Amazon says it's building a new lab to test its employees for COVID-19. But experts and employees wonder if that's a good thing.

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  • In an April 9 blog post, Amazon announced it was building a COVID-19 testing lab for employees.
  • Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told Business Insider the logic is sound. But he worries that Amazon could end up competing with state governments over finite testing resources.
  • Employees told Business Insider they would prefer Amazon focused on short-term deliverables, including better pay.
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Amazon has been doing great, especially since the coronavirus was declared a global pandemic, with sales to self-quarantined customers reportedly up by a third since this time last year. But the online retailer has also been faced with a public relations nightmare, every day bringing word — leaked to the press — of another warehouse or delivery station with a case of COVID-19.

Workers have told Business Insider that they are scared, despite efforts by the company to promote social distancing and begin checking employees for signs of fever at the start of each shift. At a facility outside Philadelphia, over a dozen people walked off the job, “freaking out,” according to a source there, after receiving automated word that another colleague was infected.

Amazon’s latest initiative, aimed at reassuring employees and consumers, was announced in an April 9 blog post. “If every person, including people with no symptoms, could be tested regularly, it would make a huge difference in how we are all fighting this virus,” the company said. That will take “collective action,” and to that end: “we’ve begun the work of building incremental testing capacity,” assembling parts for its very own lab.

“We’re not sure how far we will get in the relevant timeframe,” the company said, dampening expectations, “but we think it’s worth trying, and we stand ready to share anything we learn with others.”

Testing is good, but should Amazon be doing it?

Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, gets why Amazon is doing this, telling Business Insider that the logic is sound.

“I don’t know if it’s a PR stunt, obviously,” Jha said, “But I am very much a believer in an all-hands-on-deck approach to expanding our testing capacity.” And being able to test all of its employees would go a long way toward ensuring their safety.

It’s just that it’s not really Amazon’s job to do that, as the company alludes, and attempting to do it could increase competition for limited resources while raising some thorny moral questions.

“One of the things I worry about is: Are they going to start trying to compete for the reagents, and the swabs, and all the other things, with state governments that are also trying to build out their infrastructure?” Jha commented. 

“I’m also not sure it’s super useful for every private company to build a testing infrastructure for their own employees,” he said. “That raises a whole set of different issues, like sick people not working at Amazon can’t get tested, but healthy people working at Amazon can get tested.”

In short, Amazon isn’t wrong for its emphasis on the power of testing — Jha thinks, with ubiquitous swabbing, social-distancing measures could well be loosened by the summer — but it’s not the right player. It’s the government, especially the federal government, that should be working to build the capacity to test everyone, Amazon employee or not.

Workers have other priorities

Amazon did not respond to a request for more details on its initiative, such as a date for when the first employees might get tested. But some of its workers, past and present, did tell Business Insider what they think of it.

An employee who recently quit over safety concerns said they thought the initiative was laudable, as an idea. But, “To me, that seems more like a long-term project. It is good that they want to help, but I’m not sure how viable it will be.” It would be more useful, they said, to more regularly “sanitize any surface that people could touch, not to mention close down, if need.”

That is a sentiment echoed by other workers: focus more on the short-term — not the shot at the moon.

Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, “should be concentrating on the issues at hand right now,” said one employee. That would include making sure that social-distancing measures are actually enforced, and that all employees are provided adequate protecting equipment, including masks and gloves — something that has been improved, but is not the case, everywhere and at all times, right now.

“We are all frustrated that he’s doing all these things and not focusing on the workers,” the employee said. Part of that is the simple reason why people show up to work at Amazon: money. The company has increased how much overtime pay and boosted hourly wages by $2 during the pandemic. But why not $5, as it does during the Christmas rush? “The dedicated workers like me are getting screwed over.”

Said another worker: “Bezos has stated he is hiring 100,000 new employees.” That, they argued, suggests a greater interest in moving product. “If he were serious about protecting his workforce,” the employee said, “he would cut [it] as much as possible and start delivering only the critical items.”

“Our lives are not worth risking so someone can order a t-shirt or a new toaster,” they said.

Have a news tip? Email this reporter: cdavis@insider.com

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