"Amazon faces scrutiny over worker safety after tornado strikes warehouse", 14 December 2021

Questions over worker safety at Amazon are intensifying once again after a tornado struck an Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville, Illinois, on Friday, leaving six people dead and another hospitalized.

On Monday, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) said it had opened a workplace safety investigation into the warehouse collapse. Meanwhile, workers and activists are calling for more action...

“This incident calls into question so much of Amazon’s practices in their warehouses,” said Marcos Ceniceros, an organizer at Warehouse Workers for Justice. “This is not the first time we’ve seen workers suffer at Amazon and we want to make sure that they’re not continuing to cut corners and putting workers at risk.”

Warehouse Workers for Justice has called for a hearing in the Illinois state legislature examining what led to the deaths at Amazon’s warehouse. They are also calling on the company to ensure it has safety and training protocols in place for extreme weather events and other risks, like Covid-19, in the future...

Amazon said workers at the warehouse had little time to prepare when the National Weather Service declared a tornado warning...The tornado arrived soon after, collapsing both sides of the warehouse and caving in its roof.

“There was a tremendous effort that happened that night to keep everybody safe,” said John Felton, Amazon’s senior vice-president of global delivery services, speaking alongside the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker ...

An Amazon spokesperson, Kelly Nantel, said the warehouse received tornado warnings between 8.06pm and 8.16pm on Friday and site leaders directed workers to immediately take shelter. At 8.27pm, the tornado struck the building.

Felton said most of the 46 people in the warehouse known as a “delivery station” headed to a shelter on the north side, which ended up “nearly undamaged” and a smaller group to the harder-hit south end. The company said those are not separate safe rooms, but generally places away from windows considered safer than other parts of the plant.

...The company declined to answer questions on Monday about its disaster plans at the plant, including whether employees were required to perform drills...

Ceniceros said as extreme weather intensifies due to the climate crisis, workers are investigating how to protect themselves and hold corporations accountable...

“We don’t think of warehousing as one of the industries that’s going to be severely impacted by climate change but then you have a case like this,” said Beth Gutelius, research director at the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

At the governor’s press conference Monday, Nantel emphasized that the 1.1m sq ft building was “constructed consistent with code”.

But Pritzker raised the possibility that current codes aren’t enough to meet the dangers of increasingly devastating storms. He said there will be an investigation into updating code ,“given serious change in climate that we are seeing across the country”...

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