Spencer Soper, a senior reporter on the business beat at The Morning Call in Allentown, PA, is the winner of this month’s Sidney Award for his expose of brutal working conditions inside Amazon.com’s Lehigh Valley warehouse.

This summer, temperatures inside the warehouse soared to over 100 degrees and management refused to open the doors for ventilation. Amazon hired a private ambulance company to wait outside to treat workers suffering from heat-related illnesses.

Workers told Soper that they felt pressured to push themselves to the point of collapse because they could be penalized or even fired for slowing down or taking time off to seek medical attention.

Since the story ran on Sept 18, Amazon has been deluged with calls from angry customers, according to Soper’s Sep 23 follow-up story. Despite a flurry of public statements from Amazon, current warehouse employees said that nothing had changed inside the warehouse since the initial story ran.

You can read my interview with Soper about the making of the expose in The Backstory, our monthly feature on the story behind the latest Sidney Award-winning story.

[Photo courtesy of Spencer Soper.]