The deaths of three Amazon workers, all men from New Jersey who died at facilities in the state in 2022, have prompted many questions from worker rights groups fighting for more heat protections for employees.
Those advocates argue that not only do current extreme weather protections fall short for various reasons, but workers — especially undocumented people — often don’t speak out for fear of losing their jobs or being deported.
In the latest attempt to shed more light on a prominent company for work practices they say could prove harmful to employees, one worker’s rights group is attempting to obtain more information via public records.
WarehouseLife filed a lawsuit in federal court Tuesday asking a judge to require the U.S. Department of Labor to satisfy records requests and provide Occupational Health and Safety Administration, OSHA, reports into what the group alleges are Amazon’s “notoriously hazardous warehouses.”
The Freedom Of Information Act request was submitted Aug. 14, 2024, by Daniel Schlademan, a WarehouseLife organizer. A response is required within 20 working days, unless agencies request an extension.
Schlademan and others are seeking more clarity following the deaths over two years ago of Rafael Reynaldo Mota Frias (who died on Prime Day at Amazon’s fulfillment center in Carteret), Rodger Boland (who died after falling from a stepladder and hitting his head in Robbinsville) and Eric Vadinsky (who died at a delivery facility in Monroe). At least two of the deaths happened amid a summer 2022 heat wave.
Amazon officials called all three deaths “tragic” but denied heat contributed to them.
Tuesday’s federal lawsuit comes months after OSHA proposed a federal heat standard rule, which advocates now doubt will become law under President-elect Donald Trump who has vowed to try to slacken workplace safety rules.
Supporters of a heat standard in New Jersey hope to join states like California, Minnesota and Oregon in installing their own heat safety standards — giving workers more voice to speak out on heat-related health issues and provide more resources to manage difficult work conditions.
They say bolstering those protections and resources will be even more necessary as climate change intensifies outdoor and indoor work conditions. Both New Jersey’s Senate and Assembly bodies have referred heat standard legislation to committees.
Groups in the Garden State and beyond hope more transparency about exactly how these New Jersey workplace deaths happen will make a clearer case for additional protections.
In addition to inspector investigation notes, Schlademan’s lawsuit seeks audio, videos and photographs tied to the workplace probes, interview notes with other staff and family members and reports summarizing findings.
The records request has not been fulfilled by OSHA as of this week. Inspection documents are typically made public once investigations are closed.
“These were tragic incidents and it’s really disappointing that some people are working to twist them into something they weren’t,” Maureen Lynch Vogel, an Amazon spokesperson, said in an emailed statement.
“As is standard in these situations,” Vogel said, “OSHA conducted thorough investigations and closed all three without citations or allegations of wrong-doing on Amazon’s part, and there’s no evidence that heat was a contributing factor in any of them. Our focus has been, and will always be, on keeping our team safe and supporting them and their families.”
Schlademan, according to the lawsuit, is an organizer with Online to Offline Strategy Group, a group supporting the WarehouseLife campaign which also has ties to the union-backed nonprofit National Jobs with Justice.
“We have questions about Amazon’s working conditions and conduct that we hope to be able to answer through gaining access to these investigations,” Schlademan wrote in the suit.
“This lawsuit to obtain OSHA records on the three deaths at Amazon facilities in New Jersey in 2022 is critical for transparency, accountability, and to inform New Jersey lawmakers in preventing further deaths in Amazon warehouses and other workplaces across the state,” he continued.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Labor said the agency’s Avenel office received Schlademan’s Freedom Of Information Act request in August and is currently still processing it.
“While the agency strives to provide timely responses to FOIA requests,” the spokesperson said, “it is important that each request undergoes the proper reviews necessary before moving forward.”
OSHA closed the investigation into Mota’s death in January 2023 and determined after an inspection that he died after suffering cardiac arrest “unrelated to work or heat.”
An OSHA incident investigation after Vadinsky’s death did not clarity further the cause of death. A report on the incident involving Boland said he “received a significant head injury when he struck the floor of the trailer, resulting in death.”
More details on incident investigations following the deaths of Boland and Vadinsky were not immediately provided.
WarehouseLife organizers said that despite media interviews with co-workers of the deceased New Jersey men — people who linked the deaths to extreme heat and strenuous workloads — OSHA has not held Amazon accountable.
“Maybe not everyone in the legislature or in the public can understand what kinds of conditions Amazon workers can go through during the summer months, but I can. I’ve seen coworkers get sick, and pass out, and taken out on stretchers,” Keisha Drake, a former Amazon worker affiliated with WarehouseLife said in a statement. “The records are there and they need to be made available immediately.”
Garrett O’Connor, the director of worker organizing and policy at Make the Road New Jersey, an advocacy group for working class communities that has long fought for a heat standard in the state, was not deterred by what OSHA has said on the deaths so far.
“Regardless of current determinations from OSHA ... we’re really emphasizing the point that particularly post-election there is very little hope at this point for a federal heat rule to be established that would allow OSHA much stronger investigation and enforcement capability, and that’s exactly why we need now more urgently than ever to pass a workplace heat standard on the state level,” O’Connor told NJ Advance Media on the phone.
While not named in the federal lawsuit, O’Connor said Make the Road New Jersey was in contact with WarehouseLife and aligned in fighting for more heat protections.
O’Connor noted that in 2022 and even this past summer, Amazon workers in New Jersey faced work conditions above 90 degrees. Based on how the proposed law is written, those conditions “would have triggered Amazon putting protections in place that may have contributed to saving those (three) lives,” he said.
Amazon, among the largest employers in New Jersey, has at least 19 fulfillment and sortation centers and 20 delivery stations here. Besides some alleged obfuscation about what exactly happened to the three Amazon workers at the time of their deaths, critics of the company point to other ongoing investigations.
Among them, a probe led by Sen. Bernie Sanders’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and another investigation by the U.S. Justice Department looking into the accuracy of Amazon’s injury reporting.
To read WarehouseLife’s new federal lawsuit, click here.
Stories by Steven Rodas
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Steven Rodas may be reached at srodas@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on X at @stevenrodasnj.