San Francisco (AFP)

Thermometers, masks and disinfectants: Amazon and Instacart have strengthened their health prevention measures, three days after a strike by employees and delivery men who demanded protection against the coronavirus.

"We take the temperature of more than 100,000 employees a day," said Dave Clark, vice president of Amazon, in charge of global operations, said on Thursday in an online statement.

Employees with fever (from 38 ° celsius) are sent home.

The world leader in online commerce will implement these controls on all its American and European sites by the start of next week. "We will then test hundreds of thousands of people every day," said Dave Clark.

Furthermore, "the millions of masks we ordered weeks ago are arriving and we are distributing them to our teams as quickly as possible, starting today," he continued. , after recalling that disinfectants were always available, even before the pandemic.

The Instacart home shopping delivery service will provide these independent deliverers with sanitary kits including a washable cloth mask, hydroalcoholic hand gel and a thermometer that measures the temperature directly on the forehead.

On Monday, buyers and deliverers of the platform, which allows you to order your groceries online, had stopped work to ask for more security and better financial conditions.

Several dozen workers from Amazon's New York warehouse on Staten Island, south of Manhattan, went on strike the same day. They criticized the American giant for not taking the necessary measures to protect them against the disease, while the region has become the epicenter of the Covid-19 epidemic in the United States.

Amazon announced in mid-March the recruitment in the United States of 100,000 people to deal with the explosion in demand on the e-commerce platform, while the authorities gradually called on half of the world's population to stay at home. .

More than 80,000 new employees have already joined the group's distribution and order centers.

The group had also promised that these employees (old and new) and the deliverers would receive 2 dollars / pounds / euros more per hour approximately, a measure estimated at 350 million dollars.

But that amount should be exceeded, "and we are delighted," continued Dave Clark.

Amazon engineers specializing in machine learning (artificial intelligence) are also working on an internal camera system, designed to "improve social distancing".

"With more than 1,000 sites worldwide, and so many measures to put in place quickly, there may be imperfect cases, but I can assure you that these will be exceptions," concluded the vice-president.

© 2020 AFP