Two Amazon facilities have been ordered to partially shut down in Canada. This due to COVID-19 outbreaks at the facilities.
It seems that the hits just keep in on coming for Amazon employees. First, their efforts to unionize were crushed by what is alleged to be an unfair election, now more employees are faced with more COVID-19 outbreaks.
Two facilities in the Toronto Peel region were ordered partially shut down by Ontario Public Health. This is due to COVID-19 outbreaks. From Mobile Syrup:
The locations in question are the Amazon Centre at 8050 Heritage Road in Brampton, and the centre at 12724 Coleraine Drive in Bolton. Both have been ordered to shut down for at least 10 days, as of April 24th.
The Brampton location was ordered to fully close last month for two weeks due to hundreds of confirmed COVID-19 cases.
However, a partial shutdown only requires a business to carry out a mass dismissal of a specific work or shift area, rather than the entire facility.
Peel Public Health didn’t reveal how many employees have been affected by the shutdown at the Brampton and Bolton Amazon centres.
For context, Ontario is among the hardest hit provinces (depending on how you want to look at the data) in all of Canada. This after Conservative Premier, Doug Ford, had been long pushing to keep the province open despite the rising cases. Health officials have been pushing hard to shut down the province over fears of COVID-19 variants. Still, Ford dragged his feet for quite a while before reluctantly ordering businesses to partially shut down. Businesses could still operate even in hot spots but only with limited capacity.
As the cases rose, he then ordered a province-wide lock down, though critics pointed out that the lock down is actually no different than gray zones which still permits some business activity. For healthcare workers and advocates, this wasn’t enough and an actual shut down was demanded along with sick pay. The latter is with the argument that people shouldn’t have to choose between staying home and putting food on the table.
Now, unsurprisingly, COVID-19 cases have gone out of control and pushed health resources to the brink. Variants are continuing to appear at an ever increasing frequency.
Further, statistics have frequently shown that workplace settings are among the most common points of transmission. Still, businesses are demanding that they be deemed “essential” so they can continue operating anyway. This, obviously, puts employees at risk.
Ford, for his part, defended his actions by blaming the Trudeau Liberal government for not getting more vaccines. This despite the fact that supply all over the world remains limited and the fact that Ford didn’t do more to lock the province down to prevent the spread in the first place.
So, in some respects, it’s not really a surprise that we are seeing stories of Amazon facilities in the province being affected by COVID-19 outbreaks. Still, Amazon was actually the first company to experience closures in the area. According to the Peel Region website, the closures hit on April 24th. Five more closures of other businesses occurred on the 27th while an additional 3 so far hit today. All of them, so far, are a “partial” closure.
It’s unclear if affected Amazon employees will be compensated while they are away from work. Still, employees are no doubt going to be nervous about whether they’ll be hit with the deadly virus next. Any normal human being would be nervous with such a close call. After all, that’s probably a close enough call for them.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
