STATEN ISLAND, NY –At first, they heard during a break that there had been an accident. Slowly, and no thanks to Amazon, they learned in bits and pieces that a coworker had died on the job.
A worker was crushed to death by a truck at Amazon’s massive JFK8 fulfillment center just before 11 p.m. on Wednesday, April 9th. Police identified the worker as Leony Salcedo-Chevalier from Perth Amboy, New Jersey.
That night, as workers crowded into a brightly lit breakroom, most chatted and ate their lunch as usual, but some knew something was off.
“We were only 15 minutes into break, and somebody had said that there was an accident on the shipdock,” said Anthonie Sparrow, a tall, kind JFK8 worker and the night shift leader and member of the Amazon Labor Union.
As the lunch break came to a close, JFK8 workers began to piece together the bits and pieces of information they knew from each other, and from the Citizen app (which alerts New Yorkers about police activity in the city). The initial information did not come from Amazon.
“By the time we went upstairs and back to our station, we were told immediately that we were standing down. No reason was given, and we hung around for a bit,” Sparrow said. Two hours later, Amazon closed the entire JFK8 facility, sending over 1,500 night shift workers home early, and cancelling the following day shift.
Total chaos outside
“Once we walked out of this building, it was total chaos outside, there were so many Amazon trucks going in and leaving. The buses weren’t able to come in, and nobody knew where to get a bus …At this point, I was almost certain that someone died because the Citizen app had mentioned CPR,” Sparrow told People’s World.
After getting home, JFK8 workers made frantic calls trying to figure out what had happened. Workers would have to wait until the next morning to discover more details from the news. Workers were further disgusted by Amazon’s dismissive comments about the Salcedo-Chevalier status as a “third-party” employee, a classification Amazon uses to avoid responsibility for its workers.
“Amazon told the media that he was a third-party contractor, which I felt they were totally wrong for even mentioning. He was moving Amazon packages. This is an Amazon thing. It made light of the fact that there was a death at an Amazon facility. We are just a number to them. They are willing to just kind of delete you, and put someone in your spot, and this is a prime example of that,” Sparrow said.
Sparrow’s sentiments were echoed by Ken Coates. The outgoing and typically bubbly six-year Amazon worker and shop steward for Amazon Labor Union-International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local 1, expressed his outrage at Amazon’s comments in a statement to People’s World. “You’re an Amazonian as long as you’re in the building. It doesn’t matter if you’re a third-party contractor, that’s a father who’s not going home to his children, that’s a breadwinner who was taken from their family. It was tragic.”
The next day, workers gathered in the ALU-IBT Local 1 office, beneath portraits of Amazon workers who have died on shift, to plan a vigil mourning the loss of their coworker. Workers marched through the cold to the front of the nearby JFK8 fulfillment center to protest Amazon reopening the facility only a day after the tragedy.
Holding candles and signs calling for Amazon to improve safety and transparency, ALU-IBT Local 1 members handed out flyers to their coworkers as they entered the building, informing them of the death the night prior. After flyering, night shift workers involved in their union gathered together to confront the building’s manager.
Salcedo-Chevalier’s death is a stark reminder of Amazon’s indifference to the lives of its workers. “I feel awful thinking about it, because I’ve worked nights my entire time at Amazon, and I can’t stop thinking about how that could’ve been me, or one of my friends,” Coates told People’s World.
Passing through the turnstiles, under the large balloon arch at the warehouse entrance, Amazon workers somberly marched to the building’s main office. Managers sat in waiting, expecting the backlash.
“HR and senior management had all their canned responses ready. They said we’re a family here at Amazon, safety comes first, the same things I’ve been hearing for years that have rung hollow for years,” Coates said.
Buoyed by the emotion and tension of the moment, one by one, Amazon workers expressed their anger at Amazon to their managers. Coates was among the workers moved to speak out:
“How dare you say that we’re a family here,’ I told my managers in the office. ‘My family wouldn’t have me work a ten-hour shift after losing a brother, and that’s a fact. Would your family?’ And they don’t have answers to things like that, all they have are run-arounds.”
Amazon workers involved in ALU-IBT Local 1 have spent years organizing around safety issues at the warehouse. They expressed that accidents like this are preventable, and greater enforcement of safety procedures from a union contract could stop injuries and deaths in the warehouse in the future.
“Our union has come together to reach out to as many JFK8 workers as possible within the short time frame, so that we can band together in solidarity with each other over what has happened, and more importantly, to get Amazon to give us a period of grief processing. We need Amazon to come to the table and negotiate because as long as they don’t, things like this will continue to occur,” Sparrow told People’s World shortly after the death of the worker.
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