Amazon's 2020 Relief Fund and the Public Donation Backlash

Originally published 2020-04-14.

In March 2020, as COVID-19 lockdowns sent online orders soaring, Amazon launched the Amazon Relief Fund with $25 million of its own money to help delivery drivers, Flex contractors and seasonal staff facing hardship. The fund's website also let members of the public donate. That small detail set off a wave of anger online: why would one of the world's most valuable companies, run by the world's richest man, accept donations from ordinary people to support its own workforce? Amazon's answer was that it had never asked for public money and that the donation option was a technical requirement of the charity platform it used.

Both things can be true at once, and the episode is a useful lens on a bigger question that the pandemic pushed into the open: who pays when the workers who keep a business running get sick?

What the Amazon Relief Fund was

Amazon announced the fund in mid-March 2020. Its stated targets were the people on the edges of the company's workforce rather than its salaried employees: drivers working for independent Delivery Service Partner firms, people delivering through the Amazon Flex app, and temporary seasonal workers. Many of them were contractors, so they did not automatically receive the benefits that Amazon's direct employees had.

According to reporting at the time, eligible people could apply for grants covering financial hardship, and those diagnosed with COVID-19 or ordered into quarantine could apply for support roughly equivalent to two weeks of pay. Amazon seeded the fund with $25 million. It was run through a third-party platform used by many companies for employee hardship funds, which is where the public-donation button came from.

Why the public donation option caused a backlash

Critics spotted the donation option within days. Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and a long-time critic of Amazon's market power, captured the mood in a widely shared post:

I can’t even process this…

Amazon — you know, the one run by the richest man, the one whose sales have shot up during a pandemic — is doing an online fundraiser. Asking all of us to donate to support its warehouse temps & flex drivers hit by Covid.
https://t.co/QWd851eXBk

— Stacy Mitchell (@stacyfmitchell) March 20, 2020

The anger made sense in context. Amazon was one of the few companies whose business grew during the early lockdowns, as households shifted almost all their shopping online. Jeff Bezos, then still its chief executive, was the world's richest person, and his fortune grew substantially during the pandemic as demand for Amazon's services surged. Asking strangers to help fund sick pay for the people delivering those orders looked, to many, like a company outsourcing a cost of doing business to the public.

Amazon set up a relief fund for its employees and is asking us to donate.

Amazon is worth nearly $1 trillion.

Amazon paid a negative federal income tax rate in 2018. They paid nothing but got millions in government subsidies.

How is this real. https://t.co/MiLArAnTdA

— Rob Hart (@robwhart) March 21, 2020

(This post is no longer available on X.)

Novelist Rob Hart's post, since removed from X, made a related point about tax and public subsidies. Arguments about how much tax large companies pay are complex, but the core frustration was simple: a business with vast resources seemed to be leaving a door open for public charity.

What Amazon said in response

Amazon pushed back firmly. A company spokesperson, quoted by The Independent and other outlets, said: "We are not and have not asked for donations, and Amazon has funded the Amazon Relief Fund with an initial donation of $25 million." The spokesperson explained that the structure used by "hundreds of companies" required the fund to be open to outside contributions, but that Amazon was not soliciting them.

That explanation is plausible. Employee hardship funds are commonly set up as charitable vehicles, and such vehicles typically accept gifts from anyone. The criticism, in fairness, was less about the legal plumbing than about the message: launching a relief fund while contract workers lacked guaranteed sick pay made the fund look like a substitute for benefits rather than an addition to them.

Sick pay, contractors and the gaps the pandemic exposed

For its own employees, Amazon announced up to two weeks of paid leave for anyone diagnosed with COVID-19 or placed into quarantine. Workers with symptoms who had not been tested, or who needed to care for a sick relative, were not clearly covered, and labour advocates argued that this nudged people to keep working while unwell.

Contract drivers were in a weaker position still. Because they were employed by separate delivery firms or worked as independent Flex contractors, Amazon's employee policy did not apply to them. For many, the relief fund was the main route to any income while sick, and it required an application rather than paying out automatically.

This was not a problem unique to Amazon. In 2020 the United States had no national paid sick leave law, and millions of gig and contract workers across many industries had no paid sick days at all. Congress passed temporary emergency paid leave for some workers that spring, but it left large gaps, particularly for big employers and independent contractors.

Pay rises, overtime and 100,000 new jobs

Amazon did respond to the surge in demand with more money for frontline staff. In March 2020 it announced a temporary raise of $2 an hour for hourly warehouse and delivery employees in the US, along with double pay for overtime, and said it would hire 100,000 extra workers to keep up with orders. The temporary raise was later extended for a few weeks before ending.

Critics noted a tension here. Higher pay for hours worked, combined with limited sick pay, rewards showing up. That is an understandable business choice during a demand spike, but in a contagious pandemic it can also encourage people with mild symptoms to keep working.

Tensions over safety grew through the spring. On 30 March 2020, warehouse worker Chris Smalls helped organise a walkout at Amazon's JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island over COVID-19 safety measures. Amazon fired him the same day, saying he had broken quarantine rules; New York's attorney general later argued that the firing was illegal. Two years later, workers at that same warehouse voted to form the Amazon Labor Union, the first successful union election at an Amazon facility in the United States.

How to read stories like this one

Viral outrage is often half right. In this case, the headline version, "the world's richest man asks the public to pay his workers' sick leave", went further than the facts. Amazon did put in $25 million of its own money and did not run a campaign asking for donations. But the deeper criticism stands up better: the fund's existence showed how many people doing essential work for a giant company had no automatic safety net.

A few practical questions help with any corporate relief announcement:

• Who is actually covered? Employees, contractors and agency staff often receive very different treatment.
• Is help automatic or by application? Grants that require paperwork reach fewer people than built-in benefits.
• Where does the money come from? A company contribution, a public appeal and government support are very different things.
• Is it temporary? Pandemic-era raises and benefits were often withdrawn within months.

If you want to help workers directly

At the time, a grassroots group of Amazon warehouse employees, Amazonians United New York City, ran its own GoFundMe for frontline Amazon workers, entirely separate from the company's fund. More generally, worker-led mutual aid funds, local food banks and legal aid groups that support gig workers are usually more direct ways to help than a corporate hardship fund. Before giving, check who runs the fund, how grants are decided and whether accounts are published.

Sources: Wikipedia: Jeff Bezos; Wikipedia: Chris Smalls; Wikipedia: Criticism of Amazon; Amazon spokesperson statement as reported by The Independent and CNET (March 2020); posts by Stacy Mitchell and Rob Hart on X (March 2020).