For the fourth time in six episodes, John Oliver devoted his entire broadcast to the coronavirus pandemic—this time focusing on those who have been deemed essential workers during the health crisis.
“It’s a broad term that can include any job from health care professionals to custodians to grocery store clerks to, I would argue, TikTok stars teaching me how to dance,” Oliver joked on Sunday’s episode of Last Week Tonight.
As Oliver stated, numerous companies have released statements that pay lip service to the notion that employees on the front lines of the pandemic response are valued, including Amazon. Last month, the company debuted a 30-second commercial dedicated to the “Amazon retail heroes on the floor, in the air, or behind the wheel.”
“It’s hard to say what I like least about that,” Oliver said after playing a clip from the above commercial on Sunday. “Maybe it’s the schmaltzy piano music, maybe it’s Amazon patronizingly claiming they care about the well-being of their ‘heroes,’ or maybe it’s just the fact that, out of context, the Amazon smile logo is a quick sketch of an uncircumcised dick. It’s probably a combination of all three.”
As recently as Sunday, Amazon posted an update to its blog citing the numerous safety measures it has offered employees, including personal protective equipment, temperature checks, social distancing guidelines, and other process updates meant to keep workers healthy. But as Oliver said, Amazon hasn’t necessarily threaded the needle over the course of the crisis—including how the company initially set parameters for paid sick leave. At first, the Amazon policy was to give two weeks paid time off to anyone diagnosed with Covid-19, or anyone who had been quarantined. “Which sounds good, but there’s a big problem with requiring a positive test, as one worker pointed out,” Oliver said before showing an interview with former Amazon employee Chris Smalls, who noted how difficult it is to acquire a coronavirus test in New York State.
“Testing in New York is so scarce, Amazon’s plan may as well have been ‘you get double pay and free health care for your whole family if you can guess what number Jeff Bezos is thinking,’” Oliver said.
Smalls was fired shortly after organizing a worker walkout at Amazon’s Staten Island facility. In a statement released last month, Amazon representatives denied that he was let go in retaliation, but rather said that Smalls had been given “multiple warnings for violating social distancing guidelines and putting the safety of others at risk. He was also found to have had close contact with a diagnosed associate with a confirmed case of COVID-19 and was asked to remain home with pay for 14 days, which is a measure we’re taking at sites around the world.”