- Sen. Bernie Sanders says Amazon’s focus on speed leads to “uniquely dangerous” workplaces.
- In a new report, which Amazon disputes, Sanders says its injury rates are worse than it lets on.
- Amazon is such a large employer it tilts the calculation of national statistics, the report finds.
Jeff Bezos once said Amazon would become “Earth’s Safest Place to Work,” but Sen. Bernie Sanders says the e-commerce juggernaut isn’t even the safest place to work in its own industry.
A sweeping new report from the Sanders-led Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) says that Amazon’s focus on speed leads to “uniquely dangerous” warehouses.
In the report, which Amazon, in a response updated on December 16, disputes as “fundamentally flawed,” Sanders said the company’s workplace injury rates are worse than it lets on, with nearly twice as many recordable injuries per 100 workers occurring at Amazon than at non-Amazon warehouses in each of the past seven years.
All US employers, including Amazon, must report to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration any injuries that cause “death, days away from work, restricted work or transfer to another job, medical treatment beyond first aid, or loss of consciousness.”
The report also said that Amazon, in public documents and reports to the committee, “repeatedly compared the injury rate for its warehouses of all sizes to the industry average for large warehouses,” which have 1,000 or more employees. Only 40% of Amazon’s warehouses have that number of workers, it said.
The comparison is likely more favorable as “the injury rate for the subcategory of large warehouses is consistently higher than the overall injury rate for the entire warehousing industry,” according to the report.
“We benchmark ourselves against similar employers because it’s the most effective way to know where we stand,” Amazon said in response to the report. “Putting ourselves in a different category would be misleading.”
It also estimated that about two-thirds of large warehouses are Amazon’s, and it employed nearly 80% of all of the workers at facilities of that size.
In other words, although Amazon compares its rate against national averages compiled by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics for a subset of the warehouse industry, the report finds that Amazon is such a large employer it tilts the calculation of national statistics.
While Amazon has promoted its success in bringing its reportable injury rate down since 2019, the HELP committee’s analysis showed that year had an unusually high rate of 9.01, while its long-term trend has remained relatively flat since 2017 between 6.54 and 7.74. The overall industry range in that period was 4.8 to 5.7, and the non-Amazon range was 3.17 to 4.18, according to the committee’s analysis.
The report attributed much of the elevated injury rates to Amazon’s “obsession with productivity and speed,” which it said drives workers beyond safe limits.
“There is not a safe way to make rate without being injured,” one worker identified as RN told the committee, referring to the target number of items processed per shift. “There is not a single person I worked with while I was at Amazon that didn’t have an injury.”
“Our safety progress is well documented, and we’re proud of it,” the company said. “We’ll continue to invest in safety and continuous improvement for years to come as we work toward being the very best in the industries in which we operate.”
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