Amazon has found itself involved in a lawsuit, which was filed by a group of warehouse workers that claim the e-commerce giant put them at risk because of the working conditions at its fulfillment centers during the coronavirus pandemic.

This is not the first lawsuit that Amazon has been involved with over working conditions at its fulfillment centers during the coronavirus pandemic. The company has come under fire for its safety measures as it ramped up its workforce by 175,000 employees to meet the onslaught of demand caused by consumers stocking up on essential items from its website.

Employees at Amazon have staged walkout protests asking for hazard pay, better working conditions, and more COVID-19 testing. Amazon paid its workers $2 per hour extra during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, which expired at the end of May. The company said it has spent $800 million in the first two quarters of the year on safety measures.

Amazon said it was reviewing the complaint. “We are saddened by the tragic impact COVID-19 has had on communities across the globe, including on some Amazon team members and their family and friends,” spokeswoman Lisa Levandowski said in an emailed statement. “From early March to May 1, we offered our employees unlimited time away from work, and since May 1 we have offered leave for those most vulnerable or who need to care for children or family members.”

Amazon emerged as an indispensable service for many customers shopping online during “shelter-in-place” orders. The company scrambled to meet surging demand by hiring 175,000 workers while simultaneously announcing new procedures to protect its workforce.

According to Amazon, over 150 processes have been updated to protect employees, and the company is spending over $800 million in the first half of 2020 on coronavirus safety measures. Workers diagnosed with the virus are also being offered additional paid time off, the company has said.

But the new lawsuit claims Amazon has only “sought to create a facade of compliance” and continued with unsafe practices. Workers “continue to work at dizzying speeds, even if doing so prevents them from socially distancing, washing their hands, and sanitizing their work spaces,” according to the lawsuit.

The plaintiffs also say Amazon punishes employees who complain about workplace safety and tells workers to avoid informing others if they become infected. Amazon has told employees its contact tracing consists only of reviewing its surveillance footage, rather than interviewing infected workers about their interactions, the lawsuit says.

“Amazon’s failures have already caused injury and death to workers and family members of workers,” the lawsuit says, noting that a worker at the Staten Island warehouse has been confirmed to have died from Covid-19.  One month later, the worker’s family member reportedly displayed COVID-19 symptoms and died. The plaintiffs in the case are not seeking damages for illness or death but instead asking for an injunction to force Amazon to follow public health guidelines, the news outlet said.

The Staten Island warehouse has been a focus of health and safety complaints since March, when employees mounted the first of a series of walkouts.

Amazon terminated the leader of that protest, claiming he violated a company quarantine order. The company’s action spurred denunciations and calls for investigation by officials including Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Reverse payment patent settlements, also known as “pay-for-delay” agreements, are a type of agreement that has been used to settle pharmaceutical patent infringement litigation (or threatened litigation), in which the company that has brought the suit agrees to pay the company it sued.

That is, the patent holder pays the alleged infringer to stop its alleged infringing activity (e.g., to stop selling a generic version of a drug) for some period of time and to stop disputing the validity of the patent. These agreements are distinct from most patent settlements, which usually involve the alleged infringer paying the patent holder. Reverse payment patent settlements result from a peculiarity in US regulatory law arising from the Hatch-Waxman Act passed in 1984.

One of the Federal Trade Commission’s top priorities in recent years has been to oppose a costly legal tactic that more and more branded drug manufacturers have been using to stifle competition from lower-cost generic medicines.

According to the FTA, drug makers have been able to sidestep competition by offering patent settlements that pay generic companies not to bring lower-cost alternatives to market. These “pay-for-delay” patent settlements effectively block all other generic drug competition for a growing number of branded drugs.

According to an FTC study, these anticompetitive deals cost consumers and taxpayers $3.5 billion in higher drug costs every year. Since 2001, the FTC has filed a number of lawsuits to stop these deals, and it supports legislation to end such “pay-for-delay” settlements.

Reuters just reported that EU Regulators have now successfully pursued similar initiatives.

EU antitrust enforcers, boosted by recent court victories, reinforced their case against Israeli drugmaker Teva over its deal with rival Cephalon to delay selling a generic version of its sleep disorder drug modafinil.

Three years ago, the European Commission said the company’s cash payments deal with Cephalon as part of a settlement to end a lawsuit over alleged infringement of Cephalon’s patents on the blockbuster drug may have jacked up the price of modafinil.

It sent a statement of objections, or charge sheet, outlining its concerns why the deal may be anti-competitive. Teva later acquired Cephalon in 2011.

On Monday, the EU competition enforcer sent a supplementary charge sheet to Teva, clarifying why it considered that the objective of the pay-for-delay deal was to restrict competition. It also cited recent court judgments backing its stand.

Teva can be fined up to 10% of its global turnover if found guilty of breaching EU antitrust rules. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have fought a long-running battle with drugmakers against such deals.

Californians stricken with COVID-19 took the first step in filing more than 5,000 workers’ compensation claims from January through May, according to state data released to CalMatters.

More than 1,000 of those claims were denied, most of them before Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a May 6 executive order extending protections for essential workers infected on the job on or after March 19, the day California’s lockdown order went into effect. The order presumes that essential workers – including nurses, first responders, farmworkers and grocery workers who contracted COVID-19 – were infected on the job, and puts the burden on employers to prove otherwise.

At the same time, overall workers’ compensation claims plummeted during California’s lockdown as workplaces shut down and fewer employees were injured at work. Only 1,098 claims were filed in May, compared with more than 50,000 in January.

While a number of states have extended similar “presumptive eligibility” protections to varying groups of workers – mostly health care workers and first responders – California goes further than many in protecting all essential workers.

As of Tuesday, more than 10,000 health care workers have been diagnosed with COVID-19; 63 have died. More than half worked in nursing homes.

Analysts originally estimated that California employers and their insurers might face COVID claims of up to $33.6 billion annually but later downgraded that to about $2 billion.

COVID-related claims were denied at a rate of 10 to 60 percent depending on the month. In April, about 13 percent of claims were denied. Under Newsom’s executive order, essential workers, such as nurses or first responders, have to show that they were infected within a certain period after the statewide shutdown began; they also had to be diagnosed by a physician.

Alex Swedlow, president of the California Workers’ Compensation Institute said that even before Newsom’s order took effect, the majority of COVID claims were approved.

The shortage of diagnostic tests – a significant problem for workers in March and April, when most of the claims were filed – may have contributed to some of the denials, Swedlow said. Other workers may have been denied because they tested negative at a time when some COVID-19 tests have produced false negatives.

An Institute report released earlier this month found that about 41 percent of workers’ comp claims were made by health workers, with another 32 percent by first responders including police and firefighters. Some workers were denied because they worked at home; others because they declined to be tested, according to the report.

Swedlow anticipates that denials may decline as workers get more access to testing and California’s workers’ comp system adjusts to dealing with an entirely new disease.

Stuart Waldman is president of the Valley Industry & Commerce Association (VICA), which works to enhance the economic vitality of the greater San Fernando Valley region by advocating for a better business climate and quality of life.

He just published his views on the workers’ compensation presumptions that he says burdens the COVID-19 recovery in an opinion article published by the Los Angeles Daily News.

He says that the consequences of the governor’s COVID-19 “presumption” for workers is far-reaching and will potentially add billions in new costs to California’s already cost-laden system, especially as employers struggle to bring jobs and public services back online.

Now, he points out that state lawmakers stand ready with several legislative proposals which threaten to burden the relatively modest workers’ compensation system with an outsized responsibility for California’s response to COVID-19, even though the connection to the workplace may be tenuous or even nonexistent.

To be clear, he points out that employers have raised no objection to paying COVID-19 workers’ compensation claims that can be traced to the workplace. In fact, these claims are being paid in cases where there’s a positive test. The objection is that presumptions leave employers virtually defenseless against claims that originated outside the workplace but must be accepted as workers’ compensation claims.

Yet he makes four arguments against adding more presumptions to the current worker’s compensation compensability architecture.

First, there’s no evidence that a COVID-19 presumption is needed. In addition to unprecedented safety measures and expansions of sick leave, all evidence points to employers accepting claims for COVID-19. Early reports suggest workers’ compensation claims are only being denied when COVID-19 tests come back negative.

Second, wholesale presumptions fail to consider whether a worker has any greater risk of COVID-19 sickness. Even if they leave their home, many workers are working with ample social distancing and do not interact with the public. Personal errands for these workers likely come with far greater risk than the workplace.

Third, California’s re-opening from the pandemic is not limited to workplaces. People are easing back into broader socializing and recreation. Presumptions assume that people are merely going to or from work. That is not the current reality. The “industrial causation” standard exists precisely because people have lives outside of work.

Fourth, presumptions lay billions of new costs on employers at the exact moment when they can least afford it. For many employers and most public agencies (cities, counties, schools, and others are also employers), workers’ compensation costs are not an indirect cost paid for through insurance. They are a direct, pay-as-you-go cost that redirects critical dollars away from other business needs or public services.

The architecture of the California workers’ compensation system will be changing to favor compensability for health care workers’ who contract COVID-19 from exposure to patients on the job. The number of cases that will follow is difficult to estimate. However, an estimate by an international organization of nurses paints a stunning picture of the size of potential claims.

The International Council of Nurses is part of a global voice that has been speaking for nurses around the world for 120 years. The ICN represents 130 national associations and more than 20 million registered nurses.

ICN claims that more than 600 nurses worldwide are known to have died from COVID-19, which has infected an estimated 450,000 healthcare workers.

The death toll among nurses more than doubled in the past month from 260 on May 6, according to its figures, which are based on data from more than 30 countries.

“In the last two months, we have seen the number of deaths of nurses as a result of coronavirus around the world rise from 100 to now in excess of 600 and we think worldwide the number of healthcare workers who could be infected by the virus is around 450,000,” Howard Catton, chief executive officer of the Geneva-based ICN, told Reuters Television.

“These are numbers that keep going up,” he said.

The pandemic’s true cost among health professionals was not known, the association said, renewing its appeal for greater protection for them and systematic collection of reliable data.

On average, 7 percent of all cases of COVID-19, the lung disease caused by the novel coronavirus, are among healthcare workers, which means that nurses and other staff are at great personal risk “and so are the patients they care for”, it said.

Extrapolating from more than 6 million reported cases gave its estimate of some 450,000 infections among healthcare workers.

Infection rates among healthcare workers vary greatly between countries, with fewer than 1% in Singapore and more than 30% in Ireland, it said. Spain and Germany have recorded low numbers of fatalities among healthcare workers despite large outbreaks, it added.

“Why do the rates of deaths among nurses appear higher in some Latin American countries?” it asked, referring to the region that the World Health Organization (WHO) says has emerged as the new epicentre for the pandemic.

“Why are some countries reporting disproportionate deaths among black, Asian and minority ethnic HCWs (healthcare workers)? This is an issue raised directly by the Philippine Nurses Association to ICN, concerning Filipino HCWs in the UK,” it said.