Amazon and Instacart workers stage walk out, demand hazard pay and safety measures
Are the companies doing enough to protect their workers? Former CKE Restaurants CEO Andy Puzder reacts.
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Former CEO of CKE Restaurants Andy Puzder said on “America’s Newsroom” on Tuesday that he thinks companies like Amazon and online grocery-delivery service Instacart “are doing what they can” to protect their employees amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Puzder made the comment reacting to the fact that some Instacart and Amazon warehouse workers walked off the job Monday demanding greater safeguards against the new coronavirus.
“These people at Amazon and Instacart, these aren’t stupid people,” Puzder said.
“They know that the two most important things in a business are, number one your employees and number two your customers so I’m sure they want to do everything they can one, to protect the employees’ health. But if they’re not protecting their employees, if they’re allowing this virus to spread in their facilities, they’re going to lose business, people are going to stop ordering from them so I’m sure they’ll do everything they possibly can,” he explained.
The one-day strikes, which had little impact on consumers, called attention to mounting discontent among low-wage workers who are on the front lines of the pandemic.
Many workers in high demand are part-time or contracted employees, who do not get paid sick time off or health care.
Puzder said Amazon and Instacart “should be very concerned about these demonstrations because if people get afraid to order online they’re going to stop ordering online and that would be a disaster for the country right now with the current crisis.”
Instacart and Amazon say they are working to make sure workers have sanitation gear and have taken steps to increase pay and extend paid sick time.
New York Attorney General Letitia James is calling for an investigation of Amazon after the online shopping giant fired an employee who staged a walkout in Staten Island.
Christian Smalls was protesting what he believed were poor working conditions during the coronavirus outbreak after a co-worker tested positive.
Fox News reached out to Amazon for comment on James' call for an investigation. While they did not comment on this development, a spokesperson did say in a statement that Smalls had violated the terms of his employment, including leaving a paid quarantine to participate in the protest. They also said Smalls had "received multiple warnings for violating social distancing guidelines."
Smalls had been on quarantine after being in contact with an infected co-worker.
“Because you’re an activist that doesn’t insulate you from abiding by the company’s safety procedures and if in fact, he violated those procedures then they were fully within their rights to fire him and they should have fired him because he is in there doing exactly what he’s protesting against,” Puzder said.
“He would have been spreading the virus. I don’t know if he’s done that. We don’t know what happened. We got two versions here, but I haven’t heard him deny it in any of the statements that were issued and therefore, I think Amazon probably acted correctly,” he continued. “But that doesn’t mean you should go fire your employees every time they speak up, either. This is a big problem. Amazon needs to solve this.”
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Amazon has claimed that they have taken "extreme measures" to clean their facilities and have safety gear available. They also noted that only 15 out of 5,000 employees at the Staten Island facility participated in Monday's demonstration.
Fox News’ Ronn Blitzer, Fox Business’ Ken Martin and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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