Interest groups urge Senator Sanders to reveal details of Amazon investigation

Congress is pushing Amazon to disclose more information about its safety record, from warehouses to delivery workers, but some labor rights advocacy groups say lawmakers aren’t acting quickly enough.

On Thursday, about a year after Senator Bernie Sanders launched a congressional investigation into working conditions in Amazon’s warehouses, more than 30 interest groups sent a letter to the Vermont congressman demanding that the results be made public.

Last June, Sanders called on Amazon warehouse workers to tell their stories and the company to disclose information about injury rates, employee turnover, work pace and in-house medical services to treat workplace injuries.

“Given the high stakes of this investigation, we look forward to progress,” the advocacy groups wrote on Thursday.

“If lawmakers and regulators do not act, the company’s dangerous and exploitative model will become the standard in warehousing, logistics and retail,” the letter continues. “The result will be a harsh, untenable reality for workers in these essential jobs.”

The groups hoped to have more information about the investigation by mid-July, when Amazon’s annual Prime Day sale will mean a spike in orders and potentially increased pressure on employees to keep packages moving in warehouses.

Amazon last June disputed Sanders’ initial claim that the company’s warehouses were “one of the most dangerous” workplaces. The company said injury rates had declined for two consecutive years, thanks to investments in training, workplace “safety professionals,” technology and equipment.

But some advocacy groups, including some of the organizations that signed Thursday’s letter, accuse Amazon of not telling the whole truth in its safety reports. Moreover, the groups say, Amazon still has an incredibly high injury rate in its warehouses.

Amazon spokeswoman Maureen Lynch Vogel said the company has cooperated with the investigation and will continue to do so. “Our safety record has continued to improve,” she said. “We continue to work to be best in class.”

Sanders, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, did not respond to requests for comment by publication time.

The letter comes as a bipartisan group of senators is investigating another aspect of Amazon’s workforce. A group of 29 senators sent a letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in January asking for more information about working conditions for Amazon’s network of independent delivery workers.

Some of the company’s delivery partners – independent companies that help deliver shipments for Amazon – accused the company of setting an unsafe pace of work and creating a dangerous work environment for drivers, including skipping breaks and making deliveries in extreme weather conditions without proper equipment.

According to the letter from Congress, these allegations led drivers to demonstrate in front of 25 Amazon warehouses in nine states.

“Over the past few years, reports of unsafe and unfair working conditions have shown that widespread safety and labor law violations appear to be a feature, not a bug, of the DSP program,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter. “Further Senate scrutiny of Amazon’s DSP program is clearly overdue.”

Amazon denied the allegations in the letter.

“DSPs are small business owners and entrepreneurs who create good jobs with good pay and benefits for more than 275,000 drivers around the world,” Lynch Vogel said. “We strongly dispute the allegations in the letter and look forward to sharing the facts.”

Ryan Gerety, executive director of the Athena Coalition, one of the advocacy groups that signed Thursday’s letter, said the groups are eagerly awaiting the results of both investigations but are particularly concerned about the status of the investigation into working conditions in the warehouses, since it began a year ago.

“In response to a wave of Amazon workers nationwide demanding better conditions, multiple state and federal investigations are currently examining how Amazon treats its workers,” Gerety said. “Now we must act.”

This story will be updated.