Earlier this year, a report came out highlighting the health and safety risks that Amazon employees face during high-volume times of year – the holidays, Prime Day sales, etc.
Now, Senator Bernie Sanders (I – Vt.), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), is leading a group of legislators with the release of a report entitled, “The Injury-Productivity Trade-off: How Amazon’s Obsession with Speed Creates Uniquely Dangerous Warehouses.”
Senator Sanders has been conducting an ongoing investigation of Amazon’s warehouses since June 2023, working with current and former Amazon employees to get a better understanding of the safety measures in place.
Ultimately, this work has led the Senators to a clear conclusion: Amazon prioritizes speed and efficiency, not their employees’ safety and well-being. This leads to high rates of injury, which the company has disregarded.
What’s happening at Amazon?
Since this investigation began in June 2023, the HELP Committee has interviewed nearly 500 current and former Amazon employees. They’ve conducted over 135 virtual and in-person interviews, which translated to over 1,400 documents, photos, and videos to support the interview topics.
While the full report is 160 pages, the HELP Committee has outlined 10 primary findings in its investigation:
Amazon manipulates its workplace injury data to portray its warehouses as safer than they actually are.
Contrary to its public claims, Amazon imposes speed and productivity requirements on workers, commonly called “rates.”
Amazon forces workers to move in unsafe ways and to repeat the same movements hundreds and thousands of times each shift, resulting in extremely high rates of musculoskeletal disorders.
Although Amazon has safety procedures in place, the company’s required rates make those procedures nearly impossible to follow.
Amazon’s failure to ensure safe working environments—based in large part on its unsustainable rates and productivity quotas—results in debilitating injuries.
Amazon has studied the connection between speed requirements and worker injuries for years, but it refuses to implement injury-reducing changes because of concerns those changes might reduce productivity.
Amazon actively discourages injured workers from receiving outside medical care, putting injured workers further at risk.
Workers who need short-term or permanent workplace accommodations for work-related injuries and disabilities experience significant challenges obtaining appropriate accommodations.
Amazon terminates workers injured in the company’s warehouses who are on approved medical leave.
Amazon deflates the injury numbers it records for federal regulators.
What does Amazon say?
In the Senators’ report, they say that they’ve reached out to Amazon several times to learn more about the company’s injury protocol, the quotas the company imposes on workers, how injured workers are treated, and more. According to their account, Amazon has presented very little to the Committee as it relates to these issues.
Amazon, however, has released its own statement in response to the recent report, adamantly denying the claims.
“We’re disappointed that Sen. Sanders has published a pre-conceived and one-sided narrative instead of a factual report. We’d hoped this report would have taken into account the thousands of pages of information, data, and details we provided throughout this investigation, and the conclusions drawn would be based on facts,” the company said.
“But, the false information in this report doesn’t change reality: Our safety progress is well documented, and we’re proud of it. We’re grateful to our 1.1 million frontline employees and 9,000 health and safety professionals around the world who work hard every day to ensure a safe, comfortable, and inclusive working environment.”
