- Safety precautions at no cost to workers — PPE (at minimum hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes/sprays and soap).
- Hazard pay — an extra $5 per order and defaulting the in-app tip amount to at least 10% of the order total.
- An extension and expansion of pay for workers impacted by COVID-19 — anyone who has a doctor’s note for either a preexisting condition that’s a known risk factor or requiring a self-quarantine.
- The deadline to qualify for these benefits must be extended beyond April 8th.
This should be done by the government. It feels unfair to pass this on to consumers, but there should be some sort of "voluntary unemployment" for people with pre-existing conditions right now.
These workers were forced to work during quarantine because the government deemed Amazon an essential business. As a result, Amazon stock's price relative gain to the S&P 500 tumble during this crisis is ~80%, that's almost a doubling of the stock valuation due to the uninterrupted business that these delivery workers made possible.
I repeat: AWS basically doubled their relative stock valuation, withstood one of the biggest stock market tumbles in all history, because their lowest level employees went to work at a point when everybody else stayed at home safe.
If you think of a business as a machine, and the person who bought the machine as a stockholder, you would understand that a machine does not suddenly work harder because the person paid more for the machine.
The trouble here seems to be maintaining a consistent supply that is sustainable.