Workers do not have the ability to pay tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to defend themselves against armies of lawyers working for a multinational conglomerate with limitless resources. These types of agreements can have a powerful chilling effect, regardless of whether Amazon’s expansively vague and tendentious terms would hold up in court. pertaining to Amazon’s business” that is “not otherwise generally known to the public,” this suggests that workers could face a lawsuit for talking on social media about the number of infections in their workplace. Since information about the health and safety conditions relating to the coronavirus inside Amazon warehouses is “information. The Troutdale “non-disclosure agreement,” which was described in the Willamette Week report, subjects workers to civil liability if they disclose “proprietary or confidential information of Amazon in whatever form, tangible or intangible, whether or not marked or otherwise designated as confidential, that is not otherwise generally known to the public, relating or pertaining to Amazon’s business, projects, products, customers, suppliers, inventions, or trade secrets.” Former Amazon worker Jana Jumpp, who prepared the most comprehensive count, told the World Socialist Web Site in June that her count of 2,000 infections represented “just the tip of the iceberg.”Īt the end of September, Amazon quietly posted data indicating that nearly 20,000 US employees, including warehouse and Whole Foods workers, had tested positive. In the face of the management coverup, workers took to social media to gather and compile their own statistics. Spontaneous walkouts and sickouts over the spring and summer were frequently triggered by workers’ independent discovery of a case that had been covered up by management. When workers demanded specific information regarding their workplaces, management insisted that the data was protected by privacy laws and refused to make it available. Throughout the pandemic, Amazon management has sought to conceal the extent of infections in order to lull workers into a false sense of security. While Amazon’s practice of forcing workers to sign such agreements dates back many years and is not limited to the PDX9 warehouse, these agreements take on a new dimension in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. This is the same warehouse where management is forcing workers to sign a broad “non-disclosure agreement,” which was the subject of a report last week in the Willamette Week newspaper. According to Amazon’s own records, which were analyzed at the end of last year by the Portland Mercury newspaper, “26 out of every 100 workers at PDX9 sustained an injury in 2018.” The PDX9 warehouse was, even before the coronavirus pandemic, among the most dangerous of all Amazon’s notoriously unsafe workplaces. The largest three are at prison complexes: the Snake River Correctional Institution in Ontario (550 cases) the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton (520 cases) and the Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem (192 cases). The outbreak at Amazon’s Troutdale warehouse is the fourth largest in the state. Oregon’s health authorities reported last week that since the start of the pandemic, there have been 61 deaths and 11,139 cases associated with workplace outbreaks in Oregon. The outbreak at the PDX9 Fulfillment Center, an 855,000-square-foot building, is still considered “active.” As of the end of November, more than 100 infections have been reported in a major coronavirus outbreak at an Amazon warehouse in Troutdale, Oregon.
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