Last Saturday, Narendra Prasad, 35, and Amit Arya, 25, were at their posts inside Amazon’s warehouse on Rampur Road in Haldwani, Uttarakhand. They had both worked for Amazon for eight to ten years. They knew that building the way you know your own home. They did not come out of it alive.A fire broke out near the shutter – the single entrance and exit to the facility there were two shutters on the front side and side by side for movement and no door or window. It spread rapidly through a warehouse packed with flammable goods: electrical items, chemicals, vehicles. Narendra and Amit were in a small internal office where night-duty workers rested between shifts. There was no internal office and workers worked from early morning till late evening. Narendra and Amit used to be on duty during night to guard and take care of inventory. By the time the smoke and flames reached them, there was no way out. The only door was the shutter, and the shutter was on fire.Here is what a fact-finding team established at the scene: there was no emergency exit. There was no exhaust vent – not a single opening through which smoke could escape. There was nothing. A warehouse the size of a hall, full of combustible goods, with one entrance, no ventilation and no secondary means of escape. As one person present at the scene told us: “Forget any emergency exit – there is not even a place for the smoke to come out. The person will die of suffocation if there is a little smoke.”Both men died. And not one Amazon manager arrived at the scene that night.Also read: Amazon to India: The Frontline Voices We Must Learn to HearI want you to sit with that for a moment. Not as a statistic. Not as a line in a police report. Two young men, both with their lives ahead of them, burned to death inside a building used by one of the wealthiest corporations on Earth.The cause of the fire is still under investigation. But the cause of Amazon’s indifference to worker safety in India is not a mystery to us. We have been documenting it, reporting it and shouting about it for years.Just months before that fire, UNI Global Union published a survey of 474 Amazon warehouse and delivery workers across India, conducted in June and July 2025. The results should have prompted an emergency response from Amazon’s leadership. The survey found that three in four workers reported that they or a colleague required medical attention due to heat exposure. Nearly 68% said they had felt sick, dizzy or faint at work. More than 85% had witnessed a co-worker collapse from heat. And in warehouses where temperatures reached 55 degrees celsius, only 7% of workers said they were given extra breaks during extreme heat.Workers told our union what that looks like on the ground. At the Manesar fulfilment centre in Haryana, one worker described unloading trucks in the dock as “unbearable.” “Yes, I agree there is a fan in the area,” he told The Independent. “But the trucks are between 32 and 34 feet and there is no fan inside. If you go and tell our seniors that we are feeling hot, they say: ‘Do the work or else go home.'”Go home. As if the workers of India have somewhere else to go. As if unemployment and misery does not press people to accept the unacceptable just to put food on the table.This pattern did not begin in 2025. A year earlier, India’s National Human Rights Commission called on the government to investigate labour law violations at an Amazon facility near New Delhi, where workers had reportedly been pressured not to take water breaks during a 50°C heatwave and had been made to sign pledges giving up their right to rest. And now, two more workers are dead.Amazon will no doubt offer its condolences. It will say it takes safety seriously, that it is cooperating with authorities, that it is proud to employ 120,000 people in India. These are words the company has rehearsed before. They are not a substitute for sprinkler systems, fire exits that workers can actually reach, adequate emergency training and structures built to protect human lives rather than just protect parcels.Let me be direct about what AIWU believes: this is what happens when workers have no voice. When a company can set the terms of your employment, your breaks, your heat exposure and your safety protocols without any obligation to discuss them with you, then your life is worth only as much as your productivity. And when productivity is the only metric that matters, safety spending looks like a cost to be minimised.We are not asking for the impossible. We are asking for fire exits. We are asking for ventilation. We are asking for the right to refuse work in conditions that are medically dangerous. We are asking for compensation for the families of Narendra Prasad and Amit Arya – not a discretionary gesture, but a formal commitment. And we are asking Andy Jassy, whose company is valued at trillions of dollars and employs 120,000 people in India alone, to sit down with our union and bargain in good faith over the standards that determine whether his workers live or die.Two men with eight to ten years of loyal service were burned to death in a building with one exit. Their families are waiting. Their colleagues are watching. The question of whether Amazon will come to the table is, at this point, also a question of whether the company has any genuine regard for the people who make its business possible.Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive officer, oversees a company with a market value that exceeds the GDP of most nations. We are not asking him to give it up. We are asking him to sit down with us – with our union, recognised and bargaining in good faith – and negotiate the basic standards that would keep workers alive.Dharmendra Kumar is the president of the Amazon India Workers Union (AIWU), affiliated to UNI Global Union.