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- Shareholders are urging Amazon to audit its safety and surveillance practices, The Verge reported.
- Their resolution says “a review is needed of the practices that have made the company a leader in workplace injuries.”
- This month, six Amazon workers died after a warehouse in Illinois collapsed when a tornado struck.
Amazon shareholders are reportedly calling for an audit of the company’s workplace practices after six workers were killed when their warehouse collapsed during a tornado.
Domini Impact Investments filed the resolution, which asks Amazon’s board of directors to commission an independent audit on the company’s productivity quotas and surveillance practices and how each affects rates of injury and turnover, The Verge reported.
“As Amazon strives to be ‘the Earth’s Safest Place to Work,’ a review is needed of the practices that have made the company a leader in workplace injuries and a target for criticism and regulation,” the resolution says, according to The Verge. “With surveillance and productivity quotas linked to high injury rates, we urge Amazon to commission an independent audit of these practices.”
Mary Beth Gallagher, Domini Impact Investments’ director of engagement, told The Verge the firm wants the audit to highlight “the way in which employee productivity metrics and surveillance contribute to a less safe and stable work environment” and to “produce corporate policy changes that make workplaces safer for associates and cement Amazon as the industry leader in health and safety it states it wants to be.”
There will be a vote on the resolution at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in May if Amazon doesn’t challenge it.
Amazon and Domini Impact Investments did not respond to Insider’s requests for comment.
Amazon has come under fire lately after its warehouse in Edwardsville, Illinois, collapsed when a tornado hit, killing six workers. Workers there told Insider’s Bethany Dawson they were told to shelter in a break room or bathroom. Amazon told the BBC that most of the workers who died weren’t sheltering in the “designated location.”
In the wake of the mass casualty incident, a dozen Amazon workers told The Intercept they had little to no disaster training. Other workers told Bloomberg they worried about Amazon’s ban on phones on the warehouse floor since it might keep them from calling loved ones or medical professionals in such an emergency.
An Amazon driver whose base is also in Edwardsville said her supervisor told her she’d be fired if she stopped delivering packages during the tornado warnings, according to Bloomberg.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration said this week it is investigating the warehouse collapse.
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