Amazon is suing the New York attorney general in a bid to stop her from suing the organization over the firing of one of its honest workers and over its COVID-19 safety norms.
According to Amazon, the Attorney General Letitia James exceeded her power by regulating COVID-19 safety protocols at the company’s warehouse in New York’sYork’s Staten Island borough. Amazon filed the lawsuit Friday in Brooklyn federal court.
The company said Letitia threatened to sue if Amazon didn’t accept her list of protocols, including rehiring the employee Christian Smalls and paying him large sums of money.
James said Saturday that she would continue to review her legal options. In a report, she called the company’s lawsuit “a sad attempt to distract the authorities from the facts and avoid accountability for its failures to protect their employees from a lethal virus.”
Amazon defended it’s coronavirus safety norms in the lawsuit, saying they added hand-sanitizer stations, hired experts and signs requesting employees to stay 6-feet apart from each other. It also noted that random inspections in April and March by the New York City Police Department found the warehouse exceeded the required safety requirements.
The company argued in court that only the government have the authority and can mandate coronavirus safety protocol,s and the attorney general’s office doesn’t have the legal responsibility.
New York-based Amazon is requesting the court to stop Letitia from pursuing any action against the company and to announce that she doesn’t have any power on coronavirus safety measures or in any of the company’s matter.
