When the year of 2020 began in January, AMS had an incredible safety record of only one lost time injury in two and a half years. Here we are, nine months later, immersed in a global pandemic, and thankfully our safety record holds up. No lost-time injuries, and no COVID 19 cases arising within our warehouses and offices.
As the blog title states, our safety record is no accident. We work on it. Our safety team conducts regular walks through the warehouse, looking for any issues. We conduct OSHA training classes, we do safety challenges to see if safety teams can spot staged issues… in other words, safety is always a priority. Why? Because we value the wellbeing of our 400+ employees. As our CEO, Jay Catlin has often said, “Our employees are the reason for our success.”
In last week’s blog we promised to report on our ongoing warehouse safety efforts.
Our VP of Operations, Marco Pelaez, reports as follows: “We are continuing to enforce social distancing and wearing a mask as we believe it helps to keep everybody healthy and safe. We also have added more sanitizing stations across all buildings so employees can clean their hands as often as they need to, and we provided hand sanitizing bottles to each employee as well. Recently we installed electronic temperature reads in the lobby and employee entrance so we can read temperatures more accurately. (see photos)
“If any employee is experiencing flu-like symptoms we arrange for them to get a rapid test done, at our expense, so they can come back to work right away without losing any time. And we have extra face masks on hand in each building in case someone doesn’t have a mask with them. So we’re holding steady and the employees are feeling well.”
When asked about ongoing “non-covid” safety issues, Marco said, “We have been doing safety walks once per week, but now we have begun conducting a monthly 4 hour tour of all buildings in one day. We want everyone to be aware of how important safety is for our company. Also we have given every employee the authority to report any safety fails and safety hazards that can potentially injure anybody.
“We are having a general monthly meeting with all our employees where we talk about different topics such as how to deal with weather conditions. For example, if we have a very hot day, we encourage our employees to drink lots of water to stay hydrated and if we have employees unloading containers, we rotate them every 10 minutes to keep everybody safe from overheating.”
AMS employees and clients are very grateful to AMS Management for focusing on safety. It matters!
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