Hundreds of Amazon employees are planning to call in sick this week as they accuse the company of not prioritizing worker safety amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Beginning on Tuesday, the worker rights group United for Respect says more than 300 Amazon employees in the United States will stay home as they say the company has not done enough to protect warehouse workers during the health crisis, including by allegedly not providing workers with enough face masks and not implementing regular temperature checks as promised, The Guardian reports.
"We are calling out because Amazon is putting its revenue above our safety," one Amazon worker in Michigan, Jaylen Camp, told The Guardian. "We are not essential to them — they just think of us as numbers and quotas. They are not protecting our health."
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This comes as walkouts protesting working conditions at Amazon warehouses have popped up in numerous states, although CNBC notes this is the first major nationwide effort. The protesters' demands include that the company close down any facility with coronavirus cases and provide workers there with testing and two weeks of pay.
“I would feel a whole lot safer if they would just close down facilities for two weeks and clean them," a North Carolina Amazon worker, Monica Moody, told CNBC. "I would go back to work, no problem."
Additionally, the protesters are demanding Amazon eliminate quotas they say "make hand-washing and sanitizing impossible," as well as "provide proper safety equipment to all employees."
Update: In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson said "reports of employee participation in today's event organized by labor unions are grossly exaggerated" and that "the union organizers' claims are also simply false — what's true is that masks, temperature checks, hand sanitizer, increased time off, increased pay, and more are standard across our network because we care deeply about the health and safety of our employees."
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