Worker Illness Could Sideline Amazon’s Success

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 25, 8:45AM EDT

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Worker Illness Could Sideline Amazon’s Success — © ollo / Getty Images

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) has been identified as one of the largest successes of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rumors have spread that CEO Jeff Bezos has returned to his office to navigate the way forward, which may make Amazon the largest retailer in America. However, Amazon’s management faces what could be an insurmountable enemy, which is illnesses among its own workers and their desire to be protected from illness.

The most recent sign of friction between Amazon and its employees is management’s plan to ask workers who do not return to their jobs by May 1 to take a leave of absence. Those who opt for that leave eventually may lose some of their pay and benefits. Amazon’s plans for these decisions have not been entirely clarified.

What is very clear is that some warehouse workers and people who run Amazon’s distribution hubs insist that the company has not done enough to protect them from COVID-19 infection. Some of these workers have turned to the courts to force Amazon’s hand. The most recent of these is a decision by a French court to stop shipping nonessential items from Amazon’s warehouses, thereby cutting the number of employees at those locations and they peak hours they may work.

Amazon’s advantage as it faces more worker dissent is the lack of a union among its employees. The leverage that unions like the UAW had against America’s largest car companies does not exist. This, in turn, dilutes any plan by Amazon workers to shut down large parts of the company. It would take a grassroots approach or a major court victory to hobble Amazon’s ability to work full tilt in the United States.

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Between the option of a labor organization by a union or a court order, circumstances certainly favor one or more court orders. The legal case that workers would need to win is that Amazon endangers their health because it lacks sufficient plans to protect them. What worked in a court in France may work in the United States.

Amazon could end up as the owner of a huge percentage of the retail industry by the end of the year, as its revenue grows and brick-and-mortar businesses fail. That is, unless it is undone by its own employees.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.