit our residents. Nobody is cutting any deals here.”

NY Daily News

Supporters of Amazon’s plan to bring a new hub to Queens gathered Monday in front of the Queensbridge North Houses to counter critics who say the deal has little to no grassroots backing.

Their event attracted a diverse — and unlikely — mix of about a dozen people to the Long Island City public housing complex and included tenant leaders, a representative from the pro-business Association for a Better New York and Rep. Carolyn Maloney.

April Simpson, president of the Queensbridge Houses Tenant Association, was front and center. She contends that, unlike other new arrivals to the area, Amazon has been talking with the group since “Day One” and believes the Seattle-based company will hire people living in the NYCHA complex.

“You know why? Because we have a voice,” she said. “We’re at the table. That’s the blessing.”
 

If Amazon has been meeting with these people and there is so much alleged support for the HQ2 deal, why would they keep it such a secret?

"Day One" is Jeff Bezo's credo for running his empire.

Happy Thanksgiving from Queens Crap!

It's the day of the year when we give thanks for all we have. And no one has more than this guy. And he's about to get even more at our expense thanks to two other guys who he spun like records. I guess we should be thankful, though!