The challenge for Ms. Mitchell and her colleagues at Athena is to make the Amazon buying experience a little less simple than Amazon wants it to be — to remind shoppers that there are real-world consequences when they tap Amazon’s yellow checkout button.

“The company has tried for years to brand their operation as internet magic,” said Maurice BP-Weeks, co-executive director of Action Center on Race and the Economy, a Chicago-based member of the Athena coalition. “Look for what you need, click and it’s there in front of you. What we’re learning is that there are an awful lot of people who aren’t always treated too well who make that happen.”

The welfare of Amazon’s warehouse workers, previously a subject of irregular scrutiny, has taken on new urgency during the pandemic. If you have hundreds of thousands of workers, it is hard to keep them six feet apart. There have been reports of the coronavirus in more than 50 Amazon warehouses, and 15 state attorneys general have said the company’s sick leave policies are inadequate. After a French court ruled Amazon had failed to adequately protect its workers, the company suspended operations at its warehouses in the country.

Amazon, which announced on Monday that it would hire an additional 75,000 workers, has pushed back aggressively. In his letter to shareholders, Mr. Bezos wrote that the company was “consulting closely with medical experts and health authorities,” and that as a result it had made “over 150 significant process changes in our operations network and Whole Foods Market stores.” It is experimenting with the use of disinfectant fog and has started checking workers’ temperatures as they enter warehouses.

It is also cracking down on dissent. On April 12, two Amazon employees who had been outspoken about the company’s climate change policies and, more recently, warehouse conditions said they had been fired. Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, both user experience designers, said their dismissals came hours after their organization, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, sent out an invitation to a virtual meeting during which interested employees could hear directly from Amazon warehouse workers.

“If Amazon is actually keeping people safe, why are they so afraid for us to hear from people in warehouses?” Ms. Cunningham said. “They are trying to silence us from talking to the media, but they are also trying to silence us internally.”