Amazon is the second-largest employer in the U.S., but has its focus on financial outlooks made them neglect the existing workplace issues within? In CNBC’s article, "Amazon’s biggest, hardest-to-solve ESG issue may be its own workers," the author comments that worker safety is an often overlooked element of ESG, and it is one of Amazon’s biggest, hardest-to-solve issues.

CSB Director Tensie Whelan adds that even within one ESG category, such as worker wellbeing, ratings have many different components; for example, even if Amazon scores low on worker safety, the company’s overall worker wellbeing score may still be decent because of other factors such as pay and benefits.

Excerpt: “One of the challenges with company ESG ratings is that they factor in a wide variety of metrics and aggregate them into an overall score.”