Eight Amazon Workers Have Now Died from Covid-19

The Los Angeles Times tells the story of 63-year-old Harry Sentoso, an Amazon warehouse worker who was called back to work on March 29th -- and died two weeks later of Covid-19.Across the country, Amazon workers have documented more than 1,000 cases among warehouse workers as of May 20, and 7 deaths. Sentoso is the eighth.... The company has put new measures in place to make its warehouses safer for employees, but the number of cases at its facilities keeps rising... Amazon also fired two tech workers who had publicly criticized safety and working conditions at the company's warehouses... The week before Sentoso died, the company began requiring employees to wear masks on site, and started checking the temperature of workers before they could enter. It began requiring employees to stay six feet apart in late March, and staggered shifts and canceled in-person meetings to make that easier. The company has increased the frequency of cleaning and disinfecting in warehouses as well, and began spraying down whole facilities with disinfectant fogs in mid-April. But [the late Harry Sentoso's son] Evan, and a contingent of Amazon workers across the country, don't think that those measures are enough. Hundreds of workers at Amazon's facilities in Hawthorne and Eastvale, in Riverside County, have signed and submitted petitions asking the company to close the facilities for two weeks after infections for thorough cleaning and send workers home with quarantine pay. Following worker complaints compiled by the Warehouse Workers Resource Center, Cal OSHA has also launched investigations into both facilities... The call for a shutdown has been especially loud at warehouses in Pennsylvania and New York that have become coronavirus hotspots, with more than 60 reported cases at each before the company stopped updating the tally even to local employees.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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