Amazon is pursuing the “aggressive geographic and use case expansion” of a scheme that sends injured warehouse staff to non-profits for mild obligation, in line with The Financial Times. Under the scheme that is formally referred to as Amazon Community Together, staff get their full wage as a substitute of compensation advantages that sometimes solely cowl a portion of their common pay. While this system sounds useful for each staff and native non-profits, staff’ rights advocates argue that it is a instrument Amazon makes use of to cover the actual variety of severe accidents at its warehouses.
Participants within the Community Together program are despatched to charities like Salvation Army and Habitat for Humanity to do no matter work they’re able to with their accidents. Over 10,000 staff have been positioned at non-profits because it this system launched in 2016, however Amazon needed to reduce its operations throughout the pandemic. Amazon spokesperson Lisa Campos stated this system is voluntary and that the corporate will get “overwhelmingly positive” suggestions from contributors and associate non-profits. Indeed, the employees The Times talked to stated they’re handled properly at their placements, and associate non-profits are grateful for the “amazing amount of work” the employees do for them.
As the publication factors out, although, it additionally offers Amazon a strategy to cut back its Lost Time Incident Rate (LTIR), which is an ordinary OSHA metric that provides authorities concrete knowledge on the variety of extreme incidents in a facility. Based on figures from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Amazon’s price of harm is greater than double that of the nationwide warehousing business common. And in line with Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition of North American labor unions, there have been 34,001 serious injuries at Amazon’s US amenities final 12 months, up 36 p.c from 2020. (Company CEO Andy Jassy blamed that prime harm price to new staff in a letter to shareholders and in an interview with CNBC.)
Amazon published its own report (PDF) in January that claims a 49 p.c drop in LTIR within the US and a 43 p.c drop worldwide in 2020. It did not, nonetheless, point out the rising variety of Community Together placements, which had reportedly gone up by 22 p.c over the identical interval. Eric Frumin from SOC stated this system “can create a good social environment for people,” however “it can be highly abusive because the job could be contributing to the recurrence of the injury, or preventing recovery.”
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