Ontario’s Labour Ministry has completed its probe into the death one year ago of an Amazon employee at its London-area mega-plant – but his widow must file a a freedom-of-information (FOI) request to get the final report that includes autopsy results.
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It’s a “frustrating” process that puts more stress on grieving families, said Sudbury NDP MPP Jamie West, the party’s labour critic.
For Sheila Albuquerque, 45, it’s another delay to finding answers in her husband’s sudden death that left her to raise their young son alone and raised questions about worker safety at the giant Amazon fulfillment centre that opened Oct. 1, 2023.
Paulo DeSouza Bezerra, 51, collapsed and died at work on Jan. 15, 2024, about an hour after a fire alarm sent staff outside the Talbotville plant, south of London, for roughly 17 minutes in -20 C wind chill temperatures.
The Labour Ministry finished its investigation into DeSouza Bezerra’s death in December, but Albuquerque will have to file a freedom-of-information (FOI) request to receive the final report.
Only the worker, the company and the union can be involved when the Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development shares information about the outcome of investigations, West said.
The Occupational Health and Safety Act does not include a role for families in the process, he said.
“There’s no recognition of a next-of-kin or the idea that the family should be involved,” West said. “It’s a major oversight of compassion for the family who is grieving through this process and doesn’t know the results. It’s almost like a re-traumatization every time there’s an update.”
The province’s website says a response to an FOI request can take 30 days and the individual can be contacted for clarifications, and a time extension may be required to process the request.
“Filing it (the request) is a challenge as well,” West said. “But once you receive it, it’s better to have someone sit down with you to explain what the investigation is saying and how the Ministry of Labour interprets the act. . . And some of that can be jargon-ish.”
The Workers Action Centre in Toronto, a nonprofit organization that helps workers in low-wage and unstable jobs, helps families submit freedom-of-information requests to the ministry but they’re usually swamped because of a lack of funding, he said.
“It’s a real loophole in the system,” West said.
Albuquerque said she will look into filing the freedom of information request when she returns to Canada.
She said she doesn’t understand how the process works and wishes there was an “easier and less complicated” way to know what happened, such as a conversation about the investigation’s results.
“It’s a lot,” she said.
Albuquerque and her two-year-old son Logan are spending time with her family in Brazil and organizing a celebration of life to mark the anniversary of DeSouza Bezerra’s death.
“Right now, I’m trying to find some peace so I can return (to Canada) with more energy,” Albuquerque told The Free Press from Brazil. “2024 was a really difficult year.”
The couple, married for more than 24 years, emigrated to Canada from Brazil in 2010. They had their son a couple of years ago after many years of trying to start a family. The couple moved to London from Toronto in the summer of 2023 with the goal of finding better jobs and housing. DeSouza Bezerra started working at Amazon in October.
He collapsed near a water cooler on Monday, Jan. 15, 2024, about an hour after returning to work following the evacuation of the Talbotville plant.
An Amazon official – confirming the account to The Free Press by an on-site witness – said the worker collapsed about an hour after going back inside its large fulfillment centre in Talbotville. Employees had been sent outside into wind-chill temperatures of -20 C from about 11:10 p.m. to 11:27 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 14, in snowy, dangerously cold conditions.
“The site was cleared for re-entry about 16 minutes after the alarm sounded, and employees were encouraged to warm up in the break room before returning to their work stations,” Maureen Lynch Vogel, an Amazon spokesperson, said in January 2024.
Employees were given so-called cold-weather kits upon exiting, including blankets, hats, gloves and socks, Lynch Vogel said.
Once employees came back inside after the evacuation, several employees, including the person who later died, spent about 45 minutes in the break room warming up before returning to their workstations, Lynch Vogel said.
DeSouza Bezerra was taken to St. Thomas Elgin General Hospital after he collapsed.
Albuquerque said she received a call at about 1 a.m. on Jan. 15, 2024, from an Amazon representative who told her there had been an “accident” involving Paulo and he had been sent to hospital.
She said she took a cab to the hospital where a doctor told her husband had collapsed and couldn’t be resuscitated.
“Our family in Brazil is in shock,” Albuquerque said in an interview in early February 2024. “He was healthy. It was so unexpected.”
Amazon has come under fire for safety and working conditions in the past. In 2023, a U.S. Labor Ministry investigation cited six warehouses for unsafe working conditions.
In November 2023, the Center for Urban Economic Development (CUED) at the University of Illinois-Chicago found 41 per cent of Amazon workers it surveyed have been injured on the job. The centre surveyed 1,484 Amazon employees about the toll of the company’s work intensity.
In 2022, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the U.S. opened a national investigation into ergonomic injuries and issued more than a dozen citations to the Seattle-based company.
The two-million-square-foot Amazon complex where DeSouza Bezerra worked opened on the former site of the Ford assembly plant in Talbotville. More than 1,000 workers are employed at the facility that has the capacity to process 750,000 parcels a day.