For the investor class, April is the month not only of spring showers and tax avoidance but also of the annual shareholder letter. Typically an exercise in banality, the CEO of a publicly traded firm produces a few pages of reflections on the previous year and on prospects for the future. In those instances in which a particular company has recently been subjected to unwelcome media scrutiny, the shareholder letter is also an opportunity for the CEO to reassure investors that the firm has listened to its critics and is taking appropriate measures to remedy any perceived problems.

This latter opportunity is especially important for Amazon, which, despite record profits and a breathtaking pace of expansion, has endured a few rough years in the public relations department. In the spring of 2020, as is well known today, the company unduly terminated a Staten Island warehouse worker for the insolence of organizing a walkout in protest of the firm’s wholly unsatisfactory COVID mitigation measures. And then in September, a report from investigative journalist Will Evans, who had obtained access to the company’s internal records, revealed that, between 2016 and 2019, the rate of serious injuries for Amazon fulfillment center employees had risen steadily, from 5.9 per hundred workers to 7.7, the latter figure nearly double that of its industry peers.

All this negativity cast a dark cloud over Jeff Bezos’s April 15, 2021 shareholder letter, which had been much anticipated, since it was his last as Amazon CEO. While the letter was, as discussed in last year’s commentary for this magazine, littered with misrepresentation and misdirection, Bezos cannot be accused of remaining silent on the matter: he dedicated no fewer than eighteen paragraphs to employee relations. And to say that the soon-to-be executive chair spoke boldly about the company’s planned revisions in this department amounts to an understatement. Henceforth, Bezos announced, Amazon would strive to be “Earth’s Best Employer” as well as “Earth’s Safest Place to Work.”