October 7, 2021: -On Tuesday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company could do more to treat employees better and acknowledged one of its approaches to worker safety in the coronavirus pandemic fell short.

“According to me, if you have a large group of people as we do, it’s like a small country,” Jassy said. “There are lots of things you could do better.”

When questioned what Amazon could do better, Jassy added to its processes around pandemic leave in its warehouses. Amazon said it would provide up to 14 days of paid sick leave for employees, showing symptoms, had the virus, or were in quarantine.

But that process couldnt work perfectly. Amazon employees told CNBC the previous April that they experienced issues getting paid while they were out on leave. Additionally, the company’s highly automated human resources systems have been overloaded with workers requesting Covid-19 leave that few employees were denied sick leave or threatened with termination.

“During the pandemic in our fulfillment centers, we had a system and a process around people being able to request short and long term leave, and the process just didn’t scale,” Jassy said.

Amazon and e-commerce companies benefited from the coronavirus-fueled surge in online orders. But the pandemic generated unprecedented strain on Amazon’s fulfillment and logistics operations and tested the company’s relationship with its front-line workers, who couldn’t work remotely. Amazon disclosed in the previous October that nearly 20,000 front-line workers contracted Covid-19 between March 1, 2020, and September 19, 2020.

The coronavirus pandemic set in motion an increasing push among Amazon warehouse and delivery workers to advocate for good working conditions, leading to protests and organizing attempts. In the months before leaving the position as CEO, Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos outlined a vision to make the company “Earth’s best employer” and pledged to treat workers better.

“We don’t pretend to be perfect,” Jassy added. “Sometimes, I think there are exaggerations and anecdotal references that aren’t reflective of the whole. But we can keep working on and that we will be working on,” Jassy further said.

Jassy said he’s interested in reshaping Amazon’s relationship with the city of Seattle, where the company is headquartered. Seattle lawmakers sparked animosity with Amazon in the year 2018 while passing a so-called “head tax” aiming to levy higher taxes on large companies. Lawmakers ultimately scuttled the tax, but it did little to repair the city’s relationship with Amazon.