Key excerpts from a much clearer article. And yet again, why you never 100% believe a company's PR response when they're trying to cover themselves. They tell just enough truth, but use it to intentionally mislead.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/31/amazon-strik...
> According to the company’s previous statements, the infected co-worker in question last reported for work on 11 March. Had Smalls been exposed that day, a 14-day mandatory quarantine would have made him eligible to return as soon as 25 March.
> Smalls said Amazon did not send him home until 28 March, three weeks after the exposure.
> “No one else was put on quarantine,” he said, even as the infected person worked alongside “associates for 10-plus hours a week”.
> “You put me on quarantine for coming into contact with somebody, but I was around [that person] for less than five minutes,” he told Vice.
> According to Amazon, no one else was fired. Smalls said he was considering legal action, calling it “a no-brainer”.
> key point Amazon claims he was exposed to the worker on March 11th
Did they claim that? I'm looking for a source on this. "According to the company’s previous statements, the infected co-worker in question last reported for work on 11 March", but when you look at their linked source[1] it says: "Amazon confirmed an associate, who reported for work on 11 March, has since been diagnosed with Covid-19".
> “No one else was put on quarantine,” he said
Is this confirmed? You can't just assume this to be true. Pretty damning if so, though.
> “You put me on quarantine for coming into contact with somebody, but I was around [that person] for less than five minutes,” he told Vice.
Viral transmission has no minimum timeline and often occurs at first point of contact (e.g., handshake) or cough/sneeze at any time. Kind of irresponsible to even print that quote without correcting the argument.
It may be that Amazon retaliated, but stuff like this doesn't prove it. We need the hard facts. At this point it's unclear and sounds fishy on both sides.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/30/amazon-wo...
From Vice
>Amazon did not immediately respond to an email Tuesday morning asking how many people at the site have been ordered into self-quarantine
Even if they did quarantine others, putting someone on a 14 day quarantine 17 days after contact is hard to explain.
Not that hard. If everyone in the office had contact with someone infected then the best thing to do would have been to quarantine them all right away. Because without that, you now have the possibility that one of them had an asymptomatic case which they could have still had and given to any of the others less than a week ago, which means the others are still inside the window for being infected but not having either recovered or showed symptoms. Which means they still need to be quarantined.
This judgment call changed. If bureaucratic ineptitude was to blame, those people ignored proper procedure, making them insubordinate, and risked lives. And if they found the issue confusing enough to take eighteen days to issue the quarantine notice, they should understand why this employee might think they are being targeted for their labor practices.
The available information changed. This very quickly went from something many people weren't sure wasn't going to be maybe a nasty flu to something that has half the world staying home from work and hospitals getting overrun. Changing your procedures in response to new information is what managers should be doing.