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Who watches out for workers if a former Amazon executive is in charge of OSHA, the federal agency with the mission to protect workers?

As in other parts of government, President Trump is placing a fox in charge of the henhouse at OSHA. The Senate will take up logistics industry hack David Keeling’s nomination June 5. The administration’s goals seem to be to apply the practices of the warehouse sector, famous for being dangerous and unhealthy, to our entire economy.

While Keeling was a key workplace safety executive at Amazon, we saw that Amazon’s push for speed came at the expense of worker safety and health. Injuries are disturbingly common in Amazon warehouses and Amazon has frequently contested even the smallest citation. Keeling also worked at UPS as a top safety executive at a time when drivers documented heat illness and other hazards at work. In fact, OSHA cited Amazon and UPS for over 300 safety violations combined during Keeling’s respective tenures at each company. 

For five years, the Strategic Organizing Center has been tracking the injury rate at Amazon warehouses – using publicly-available OSHA data. The SOC’s annual report is incredibly valuable because Amazon employs nearly 1 million people in its warehouses and this evidence is important to workers, the US Senate and to local officials with Amazon warehouses in their cities in the fight to hold the company accountable. 

Four years ago, Amazon made a bold and completely hollow declaration that it would become the safest place to work in the world. But every year since it has a much higher injury rate than other warehouse operators. This culminated with the Senate HELP Committee’s report in December 2024 on the documents the committee subpoenaed from Amazon.

Keeling’s nomination comes at a critical time when federal enforcement capacity is being slashed and OSHA is working on long-overdue rulemaking to establish national standards to protect workers from heat illness. OSHA’s mission is to ensure that American workers are safe at work. Keeling’s record with companies that have repeatedly undermined that mission for their workers should be disqualifying.

-Sheheryar Kaoosji

For years the community and the California Attorney General’s office have raised serious concerns about a plan to redevelop part of San Bernardino that would have displaced 2,600 people and destroyed hundreds of units of affordable housing. 

Community members were relentless in their organizing, noting the proposed warehouse and industrial development that would take the place of their homes would cause increased congestion, safety concerns, harm to children and their schools and more. 

While we celebrated in coalition with San Bernardino Airport Communities in 2024 when the Inland Valley Development Agency publicly shelved the plans, we quickly learned that the agency immediately began working on a new proposal dubbed the Inland Valley Infrastructure Corridor Project. This renamed project would build out much of the same infrastructure to support warehouses and industrial uses. But this time, the IVDA chose to obscure and downplay the impacts to the surrounding community.

The People’s Collective for Environmental Justice exposed this duplicitous plan in a lawsuit filed in San Bernardino County Superior Court challenging the Inland Valley Development Agency.

We stand with PCEJ.

Please read more about their strategic lawsuit in reporting by Anthony Victoria in KVCR. 

What’s a worker center? That’s a question I get a lot. Put simply, when workers are organized, the workplace is safer. A worker center can help workers in a particular industry or geography find their power through collective action and fighting for their rights.

In California, we have large sectors that have virtually no union representation. The lowest rates of unionization are in low-wage and hourly jobs like retail and restaurants. Warehouses in the Inland Empire have been steadily multiplying, but an overwhelming majority of those workers don’t belong to a union.

The Inland Empire has more than 500 large warehouses representing all retailers. While many communities have one Amazon warehouse, in the Inland Empire we have 14 large Amazon facilities and dozens more smaller ones. Amazon is the largest private sector employer in the region and in the state of California.

Warehouses typically have high turnover and injury rates driven by the use of piece rates, surveillance and quotas to keep maximum pressure on workers to work as fast as humanly possible in order to keep their jobs. Amazon has one of the highest injury rates in the industry.

The Warehouse Worker Resource Center was founded to engage workers and community members through education, advocacy and action. For over ten years we have built a movement of workers and local residents impacted by the goods movement sector to hold companies accountable for their impacts on workers, communities, the environment and our economy.

Our strategy is rooted in building power in our region and making connections with workers who are part of the global supply chain. To do that we organize workers and teach them how to join with their coworkers to change working conditions for the better.

While our work requires a sophisticated understanding of the flow of freight, the trends in warehousing and logistics, and the business operations of the key players, specifically Amazon;  our approach is also simple.

We live in a region that is dominated by one industry. In the Inland Empire everyone is directly affected by warehouses, many people have worked, currently work or will work in a warehouse and if you are one of the few who don’t have that experience you most certainly know someone who does. Warehouse workers need a resource to help navigate their workplace, find community and get support as they confront and improve their working conditions. We elevate and build the community’s response to this sector and its footprint on our region from residents, workers and policymakers with the goal of making the sector sustainable for everybody.

-Sheheryar Kaoosji

While all eyes are on Musk, don’t take your eyes off of another oligarch, Jeff Bezos. Amazon Web Services, web host to a third of the internet, profits from enormous federal contracts for technology services.

This rise of AWS coincides with the convergence of private technology contracts and state power for the purposes of surveillance and information collection. This bipartisan project is entering a new era. Despite its relative low profile in DC, Amazon is at the center of this effort, and will likely win more police and military contracts in the next four years.

Where and why did Amazon perfect such devious data collection and processing? In the warehouses that have multiplied in the Inland Empire in the last ten years.

Every day over a million people work in Amazon warehouses moving goods that we order. These workers live in countries with freedom, like the United States, but inside the workplace there is no democracy. As a result, workers are subjected to experimentation and surveillance tools that create tight and complicated binds around them. Cameras track workers from the moment they enter the facility and record their actions, their motions, the number of items they move and their interactions with their co-workers. When Amazon wants to use the information against someone, they rewind or search the data to find a reason to discipline or fire the worker.

Amazon’s approach to getting people to work harder and faster has become the model of labor relations for many employers. Now Amazon has marketed these tools to the state.

Data “fusion” across different datasets, government agencies and across national boundaries, has been the driving logic of the enforcement state in this era. This leads to an amalgamation of data – consumer, administrative, biometric, location – harvested to enable police and state agencies to track all residents for any reason. Just as Amazon can go back to ‘find a reason’ to incriminate a worker they target for speaking up, the state has the same tools to go after a resident who has a differing viewpoint.

Workers inside Amazon warehouses were the first to receive punishment by data agglomeration, and now these same tools are being turned upon their communities.

But what can we do? The establishment of these data tracking systems does not guarantee their success. In fact, the dependence of these entities on technology and secrecy rather than public credibility belie the lack of legitimacy and fundamental weakness at the root.

Joining collectively and understanding that the goal is to scare us with our own data is a strong antidote as is making public the nefarious goals of data collection. Warehouse workers helped pass AB701, a groundbreaking policy that protects workers from retaliation related to high rates of work including quotas enforced with surveillance. It’s not too late. Direct action in alignment with policy and legal action will help us dismantle and resist these developing systems.

-Sheheryar Kaoosji

Additional Reading

There are lots more resources to go deeper. Mijente, which leads the No Tech for ICE campaign, has been tracking this process since 2018, with their amazing report Who’s Behind ICE reviewing tech companies like Amazon’s role in the development of the fusion center- sites where DHS and local police data were joined for border enforcement purposes. Since then, Amazon has been awarded additional contracts to expand these tools, most significantly the Repository for Analytics in a virtualized Environment (RAVEn) platform that aggregates private, legal and public datasets for DHS, and the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology System (HART), which is focused on aggregating biometric data of citizens for DHS. AWS received a contract to host RAVEn in 2019 and to host HART in 2022. RAVEn is operational, HART is still in development.