Three Senators Are Demanding Answers From Amazon About Its "Unfair And Dangerous" Delivery System

Three powerful senators sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on Thursday morning demanding that he answer questions about the retailer’s package delivery operation while denouncing it as “a system of deception” that imposes “unfair and dangerous conditions” on workers and the public.

The three-page letter, signed by Sens. Richard Blumenthal, Elizabeth Warren, and Sherrod Brown, comes in response to a BuzzFeed News investigation of Amazon’s delivery network, which the lawmakers called “startling.”

The investigation — which was followed five days later by a story on the same topic by ProPublica and the New York Times — revealed that Amazon uses hundreds of independent contractors around the US to deliver an increasingly large share of its packages while also creating a legal separation between itself and the drivers who carry its boxes and envelopes. When accidents happen, including numerous deaths, the retailer disavows responsibility.

In their letter, the senators wrote that Amazon uses “a variety of underhanded tactics” to allow the retailer to dodge “oversight and legal accountability for the treatment of its workers” and avoid regulation, which puts the public at risk.

“Innocent bystanders — as young as 9 months old — have lost their lives and sustained serious injuries from drivers improperly trained and under immense pressure to meet delivery deadlines,” the senators wrote. “It is simply unacceptable for Amazon to turn the other way.”

Amazon did not initially respond to a request for comment on the letter. But later Thursday morning, the company issued a statement:

Amazon is proud of our strong safety and labor compliance record across our transportation network of employees and contractors, and we continue to drive improvements that benefit our transportation providers, our customers and the public. We have strict requirements for safety and labor wages and working conditions that meet or exceed the law. We also require comprehensive insurance, competitive wages, working hours and numerous other safeguards for our delivery service providers and regularly audit to ensure compliance. Safety is and will remain Amazon’s top priority as evidenced by the vast percentage of deliveries that arrive on time and without incident.

In addition, in response to a tweet last week from Sen. Blumenthal excoriating Amazon’s delivery system as a “callous attempt to shirk its responsibilities and evade accountability," Dave Clark, senior vice president of Amazon, vociferously defended the $900 billion company.

That did little to assuage Blumenthal, Warren, and Brown. In their letter, they asked the tech giant to provide a more transparent accounting of its delivery fleet, provide more detail about those safeguards and audits, and to “cease business with contractors that violate labor laws and to promote standards that protect its drivers and ensure public safety.”

They gave Bezos until Sept. 27 to answer numerous detailed, multipart questions about the way the company hires and monitors its delivery contractors — which it calls DSPs, or delivery service partners. The senators also asked Amazon to agree to publish the names of all those contractors.

Warren has made consumer protection and workplace safety a centerpiece of her presidential campaign, while Brown has criticized tech companies for what he views as anticompetitive behavior. And Blumenthal, who is the ranking member of the Senate’s Manufacturing, Trade, and Consumer Protection Subcommittee, has been an especially tough critic of tech companies’ business practices, calling among other things for the breakup of Facebook.

“Amazon is a company that prides itself on technological innovation and big ideas, but continues to struggle with basic standards of public safety and responsibility,” Blumenthal, Warren, and Brown wrote. “Amazon’s pursuit of larger profit margins, increasingly unsustainable delivery expectations, and methods to avoid regulatory and legal oversight are alarming. Further, we are disappointed by Amazon’s repeated disregard for workers’ rights and consumer safety.”

Although the Seattle-based company still relies on UPS and the US Postal Service to deliver many of its packages, a growing share is handled by its homegrown delivery network, composed of small- and medium-sized courier companies that hire their own drivers.

Many of those companies, the BuzzFeed News investigation found, have no source of revenue other than Amazon, and face stiff quotas that require them to deliver 99.9% of their packages on time or risk losing routes and having their contracts terminated altogether.

Drivers, meanwhile, are under tremendous pressure to finish their daily routes — which can include 250 packages or more in an eight-hour shift — on time, and in some cases claim they are asked by managers to skip lunch and even restroom breaks to accomplish that goal.

They are provided far less training than drivers at UPS and FedEx — and the vans they drive, unlike those at the traditional delivery companies, fall just under the size threshold that would subject them to Department of Transportation oversight. Numerous contractors, BuzzFeed News revealed, have been determined to be in violation of federal labor laws.

At present, there is no publicly available listing of the independent companies that deliver boxes and envelopes for Amazon, which is among the factors that makes it difficult if not impossible to track the safety or labor record of the company’s sprawling, decentralized delivery network.

Some companies identified by BuzzFeed News have repeatedly been cited by the Department of Labor for improperly paying workers, while others had been sued numerous times over accidents as well as unpaid overtime, insurance bills, and loans. Several of the companies have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past several years.

Nonetheless, the growth of the delivery network has been relentless. Amazon says it has added at least 200 new companies to its delivery network in the past year.