While working mandatory overtime in March 2020, Alberto Castillo was among the first wave of employees at JFK8, Amazon’s only fulfillment center in New York City, to test positive for the coronavirus. Covid-19 left him with severe brain damage. nyti.ms/3goAumo
For months, his wife, Ann, alerted the company that her husband was critically ill. Emails and calls to Amazon’s automated systems often dead-ended. The company’s benefits were generous, but she was left panicking as disability payments mysteriously halted. 
She managed to speak to an HR worker who reinstated the payments, but after that, the dialogue mostly reverted to phone trees, auto-replies and voice mail messages on her husband’s phone asking if he was coming back.
She wanted to ask Amazon: “Are your workers disposable?”
She wanted to ask Amazon: “Are your workers disposable?”
Amazon took steps unprecedented at the company to offer leniency during the pandemic. But then at times contradicted, miscommunicated or ended them. Workers like Castillo were told to take as much unpaid time off as they needed, then hit with mandatory overtime.
When Amazon offered employees flexible personal leaves, the system handling them jammed, issuing a blizzard of job-abandonment notices to workers and sending staff scrambling to save them, according to human resources and warehouse employees.
Many workers found local HR personnel unreachable and felt managed largely by app and strict but poorly explained rules. Current and former Amazon employees who worked on the disability and leave system bemoaned its inadequacy, calling it a source of frustration and panic.
In early December, Ann Castillo decided to bring her husband, now on hospice care, home and tend to him herself. Even with Amazon’s long-term disability insurance, she might have to move into low-income housing.
“If he’s going to go, then at least he’s with us,” she said.
“If he’s going to go, then at least he’s with us,” she said.
“They never called and asked to follow up on how he’s doing,” she said about JFK8’s human resources. Months later, after inquiries from The New York Times, Amazon reached out to Castillo.
More on Amazon’s employment machine here. nyti.ms/3goAumo
More on Amazon’s employment machine here. nyti.ms/3goAumo
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