Amazon warehouse workers’ lawsuit alleges ‘sloppy contact tracing’

When Derrick Palmer learned that his supervisor at Amazon had the coronavirus, he immediately notified the company.

“I told them that I was in contact with this person, that I might have the virus and possibly spread it,” said Palmer, a worker at Amazon’s Staten Island facility, known as JFK8. 

Palmer was sure that Amazon would tell him to go home and quarantine.

Instead, they told him to report to work as usual the next day, Palmer told CNBC.

Now, Palmer and two other JFK8 workers have filed a lawsuit on that calls into question the company’s efforts to track and prevent the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus among workers, arguing that it has failed to follow proper guidelines provided by public health agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Amazon’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has been criticized by warehouse workers, politicians and state attorneys general. They argue Amazon moved too slowly in its efforts to provide personal protective equipment, temperature checks and other tools to keep employees safe. The company and its CEO Jeff Bezos have pushed back on these accusations, saying Amazon has gone to “great lengths” to protect workers from the coronavirus. 

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court for New York’s Eastern District, alleges that Amazon has “sought to create a facade of compliance,” but has failed to adequately protect workers from the virus in a number of ways, including “sloppy contact tracing.” Last week, the company notified employees of multiple new cases at JFK8, according to the lawsuit. 

The employees aren’t seeking financial damages but are asking the court for an injunction that would require Amazon to follow public health standards. 

“Amazon purports to take responsibility for ‘contact tracing,’ even while declining to take the most basic steps in tracking worker contacts and in some cases purposefully concealing information about who has contracted the virus from the coworkers,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed jointly with legal groups Towards Justice, Public Justice, and Make the Road New York. 

Amazon told CNBC in a statement that it has always followed the guidance of federal and local health authorities, including the CDC, the World Health Organization, its own workplace health and safety experts and an independent epidemiologist. The company said it follows CDC guidelines around contact tracing and that its process includes reviewing camera footage and data such as where employees were onsite and for how long. Amazon also said it conducts interviews with individuals. 

Amazon added that state health and safety regulatory agencies have inspected 91 facilities since March and it passed all on-site inspections. 

The lawsuit lays out what it claims to be are several flaws in Amazon’s contact tracing efforts.

After an Amazon employee tests positive for Covid-19, the…