(Newser)
– Jana Jumpp spends eight hours a day updating a spreadsheet, not for work, but for a recent hobby: Finding out how many of Amazon’s 400,000 warehouse workers have become ill with the coronavirus, the AP reports. Amazon won’t give out a number, so Jumpp tracks it alone and shares what it finds with others. She trusts Amazon employees at more than 250 facilities that report potential cases. She asks for evidence, such as messages or voicemails from Amazon, and tries to make sure it doesn’t count the same case twice. It takes a long time, but Jumpp says workers need to know if there is an outbreak and how risky it is to go to work. “Amazon isn’t going to do it, so it’s up to us,” says Jumpp, 58, who lost her job in July at an Amazon warehouse in Jeffersonville, Indiana.
Major companies keep their employees in the dark about how prevalent the virus is in their warehouses, stores, and meat packing plants. That has left workers like Jumpp to become amateur detectives in their spare time. Unions and advocacy groups have also addressed the cause, creating lists or building online maps of stores where workers can self-report cases they know of. The numbers are published by unions and labor groups and are used to organize protests by workers. But mainly, the reason for collecting them is so that workers can make decisions about their health. Companies typically notify employees if a coworker has exposed them to the virus, but critics say they won’t disclose the totals because they could scare workers and fire customers.
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