A new bill would make warehouse giants like Amazon responsible for COVID-19 cases that occur within their facility, and it was introduced a week after the online retail giant revealed that nearly 20,000 warehouse workers were stricken by the virus over the past six months.
Under the proposed Assembly Bill 4784, distribution center and warehouse workers that test positive for the virus during the COVID-19 state of emergency will be presumed to have gotten it at the warehouse, making them eligible for worker’s compensation and other benefits.
The bill’s sponsor, Assemblywoman Anette Quijano, D-20th District, was not available for comment. There is currently no Senate version of the bill, which was introduced on Oct. 8.
According to an Amazon blog post from Oct. 1, 19,816 of the e-commerce giant’s 1.3 million Whole Foods and Amazon employees tested positive for the highly infectious respiratory disease.
“This is a huge number for a company that has been downplaying how many of their employees have gotten sick,” Deborah Berkowitz, a former chief of staff of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, told numerous media outlets this month.
Amazon has come under intense fire from lawmakers and labor rights groups across the country for what they decry as a highly secretive nature about COVID-19 outbreaks among its facilities and workers.
“Now we know why the corporation refused: Amazon allowed COVID-19 to spread like wildfire in its facilities, risking the health of tens of thousands of people who work at Amazon—as well as their family members, neighbors, and friends,” reads a statement from Dania Rajendra, who heads the Athena Coalition, a national critic of the retail giant.
Amazon did not immediately return requests for comment.
Gov. Phil Murphy signed a similar measure a month ago, which extends those same worker protections laid out in this bill to any essential workers.
“The men and women who are on the front lines protecting our health and safety and providing the vital services we all need during this crisis must be assured that they have basic worker protections and that they can get workers’ compensation if they fall ill to the coronavirus,” one of that bill’s sponsors, Senate President Stephen Sweeney, D-3rd District, said in a September statement.
Business groups cried foul of the measure, saying that a worker who could have caught the virus anywhere else can make a hard-to-disprove claim that they caught it on the job.
“Any essential worker out and about at a time when more people are catching COVID-19 in social settings than workplace settings, or those traveling to other states on vacation, can now make a claim they contracted it at work,” Michele Siekerka, president and chief executive officer of the New Jersey Business & Industry Association, said in a September statement.
Bracken
Tom Bracken, president and CEO of the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce, questioned the necessity of this new legislation, arguing that the bill Murphy signed was broad enough to include warehouse workers.
“[Amazon] proposed to hire more” workers, “so what do we do? Instead of saying ‘great, bring in more, it helps our economy,’ we decide to penalize them and maybe force them to rethink what they’re doing,” Bracken said.
“Amazon and all the big warehouse and distribution centers are doing everything they can to comply with all the social distancing and masking, nobody in today’s world, hiring that many people, is going to leave any stone unturned when it comes to compliance,” Bracken added.
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