The committee’s investigation found that Amazon’s internal data attributed high injury rates around major sales events to staff shortages, “unsustainable productivity demands” and “ignorance[ed]security protocols, the report said.
Sanders, who chairs the panel, told The Washington Post that the “extremely high level of injuries” uncovered in the investigation “speaks to Amazon’s irresponsibility” and that he is “seriously considering” holding a hearing where executives from Amazon. asked to testify.
“With all their wealth and profits, [Amazon and its executives] end up doing everything they can to stress out their workers and push them as hard as possible to make as much money as possible,” Sanders said.
In an emailed statement, Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said “the safety and health of our employees is and will always be our top priority — it comes before everything else we do.”
Nantel said Amazon’s recorded injury rate has improved significantly since 2019, from 8.7 injuries per 200,000 work hours in 2019 to 6.3 in 2023. The company was not immediately able to provide more recent data on total injuries. Nantel disputed the veracity of the Senate committee’s report, saying “it draws sweeping and inaccurate conclusions based on unverified anecdotes and misrepresents documents that are several years old and contained factual errors and flawed analysis.”
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.
The report arrives the week of Amazon Prime Day, which falls this year on July 16 and 17 and offers discounts to millions of Amazon Prime members. The event is a major source of revenue for the e-commerce giant, which generated $12.7 billion in sales over the two days last year, according to Adobe Analytics data. The popularity of Prime Day sales has led Amazon to introduce additional sales events throughout the year.
As chairman of the Senate HELP Committee, Sanders has targeted labor practices at big businesses, including Amazon and Starbucks, as well as inflated drug prices at pharmaceutical companies and medical debt caused by the health care industry.
The Senate review also found that warehouse workers suffered “recorded” injuries at more than twice the warehouse industry average during Prime Day week in 2019. Employers are required to report recorded injuries that require medical attention beyond first aid basis and other increased care for the federal government.
Data provided by Amazon shows that warehouse injuries fell in 2020 after implementing Covid protocols.
The report’s authors suggest these rates are underestimates, noting that the company has been hit with dozens of federal and state recordkeeping violations, such as “failure to record injuries and illnesses” and “misclassification of injuries and diseases”.
The Senate committee relied on injury data from 2019 and 2020 because that’s what Amazon provided to the inquiry, a Sanders spokesman said. The panel’s investigators also interviewed more than 100 workers and relied on other documents from Amazon.
Amazon’s Nantel said “claims that we systematically underreport injuries and that our actual injury rates are higher than publicly reported are false” and that federal labor investigations have not found “intentional, intentional wrongdoing or systematic in our reporting”.
The Senate report found that in January, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration sent a letter to an Amazon warehouse near St. , instead of seeking medical attention outside.
“Workers cannot truly receive ‘first aid’ for the same acute injury on the 10th, 20th or 30th visit,” the federal investigator’s January letter to Amazon said.
Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, has often singled out Amazon in fiery speeches on inequality, corporate greed and union busting. But the future of the Senate inquiry is unclear. If Democrats lose the chamber in November, Sanders would no longer be speaker, quickly ending his Amazon investigation and other initiatives.
Labor advocates have long criticized Amazon for workplace safety in its warehouses. In addition to the Senate probe, the tech giant is also under investigation into the extent of its damage at the warehouse by federal workplace safety regulators and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. In May, California labor officials fined Amazon $5.9 million for violating a state law intended to protect warehouse workers from aggressive productivity quotas that jeopardized their health and safety.
The report also says that staff shortages are a major reason why injuries at work occur during Prime Minister’s Day.
In an internal Amazon memo cited in the Senate report, titled “Lessons Learned from Key Day 2021,” the company said that at the start of the sales event that year, it fell short of its hiring goals. Amazon met 71 percent of its hiring goals from May to the end of June that year, ending Prime Day week. A month or so ago, Amazon “only had a 54.7 percent success rate in meeting its hiring goal,” the report said.
The memorandum stated that these levels of personnel, “create[ed] a negative business impact and risk to Prime Day.”
Nantel said the claims of understaffing are false. “We carefully plan and staff major events, ensure we have excess capacity on our network and design our network so that orders are automatically sent to sites that can handle sudden surges in volume,” she said in her statement. .
“This is simply not true, as we carefully plan and stage major events, ensure we have excess capacity on our network and design our network so that orders are automatically sent to sites that can handle sudden surges volume. If anyone wants to truly understand the facts about our safety record and our progress toward being the safest company in the industries in which we operate, we encourage them to review our annual safety report or come visit one of our fulfillment locations to see for yourself. Nantel added.
Sanders said this report contains preliminary findings and that the committee plans to issue further results from its investigation.