Vox: The real cost of Amazon

Recode writes:

At 5:30 every morning, Rosie, an Amazon worker at a fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York, checks her text messages to see if she’s received more bad news: yet another colleague infected with Covid-19, on top of the at least 50 people at her facility who she says have already gotten sick.

As an older employee, Rosie is at higher risk of developing serious complications from the disease than many of her younger coworkers. Her two children beg her to quit.

“It’s frightening, but you have to put on a smile and you go to work because you need the income,” Rosie, who is being identified by a pseudonym because she fears losing her job for speaking to the press, told Recode in late May.

While she’s grateful for the safety precautions Amazon has introduced at its fulfillment centers in the past two months, like providing masks and hand sanitizer stations, she’s alarmed by what she says she saw and heard around her: dirty air filters that aren’t replaced, a visibly ill colleague who vomited in the bathroom — even after passing the mandatory temperature checks the company instituted in early April — and workers standing close together in the morning when they’re waiting to get shift assignments, even though the rules specify workers must always stay 6 feet apart.

On a follow-up call in late June, Rosie said that since management canceled morning meetings, there is no longer crowding before shifts, and conditions have improved, but not entirely.

To read the full story, please click here.

Also in the news: “1 killed, 2 shot outside Amazon warehouse in Jacksonville“.