Warehouse Worker Resource Center

Improving working conditions in the warehouse industry in Southern California

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Amazon Warehouse Workers Document Extreme Temperatures in Western Air Hub, Demand Safety Protections

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Contact: media@warehouseworkers.org

Bracing for California’s Heat Wave, Workers Demanded and Won Extra safety Precautions to Protect their Coworkers from Extreme Heat

San Bernardino, Calif. — Warehouse workers at Amazon’s West Coast Air Freight Fulfillment Center, also known as KSBD, in partnership with the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, released a new report Thursday that documents extremely high temperatures at the warehouse and grave inconsistencies with Amazon’s own temperature monitors.

“People who I work with closely, who I call friends, have suffered from heat illness this summer,” said Rex Evans, who works at KSBD. “When we saw the forecast that it would be even hotter, we had to take action. We had to protect ourselves.”

Over the summer, at least half a dozen workers documented heat illness at KSBD and as temperatures soared into the 90s and 100s, the workers at KSBD formulated their demands and directly approached Amazon warehouse management on Aug. 31 and Sept. 2 to win protections from extreme heat.

Then workers representing every department at the facility took thermometers to work for seven days and recorded the temperatures throughout the day. At one point, on Sept. 4, workers recorded a temperature of 121 degrees in an outdoor work area.

“We understand how serious heat illness is. It can kill,” said Alfonso Rodriguez, who works at the facility. “We do physically demanding work, moving thousands of pounds of freight a day. Without regular breaks, access to water and a chance to cool your body down, even the healthiest person is in danger.”

The data the workers collected confirmed extreme temperatures at the facility and affirmed that their advocacy was merited, underlining the need for improved health and safety protections.

“Workers in California have a right to a safe work environment and that includes protections from heat,” said Tim Shaddix, legal director at the Warehouse Worker Resource Center. “But collective action is critical to actually hold a company, especially one as large as Amazon, accountable to the people essential to their business.”

Since workers approached facility management they have won:

  • Increased, yet inconsistent, preventative cool down breaks
  • Increased access to water, ice and electrolyte packets
  • Increased fans inside the facility, permanent fans yet to be installed
  • Outdoor employees have been moved indoors one time
  • Increased rotation for outdoor employees

“It is an unfortunate fact that in our country, workers have to come together to hold their employees accountable to the rules and protect themselves and their co-workers in dangerous situations like this heat,” said Sheheryar Kaoosji, executive director of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center. “We know that when workers are not in a position to protect themselves, we see increased violations and injuries.”

BACKGROUND

KSBD opened in March 2021 and is one of three major U.S. Amazon air hubs. Amazon currently operates approximately 14 flights a day in and out of the 24-hour facility. At the San Bernardino facility workers process prepackaged merchandise that is flown or trucked in from other Amazon facilities for outbound shipments in either planes or trucks. Freight from KSBD serves markets across the country.

Workers at KSBD work both inside a 658,500 square foot building with inconsistent ventilation and outside on the San Bernardino International Airports tarmac. Workers’ jobs require physical labor and shifts are generally ten hours a day. About 500 of the roughly 1,400 employees work outside for the duration of their shifts. Amazon also requires a high rate of work of its employees.

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About the WWRC

The Warehouse Worker Resource Center is a nonprofit, 501(c)(3), organization founded in 2011 dedicated to improving working conditions in the warehouse industry in Southern California. We focus on education, advocacy and action to change poor working conditions in the largest warehousing hub in the country.

Statement of Solidarity with Workers Organizing at SoCal Amazon Facility, ONT8

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Contact: media@warehouseworkers.org

San Bernardino, Calif. — In response to Amazon warehouse workers announcing their intention to form a union at the Amazon fulfillment center in Moreno Valley, Calif., known as ONT8, the Warehouse Worker Resource Center issued the following statement:

The WWRC stands in solidarity with the people who work at ONT8 and congratulates them on their effort to form a union. In a region where more than 200,000 people work in hundreds of different warehouses, it is critical that we all stand together to call for better pay to keep up with the cost of living in Southern California, safe workplaces free from sexual harassment and injury, and a reduction in congestion and harmful emissions.

The community and the people who work in warehouses in the Inland Empire are demanding accountability from the corporations that operate the warehouses in our neighborhoods. For too long, retailers like Amazon and Walmart have extracted resources from our community. The workers at ONT8, like the workers at Amazon’s air freight facility in San Bernardino and community members in Riverside and other communities, are standing together to demand change to improve the lives of the people who live here.

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About the WWRC

The Warehouse Worker Resource Center is a nonprofit, 501(c)(3), organization founded in 2011 dedicated to improving working conditions in the warehouse industry in Southern California. We focus on education, advocacy and action to change poor working conditions in the largest warehousing hub in the country.

Amazon workers walk off the job at major West Coast air hub

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Reposted from the Washington Post

The workers, who are demanding higher pay and better safety precautions, are organizing within the e-commerce behemoth’s essential air logistics arm.

By Lauren Kaori Gurley and Caroline O’Donovan 

August 15, 2022 at 6:28 p.m. EDT

Dozens of Amazon employees at the company’s air hub in San Bernardino, Calif., on Monday abandoned their workstations mid-shift over low wages and concerns regarding heat safety.

The walkout in Southern California marks the first coordinated labor action in Amazon’s growing airfreight division, which uses Prime-branded planes to fly packages and goods around the country much like UPS or FedEx. The employees, who are independently organized, said they don’t plan to return to work on Monday in an effort to pressure Amazon to raise wages and improve safety.

Organizers said more than 50 people walked out Monday afternoon, where managers had already slowed some operations in anticipation of the action. While a fraction of the 1,500 total employees who work at the hub in various shifts walked out, even a small work stoppage can create logistical headaches and disruptions.

Amazon calls cops, fires workers in attempts to stop unionization nationwide

Monday’s walkout is the latest sign that pro-union sentiment is spreading throughout Amazon’s ranks — this time at a uniquely vulnerable point in its logistics network. Amazon depends heavily on a small number of air hubs to keep millions of packages moving every day, which means the impact of a strike or work stoppage at any of those facilities would have a greater impact than a similar action at a regional warehouse.

Even as Amazon, the nation’s second largest private employer, pits its weight against organized labor — trying, for example, to get the results of the Amazon Labor Union’s historic election victory in Staten Island thrown out — the walkout in California demonstrates how workers are continuing to independently organize around the country.

Anna Ortega, 23, said she hopes the San Bernardino walkout that she participated in forces Amazon to “stop and think about what they’re doing and why.”

“With the rising cost of everything in our lives, it’s getting tough to make ends meet,” said Ortega, who makes $17.30 an hour. “It doesn’t make any sense that people who work here should be on food stamps or struggling financially.”

Workers are also asking for better heat safety measures as the temperature has often reached above 100 degrees this summer, causing heat-related illness in particular for workers who are outdoors loading and unloading planes. Federal workplace health and safety officials have recently investigated the deaths of three Amazon workers in New Jersey and expanded a probe into safety issues at Amazon warehouses nationally.

OSHA investigates deaths of Amazon workers in New Jersey

“We appreciate and respect the direct relationship we have with our employees to discuss and address feedback,” said Paul Flaningan, an Amazon spokesperson, before the walkout. “Through this open-door policy we have many communication channels we use, including All Hands meetings, which help us address employee concerns.”

Flaningan added that full-time employees at the San Bernardino Air Hub and throughout the region have a minimum wage floor of $17 an hour and can earn up to $19.25 and receive health care, retirement benefits and up to 20 weeks of parental leave. Flaningan did not immediately respond to additional questions about the walkout Monday afternoon.

The San Bernardino work stoppage is part of a broader wave of labor organizing campaigns across the country at Amazon warehouses — marked so far by union election victory in Staten Island. Results at a warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., are too close to call and are currently being contested. And a warehouse in Albany, N.Y., is also growing close to filing for a vote.

The coordinated work stoppage in San Bernardino is the culmination of months of organizing by an independent group of warehouse workers, which calls itself Inland Empire Amazon Workers United, that formed early this year. Workers said they have been meeting in air hub break rooms, workers’ homes, restaurants, and a community center in San Bernardino in recent months to discuss their working conditions.

The seeds for the group were planted earlier this year during a facility-wide all-hands meeting when a handful of workers at the air hub spoke out and circulated a petition about the hardships caused by hundreds of dollars in lost pay for individual workers during a series of unexpected holiday closures in late 2021.

In response, Amazon’s Flaningan said the company changed its global policy for temporary closures — limiting any impact to one unpaid shift per holiday period.

After months of organizing in and outside of the warehouse, the group delivered a petition to warehouse management in July with more than 800 signatures from workers in the facility. They demanded $5 an hour pay increases and a series of smaller raises for workers with specific job titles and night shifts.

“We as Amazon Associates work hard to ensure that the building hits the numbers it strives for and work together in order to provide satisfaction to all of our customers,” the petition said. “[But] we can barely afford to live in today’s economy.”

According to the workers’ petition, the average rent in San Bernardino is $1,650 a month, which means full-time Amazon air hub workers earning a starting wage of $17 an hour must pay roughly 75 percent of their monthly income post-taxes on rent. The legal minimum wage in California is $15 an hour; according to researchers at MIT, a living wage in the San Bernardino area would be closer to $18.10 for someone without children.

“We’re not making enough to save anything,” said Sara Fee, a lead organizer of Inland Empire Amazon Workers United who sorts packages at the air hub. “If something goes wrong with my car, I don’t have savings. I can’t afford to eat healthy food. I have to buy chicken nuggets or noodles.”

Amazon called all-hands meetings at the facility on Aug. 3 and 5 to address the petition. Managers suggested that workers save money by taking the public bus and enrolling in a carpooling benefits program. They also offered a $1.50 an hour raise on the weekday night shifts and ​​a $2 an hour raise on weekend night shifts.

Four workers involved in organizing at the facility described grueling working conditions to The Washington Post. Two workers said they had experienced heat-induced nosebleeds this summer and another described hitting her head on a shipping container and getting a concussion.

“It’s been really hot every day this summer,” said Daniel Rivera, a leader of the union drive who unloads freight from incoming aircraft. “They say there is air conditioning but you can only feel it in some sections.”

Amazon’s Flaningan said that the entire air hub campus has indoor AC and that to date no heat related illnesses have been reported from active loading areas.

Marc Wulfraat, an industry consultant who tracks Amazon’s facilities globally, said that the Amazon air hub in San Bernardino is one of the most logistically significant for Amazon in the country. The facility is a regional hub for Amazon that funnels customers’ orders from across the country to regional outposts on the West Coast. Recent flight data shows the facility oversees around seven flights a day to and from the East Coast, the Midwest, Texas, and the Pacific Northwest.

San Bernardino, and its neighboring county Riverside, have more than 35 Amazon facilities. The company is the region’s largest private employer.

Air hubs are more significant to Amazon for entire regions, compared with one warehouse the company could route around in case of disruptions, Wulfraat said.

The workers at the San Bernardino air hub have received organizing assistance and space to hold meetings from local labor organizations, including the Warehouse Worker Resource Center and Teamsters Local 1932, but prefer to remain independent.

Workers who walked out of the facility on Monday don’t have immediate plans to file for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board, but said they would consider filing for a formal election in the future.

“Staten Island was absolutely inspiring,” Fee said. “Unionizing is not off the table for us.”

Report: Amazon’s California Injury Rate Jumped 30% in 2021, Despite Company’s Safety Pledge

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ONTARIO, Calif.  — A disturbing analysis of newly released Amazon injury records shows that injury rates at its facilities increased by a staggering 20 percent from 2020 to 2021.  The report finds Amazon warehouse workers were seriously injured at twice the rate of other warehouse employers at 6.8 per 100 workers, as compared to 3.3 per 100 for all other employers in the warehouse industry. 

Download the PDF report. 

A review of California-specific data shows that injury rates in California increased 30 percent, to a rate that was over 60% higher than the rate of injuries at other warehouse companies in the state.

For years, Amazon’s warehouses and related logistics operations in California have led the nation in the number of serious injuries among warehouse workers. In 2021, the injury crisis for its warehouse workers got even worse. Compared to 2020, Amazon’s California warehouse workers suffered ten injuries for every 100 full-time workers – a 30% increase from the already high rate of 7.7 per 100 full-time workers in 2020. 

“Too many people who work in Amazon facilities get injured. The data shows that this company continues to prioritize speed and profits at a terrible cost to the health and well being of its employees,” said Sheheryar Kaoosji, executive director of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center. 

California is a major market for Amazon. In 2021, Amazon had a total of 123 fulfillment centers, sortation centers and delivery stations in California, with a total of 77,664 workers. 

The Injury Machine: How Amazon’s Production System Hurts Workers, published April 12 by the Strategic Organizing Center, examines Amazon’s safety and injury trends across a five-year period, focusing on the most recent employer-reported data from 2021 released earlier this month by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). According to the report, the company’s crushing work pace, punitive surveillance programs and the prevalence of robotics technology only heightens pressure on workers and fuels the nation’s second-largest private employer’s alarming injury rates, despite Amazon executives’ promises to improve safety at its warehouses.

“Amazon’s back-breaking work pace is only getting worse,” said Eric Frumin, Director of Health and Safety at the Strategic Organizing Center. “The very same year that Amazon promised to address worker safety, injury rates shot up 20 percent, facilities with robotic technology became more dangerous — and Amazon spent millions of dollars to mislead the public about the reality in their warehouses. The company’s obsession with speed is crushing tens of thousands of workers each year, and Amazon seems to have no plan to stop.”

Nationally, workers at Amazon facilities suffered nearly 40,000 injuries in 2021, according to SOC’s analysis. While Amazon employed 33% of all U.S. warehouse workers in 2021, the company was responsible for 49% of all injuries in the warehouse industry last year.

Key findings in the California data include:

  • The Redlands, Calif. fulfillment Center (known as ONT9) had the highest year-on-year increase in 2021 of any large Amazon warehouse in the state. After already being the third-worst large warehouse in the state in 2020, the overall injury rate at ONT9 jumped by another 26% in 2021 – a clear indication of the management’s failure to focus on the most urgent safety problems in the state.
  • Workers at 51 of the largest logistics centers in California suffered a total of 5,848 injuries and illnesses in 2021, of which fully 5,119, or nearly 90%, were serious enough to either force the workers to stop working entirely, or require them to switch to another job.
  • At 36 of those 51 sites, so many warehouse workers were injured that the injury rates exceeded Amazon’s already terrible 2021 national average warehouse injury of 7.9 cases/100 workers.

Among these were the massive multi-thousand-employee facilities in San Bernardino (ONT5), Moreno Valley (ONT6), Rialto, Eastvale, Bakersfield, Beaumont and Fresno, which together accounted for over 1700 injuries in 2021.

The SOC report also finds that new robotic technology in 2021 that Amazon claimed “could make work safer for employees” may not have had that impact. Serious injury rates at Amazon’s sortable facilities with robotic technology grew by 20 percent from 2020 to 2021. In 2021, these facilities had a serious injury rate of 7.3 per 100 workers — 28 percent higher than the rate at non-robotic sortable facilities (5.7 per 100). 

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The Warehouse Worker Resource Center is a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) dedicated to improving working conditions in the warehouse industry in Southern California. We focus on education, advocacy and action to change poor working conditions in the largest hub of warehousing in the country.

What’s a quota? Everything you need to know if you’re working in a warehouse.

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Did you know that starting in January 2022 there is a new law in California that protects the health and safety of warehouse workers?

Here’s a simple quiz you can take to see if you are covered:

A) Do you work in a warehouse?

B) Are there a 100 or more employees?

C) If fewer than 100 people, does your company have 1,000 or more total warehouse employees in California?

D) Does your warehouse use work quotas, rates, or similar performance targets?

If you answered YES to these questions then you are covered. Here’s what that means:

As of Jan. 1, 2022, under California’s new law AB 701 your employer MUST:

  • Have provided existing employees a written description of every quota an employee is expected to meet 
  • Provide every newly hired employee with a written description of each quota they are expected to meet 

Your employer also CANNOT:

  • Discipline or terminate you for failing to meet a quota for which you were not provided a written description as described above.
  • Discipline or terminate you for failing to meet a quota requiring so much work or speed that it prevents you from taking meal or rest breaks, using the bathroom, or following CalOSHA safety laws. 

Do you have questions? 

If you never received a written description of your quota, contact us! Two ways:

  1. Call (951) 394-0236 (Español or English)
  2. Email: legal@warehouseworkers.org

More information:

For questions or to file a complaint for an AB 701 violation, you can also contact the California Labor Commissioner’s Office (https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/districtoffices.htm). 

 

Disclaimer: This material is for general information only and is not legal advice. The law in individual circumstances may vary and you should consult an attorney for advice on your specific situation.

Warehouse Workers Are Changing the World

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Warehouse workers in the Inland Empire stand in solidarity with the workers at JFK8 in Staten Island who just formed the first-ever union at an Amazon facility.

Workers in New York showed that by working together we can win a voice on the job, better working conditions and stand up to major international corporations like Amazon. In Southern California we know all too well about wages that don’t keep up with the cost of living, dangerous working conditions and unsafe daily quotas.

We live and work in an area dominated by warehouses and we pay the price in the quality of our air and the quality of our jobs, but we are working to create a better future and lift the voices of workers and our community.

New York Amazon workers are an inspiration and a model for what is possible.

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