Amazon subs out its delivery drivers to a number of subcontractors.  To promote safe driving within the fleet, Amazon created an app called Mentor to track how a driver deals with various driving situations and gives the drivers a safety score.  Sounds good right?  While Amazon created the system, it does very little to monitor the safety system to ensure that its subcontracted drivers are actually using the system and to ensure that unsafe drivers are not simply avoiding the system.  It is like trucking companies who require their drivers to keep the federally required driving logs but then do nothing with them to ensure their accuracy.  This appears to be a digital version of the same old scam, but it is worse.

According to a story at Interesting Engineering, the Amazon bosses have been telling their employees to turn off the Mentor app during delivery times to drive faster and meet their strict delivery quotas.  In a group chat, the employees were told to only be logged into mentor for at least two hours — no more or no less — first thing in the mornings.  The problem is of course that these drivers are on the clock for ten hours, not two.

What appears to be happening is that Amazon wants to be able to talk about Mentor and what it is doing to make its drivers safer when the drivers harm someone, while on the sly not only not monitoring the system for compliance, but actively instructing drivers to disable the system.  Stated another way, it is knowingly putting its profits over safety while still trying to appear to be a good and safety conscious company.  Hypocrisy pure and simple.

If you are involved in a wreck with one of these subcontractors, the evidence collected in the Mentor system as well as that evidence that is not collected because it is turned off could be critical to prove Amazon directly negligent for willfully turning a blind eye to unsafe practices to bolster the bottom line. Call the McCraw Law Group for dedicated legal guidance.