What course of action should Amazon take?

 

There are many courses of action that Amazon should take to remedy their warehouse and labor issues. First and foremost, they should listen more to their employees about what changes they would like to see in the company and not the changes that they “think” they want. In addition, they should have external warehouse inspectors come in frequently to assess the safety of workers and any changes that need to be made to that specific warehouse. Furthermore, they cannot put profits over workers’ safety ever again, it is morally wrong. They need to have more explicit safety protocols in place for even the worst of circumstances. For instance, if Amazon had an efficient safety protocol in place when they got news of the tornado warning they could’ve planned accordingly by sending workers home.

The ethical framework behind my reasoning is the Virtue framework. It’s simple, right and wrong are the product of character, morality is in the actor. The executives and supervisors who are forcing workers to work through severe weather events are immoral and don’t care about workers’ safety. Same goes for lack of break time inside warehouses. Their sole focus is profit instead of ensuring worker’s safety first. This is greed at its finest and is wrong in all ways. Workers are dying and getting severely injured because of their negligence.

The virtue framework yields better results than Teleological and Deontological frameworks for a myriad of reasons. For instance, Teleological framework has a flaw which is raised after asking this question. “How do you measure utility or usefulness? Can we really accurately measure the value of a human life”. You shouldn’t put a price on a human life in this situation because they are human and have families to go home to after work. They shouldn’t be risking their life lifting boxes. Furthermore, “the greatest good for the greatest number of people” could be getting the packages processed and delivered despite a tornado about to strike the warehouse which conflicts with the Virtue framework. The Deontological framework could work to a certain extent because it focuses on the idea that people should be treated with dignity and respect. In our case, workers should be treated as human beings and not machines. However, it is also focus on duty which can cause conflicts that could lead to bad consequences. For instance, workers had a duty to process packages that day, but the bad consequence was the unfortunate tornado striking the workplace. Then you ask yourself, was the six people dying justifiable because of the strict sales targets we had to make?

In summary, the virtue framework would only work to solve this problem entirely. Hopefully Amazon makes efficient changes to improve workplace safety and track metrics in the near future so they know those changes are working. They can never put profits over workers’ safety again. They need to do the right thing. Their time starts now to do that.