They don't work for Amazon
Not completely true. Amazon has been working on growing its own delivery services for at least 5 years now. It's still small, but I see Amazon trucks fairly often on my hour long commute in SoCal. About 20% of my packages come through their service and they do cool things like take a picture of your package when delivered, but I think they stopped doing that recently
I'm a little black and white on some things. The end question is "Who signs the employee paycheck?" The article explicitly states that these employees work for a third party. They work for a third party who signs their paychecks so they don't work for Amazon. They do Amazon's work but they are not Amazon employees. It's kind of like working for a tech recruiter at a client location. There are a number of them and if the client starts doing stuff like this, the worker/contractor does not have to tolerate it. They can walk out and the staffing company will stand up for them.
It's like Fedex. Nearly got rammed into a cement median by a truck with a Fedex logo on the trailer but the cab was brown, not Fedex white. Called in to file the complaint and was flat out told "These drivers do not work for us so there's nothing we can directly do but we're going to talk to the company that driver works for."
This is why I'm saying "Not Amazon employees" because they aren't.
Yes, I'm aware Amazon is doing its own delivery business but that's not what the article is talking about. But in that delivery business, they can do whatever the employee signs off on.
I get your point. The same could be said about any soldiers following orders to do horrific things. Do we blame the soldier's or do we blame the purple giving them orders?
They don't work for Amazon. That'd be like some other company coming in to test you at your workplace instead of going through the proper chain and your boss.
But supposing they find a thief. The only thing that they can do is file a police report and sue. All the driver has to do is say "I left it on the dock to get picked up" and that's it. Word against word. Why? Because the employee signed absolutely no agreement with Amazon.
And that's the important part. The employee signed no agreement with Amazon at all. So Amazon can go smoke a big fatty and get glad.
I'm not arguing that Amazon shouldn't look into it. I'm saying that they should follow the proper channels and work with the company directly and let the company deal with it.