Amazon considers coronavirus tests for all employees, including those with no symptoms
Tech giant is currently performinig temperature checks on all employees as soon as they come into work
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Amazon is considering conducting regular coronavirus tests on all of its employees, including those with no symptoms.
"Regular testing on a global scale, across all industries, would both help keep people safe and help get the economy back up and running," Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said in his 2019 letter to shareholders published Wednesday.
The tech giant is currently performing temperature checks on all employees as soon as they come into work as part of a set of new safety measures put in place on April 2.
| Ticker | Security | Last | Change | Change % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AMZN | AMAZON.COM INC. | 198.38 | -4.50 | -2.22% |
Such worldwide regular testing would require "vastly more testing capacity than is currently available," Bezos wrote.
Amazon announced on April 9 that in the process of building up testing capacity for COVID-19 using its research labs.
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"We've begun the work of building incremental testing capacity," the company said in a blog post. "A team of Amazonians with a variety of skills – from research scientists and program managers to procurement specialists and software engineers – have moved from their normal day jobs onto a dedicated team to work on this initiative."
The company added that it hopes to build its first lab and "start testing small numbers of our front-line employees soon."
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More than 50 Amazon warehouses have been affected by COVID-19 cases. Some workers have staged walkouts in protest of the company's handling of the virus, saying it is not doing enough to enforce the safety measures it says it has enacted to keep employees safe.
Amazon has also fired workers for being critical of the company's actions, including two user-experience designers who were let go on Tuesday for "repeatedly violating internal policies."
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The tech giant said it supports “every employee’s right to criticize their employer’s working conditions, but that does not come with blanket immunity against any and all internal policies.”
Amazon has made 150 process changes in its efforts to keep employees safe. It has also increased minimum pay by $2 to $17 per hour, offered two weeks of paid leave for all workers and opened a total of 175,000 new job openings that have offered opportunities to those who have been laid off because of the pandemic.
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This post contains material from a previous FOX Business article.
