Amazon shareholders were presented with a defense of the benefits and the wages of the company through the first letter by CEO Andy Jassy that is given by the company to their warehouse workers, he also additionally vowed to effectively improve the rates of injury inside the company facilities.
More about Jassy’s life
Jassy became the next CEO the last July after the former CEO and the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. He wrote that the company did research and created an extensive list concerning the top 100 points about employee experience pain; he is also looking for ways to solve them.
Considering the same, he wrote that he and his company are passionate about the further improvement of the overall safety in their network of fulfillment with a direct focus on reducing sprains, strains, falls, and stress injuries on a repetitive basis.
The company is ready to come across two distinct votes by shareholders in the succeeding month coupled with injuries at the workplace. While one is seeking to assess the policies of Amazon that give rise to gender and racial disparities in the rates of workplace injury, the other was noted to call for independent audits into the treatment of workers working in warehouses and their working conditions. Both the proposals were argued against by the retailer, but the securities regulators of the U.S. were known to disagree and permit the resolutions to prevail.
A report was released by Strategic Organizing Center this week with a coalition of four independent labor unions wherein it was found that Amazon employed around 33% of the total number of warehouse workers in 2021, but was held guilty for 49% of the total injuries in industries. Andy Jassy pushed back on the given report in an interview along with CNBC saying that it was inaccurate on a Thursday morning.
Furthermore, he wrote in a shareholder letter that the injury rates of the company can be misunderstood at times, saying that it possesses operations jobs that perfectly fit the delivery and courier and warehousing categories.
Offering the data presented by him, Andy Jassy acknowledged the warehouse injury rates of the company were a bit more than the average rate when compared to all the other warehouses but comparatively lesser than the average in comparison with the courier and delivery process of Amazon.
Jassy further wrote that this makes them relative on an average to his peers but they do not wish to be average, instead, they wish to be at the top in class.
Union organizers of New York, Staten Island, and Bessemer, Alabama were considered to have rallied oftentimes with the workers while they pointed out the injury rates of the company. The nascent labor union of Amazon which won the union election previously this month in Staten Island is known considered to seek negotiations for a union contract with the retailer. Amazon rebuffed all the attempts and seeks a re-do of the election.
Jassy never mentioned in his letter the union push but said that the company does offer robust benefits and substantially increased the hourly wages a few years previously. When he was questioned about the union win at the time of the interview, he said that it was the choice of the employee as to whether or not they wish to join a union but he also believed that they are better off without doing the same.
He argued that unions ought to substantially slow down the changes and believed that workers are better off while they have direct connections with their managers, an argument made by the company in the lead-up to elections for persuading unionization by the employees.