> Lastly, everyone seems to ignore that this employee violated a direct work order to not come on site...
Keep asking why. Why was this worker ordered to stay home. Was it because he had a brief, 5 minute contact with a covid-19 patient? Other news outlets say that Smalls was unique in his being sent home.
Or maybe was it because he was pushing for a union and the company wanted to find a way to keep him out. Given the article, the latter seems FAR more likely.
He had been complaining to management and organizing before that. Sending him, and ONLY him, home was a punishment under the guise of being quarantine. They did not quarantine any other individual that had contacted the same person he contacted of which there were dozens.
The arguments that Smalls was singled out and that it was already 18 days past his contact seem like notable things to look into further.
The "5 minute" contact argument doesn't make any sense to me, and only works to weaken his case. To my knowledge there is no minimum time requirement for virus transmission, so this argument comes across as naive.
The "5 minute" contact argument essentially boils down to "on that basis the entire facility should be shut down". For some reason it wasn't, and only the union organizer was sent home. How strange.
If five minutes of exposure is really that big of a threat - perhaps it is? - then why does Amazon care about their employees so much that they waited weeks to act and then only sent a tiny number of people home?
Keep asking why. Why was this worker ordered to stay home. Was it because he had a brief, 5 minute contact with a covid-19 patient? Other news outlets say that Smalls was unique in his being sent home.
Or maybe was it because he was pushing for a union and the company wanted to find a way to keep him out. Given the article, the latter seems FAR more likely.