which were promised by the company. He said that the firings were "chickenshit" and "designed to create a climate of fear" in Amazon warehouses. In a Q1 2020 financial report, Jeff Bezos announced that Amazon expects to spend $4 billion or more (predicted operating profit for Q2) on COVID-19-related issues: personal protective equipment, higher wages for hourly teams, cleaning for facilities, and expanding Amazon's COVID-19 testing capabilities. These measures intend to improve the safety and well-being of hundreds of thousands of the company's employees. From the beginning of 2020 until September of the same year, the company declared that the total number of workers who had contracted the infection was 19,816. Closure in France The SUD (trade unions) brought a court case against Amazon for unsafe working conditions. This resulted in a French district court (Nanterre) ruling on April 15, 2020, ordering the company to limit, under threat of a €1 million per day fine, its deliveries to certain essential items, including electronics, food, medical or hygienic products, and supplies for home improvement, animals, and offices. Instead, Amazon immediately shut down its six warehouses in France, continuing to pay workers but limiting deliveries to items shipped from third-party sellers and warehouses outside of France. The company said the €100,000 fine for each prohibited item shipped could result in billions of dollars in fines even with a small fraction of items misclassified. After losing an appeal and coming to an agreement with labor unions for more pay and staggered schedules, the company reopened its French warehouses on May 19. Matt Walsh books Conservative political commentator Matt Walsh has published various books, some of which were deemed transphobic, including a children's book titled Johnny the Walrus (an allegorical tale about a boy whose parents surgically transition him into a walrus after catching him pretending to be one). A number of these books became bestsellers on Amazon, annoying and upsetting numerous Amazon employees, who claimed to have been traumatized by the books being sold on Amazon. Amazon held a session for the employees to discuss their trauma, while other employees hosted a "die-in" protest, arguing that transphobic opinions in the media contributed to hate speech, suicide of trans youth, and misconceptions about trans people. Matt Walsh, in turn, took the reaction of the Amazon employees as a point of amusement, noting that Johnny the Walrus had been listed on Amazon as the #1