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For Immediate Release
June, 20 2023, 12:02pm EDT
Contact:
press@sanders.senate.gov
Chairman Sanders Opens Sweeping Investigation into Amazon Warehouse Safety and Calls for Amazon Workers to Share Their Stories
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), sent a letter today to Amazon Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy initiating a HELP Committee investigation into the abysmal safety record in Amazon’s warehouses and the company’s treatment of workers who are injured in those warehouses. Sanders also published a website where Amazon workers can submit stories about their experiences at the company to help inform the Committee’s investigation.
In the letter, Sanders wrote, “The company’s quest for profits at all costs has led to unsafe physical environments, intense pressure to work at unsustainable rates, and inadequate medical attention for tens of thousands of Amazon workers every year.”
“Amazon is one of the most valuable companies in the world worth $1.3 trillion and its founder, Jeff Bezos, is one of the richest men in the world worth nearly $150 billion,” Sanders wrote. “Amazon should be one of the safest places in America to work, not one of the most dangerous. If Amazon can afford to spend $6 billion on stock buybacks last year, it can afford to make sure that its warehouses are safe places to work. If Amazon can afford to pay you $289 million in total compensation over the past two years, it can afford to treat all of its workers with dignity and respect, not contempt. The time has come for Amazon to stop willfully violating workplace safety laws with impunity and commit to changing its operations to protect the health and safety of its workers.”
Sanders emphasized that the immense wealth amassed by the company and its executives is directly tied to the decisions to force workers into these unsafe environments, writing, “In its endless pursuit of profits, Amazon sacrifices workers’ bodies under the constant pressure of a surveillance system that enforces impossible rates. When faced with worker injuries, Amazon provides minimal medical care… This system forces workers to endure immeasurable long-term pain and disabilities while Amazon makes incredible profits from their labor.” Those decisions also contribute to the company’s turnover rate, which has regularly been as high as 150 percent per year.
Congress cannot allow this to continue. Sanders is demanding that Amazon provide information about the high injury and turnover rates at Amazon’s warehouses, the connection between the extremely fast pace of work demanded of Amazon’s workers and these injury rates, and the inadequate medical care provided at Amazon’s on-site medical clinics.
Amazon’s warehouses remain uniquely unsafe even as regulators have repeatedly cited the company for violations of federal workplace safety laws. The company’s employees suffered more serious injuries than all of the other warehouse workers in the country combined in 2022, despite Amazon only employing approximately a third of the country’s warehouse workers. Amazon’s serious injury rate is double the warehousing industry’s average. The Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and state regulators have provided Amazon with measures it could adopt to comply with workplace safety laws and make its warehouses safer. Amazon has chosen to disregard the vast majority of those recommendations.
When Amazon workers are inevitably injured, the letter notes, the company has a documented history of failing to provide adequate medical care. Instead, significant reporting indicates that the company’s on-site medical clinics under-treat and underreport injuries in an effort to push workers back onto the warehouse floor as quickly as possible and downplay the number of serious injuries employees suffer.
Sanders is also asking Amazon workers to submit stories about their time at the company through a webpage available HERE. The submissions are confidential and will help the HELP Committee investigate how the company fails to protect workers and evades responsibility for their necessary medical care.
Read the full letter, here.
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Progressives and public health advocates on Tuesday were among those urging U.S. senators to vote against Republican legislation that would let President Donald Trump claw back billions of dollars already appropriated by Congress, even as GOP lawmakers ditched plans to cut funding for an HIV-AIDS prevention program that has saved tens of millions of lives in Africa.
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"Even though the Senate has removed $400 million in PEPFAR funding from the rescissions package, another $500 million in global health funding could still be cut," Think Global Health managing editor Nsikan Akpan noted Tuesday.
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Polling published Tuesday by Data for Progress revealed that the proposed cuts in the rescission package are deeply unpopular, with a majority of respondents saying that funding for global health programs, public broadcasting, and developmental aid should be maintained at current levels or increased.
NEW: As Senate Republicans approach the Friday deadline to pass Trump’s rescissions package, voters reject the proposed billions of dollars in cuts to global aid and public broadcasting.We find that less than 30% of voters want cuts to these programs.www.dataforprogress.org/datasets/pol...
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— Data for Progress (@dataforprogress.org) July 15, 2025 at 6:54 AM
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Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously voted against forcing the Department of Justice to release its full files on deceased financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, just hours after the GOP-led Rules Committee rejected the measure.
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A nation that chooses to protect rich and powerful men who abandon, abuse, and assault young girls is a nation that has lost its moral purpose.
We get a vote this afternoon.
I will continue to fight for the release of the Epstein files. pic.twitter.com/kKf8YLH7It
— Rep. Ro Khanna (@RepRoKhanna) July 15, 2025
Khanna pledged Tuesday he "will continue to fight for the release of the Epstein files," a vow echoed by other congressional Democrats. House Rules Committee Ranking Member Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) told Axios, "That was probably not the last time that you're going to see us deal with this issue."
House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) led a Tuesday letter from panel's Democrats urging Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to investigate how President Donald Trump's administration has handled the Epstein files. The letter requests that the committee invite—and, if necessary, subpoena—Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel, and Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino to testify publicly.
"Mr. Epstein reportedly took his own life to escape justice, robbing his victims and the public of an opportunity to hold him accountable for his shocking crimes," the Democrats wrote. The New York City medical examiner ruled his 2019 death at the Metropolitan Correctional Center a suicide by hanging, but that determination has been met with widespread skepticism.
"In the absence of facts and evidence related to Mr. Epstein's sex trafficking enterprise and the 'vast network' of underage victims he created, the public will turn to conspiracy theories to fill the void of credible information," the Democrats warned. "Alas, President Trump and his team, acting out of personal and political self-interest or some other more inscrutable motive, have suppressed the release of information in their possession and, in so doing, fed yet more conspiracy theories and advanced conjecture to explain this about-face."
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