California says Amazon hid COVID outbreaks from workers, will pay $500,000

In what California officials are calling a national first, Amazon will pay a $500,000 fine and submit to state monitoring for failing to adequately notify warehouse workers and local health officials of COVID-19 outbreaks in the workplace.

Attorney General Rob Bonta said Monday the online retail giant violated a state law that requires employers to notify workers of COVID-19 cases at their worksites and report them to local health agencies. The company’s actions, he said, often left workers and local health officials in the dark and unable to effectively track the spread of the virus.

“Bottom line: Californians have a right to know about potential exposures to the coronavirus to protect themselves, their families, and their communities,” Bonta told reporters outside an Amazon warehouse in San Francisco. “This judgment sends a clear message that businesses must comply with this important law.”

Amazon senior public relations manager Barbara M. Agrait said Monday that “we’re glad to have this resolved” and to see that the attorney general “found no substantive issues with the safety measures in our buildings.”

“We’ve worked hard from the beginning of the pandemic to keep our employees safe and deliver for our customers — incurring more than $15 billion in costs to date — and we’ll keep doing that in months and years ahead,” Agrait said.

The stipulated judgment is subject to court approval, but Bonta said that is expected and “it’s a done deal.” The agreement comes as Amazon’s peak holiday season approaches, and requires the company to update COVID-19 notification policies and take actions to help protect workers.

That includes issuing notifications to its tens of thousands of warehouse workers that identify within one day the exact number of new COVID-19 cases in their workplaces. The company also must notify local health agencies of COVID-19 cases within 48 hours.

Amazon agreed to submit to monitoring by the attorney general’s office and pay $500,000 towards enforcement of California’s consumer protection laws.

State officials adopted California’s worker notification law, AB 685, by Assembly Majority Leader Eloise Gómez Reyes, D-San Bernardino, in response to complaints from workers at various companies that they weren’t given adequate information about workplace outbreaks of the potentially deadly virus. It was signed into law in September 2020.

“We heard the stories from across this state of employees who were not informed of COVID-19 exposures and had to work in conditions where safety from this highly contagious disease was an afterthought,” Reyes said in a statement. She said she was happy to see the attorney general “demanding accountability and transparency from employers who have been unwilling to follow a straightforward law.”

Amazon reported in October 2020 that nearly 20,000 of its U.S. workers had tested or been presumed positive for the virus, but the company said its employee infection rate was below that of the general U.S. population as a whole. That disclosure had come amid pressure from workers and labor groups calling for the company to divulge the COVID-19 numbers.

A Bay Area News Group analysis of the state law in June found that Amazon had reported to relevant counties more than 1,700 COVID-19 cases at warehouse, distribution and grocery facilities in Riverside, Solano, Contra Costa, San Joaquin and Kern counties.

A former Amazon worker at a Southern California facility told the Bay Area News group in June that workers learned of new cases through an app that didn’t describe which shifts the infected employees worked, or how many cases were active at once.

After the law took effect, employees of a HelloFresh food distribution warehouse in Contra Costa County first learned for the first time that there had been an outbreak among 171 workers the previous summer.

Amazon’s Agrait said the settlement doesn’t change or allege any problems with Amazon’s protocols for notifying employees who might have been in close contact with an affected individuals, only with the structure of bulk employee COVID-related notifications. When an employee is infected, she said, the company conducts contact tracing to determine if anyone was exposed to that person and informs those employees right away.

Agrait added that Amazon considers vaccinations the best way to protect our front-line employees and communities from COVID-19, and has hosted more than 1,800 free on-site vaccination events at Amazon facilities across the U.S., and also offered U.S. hourly employees a $40 per-dose benefit.

The Bay Area News Group analysis found that six months after the new law had taken effect, employees were scarcely better informed about outbreaks where they work than before, with most county health departments still declining to disclose outbreak information. Some counties including Alameda and Monterey, even argued the law prevents them from publicly disclosing outbreaks, and the California Department of Public Health said it called for “balancing the needs of public disclosure with privacy concerns of individuals.”

Reyes said at the time her bill was never intended “as a blanket prohibition on the sharing of outbreak data.”

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