A US Senate Committee led by Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has released a report alleging that nearly half of Amazon warehouse workers were injured during the week of Prime Day 2019. The chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) described the company’s behavior five years ago as “extremely dangerous”. For its part, Amazon claims that Senator Sanders is twisting and cherry-picking facts while ignoring others to fit a narrative.
The report cites internal company data, including injuries that Amazon is not required to document to OSHA, showing that warehouse workers suffered nearly 45 injuries per 100 workers during the week of Prime Day 2019. Meanwhile, of the injuries “recorded ” serious enough that the company must report them to OSHA, the report claims Amazon was more than double the industry average — over 10 per 100 workers.
“The incredibly dangerous working conditions at Amazon uncovered in this investigation are a perfect example of the kind of corporate greed that the American people are sick and tired of,” Sanders wrote Tuesday in a HELP Committee announcement. The senator said Amazon treats its workers as “disposable” and “with complete disregard for their safety and well-being.”
Meanwhile, an Amazon spokesperson’s statement, shared with Engadget, claims the committee’s findings paint a misleading picture. The company says the committee’s conclusions stemmed from unverified anecdotes, misrepresented old documents and included factual errors and flawed analysis.
“For example, one of the false claims in the report implies that we don’t have enough staff for busy shopping periods,” company spokeswoman Kelly Nantel wrote in Amazon’s statement. “This is simply not true, as we plan and staff carefully for major events, ensure we have excess capacity across our network and design our network so that orders are automatically sent to sites that can handle growth unexpected volume.”
Amazon says it has made “significant progress” in the five years since the data cited in the report, including reducing its recordable incident rate (those requiring OSHA reports by law) by 28 percent in the US. The company says it also reduced its “lost time incident rate” (workers sustaining major injuries requiring time off) by 75 percent.
Regardless of whose side you prefer, this isn’t the first time Amazon has come under fire for warehouse working conditions. Last year, a coalition of unions, citing OSHA data, claimed that the company was responsible for 53 percent of all serious warehouse injuries recorded in the US in 2022. This report claimed that Amazon warehouse workers were injured more often (and often more heavily) than their non-Amazon counterparts.
Last month, the California Labor Commissioner’s office fined Amazon nearly $6 million for violating a state law that requires large companies to notify warehouse and distribution workers in writing of their expected quotas, how often they are expected to they perform certain tasks and what consequences they will face. for not meeting their quotas. That law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021, was drafted in response to Amazon workers who claimed they would take bathroom breaks or risk injury to optimize their production.
This followed a 2021 report by Washington Post (ironically owned by Jeff Bezos), claiming that data shows that Amazon warehouse workers “suffer serious injuries at higher rates than other firms.” The company, still led by Bezos at the time, quickly changed its Time Off Task policy in response.
In addition, how CNBC Notes OSHA and the US Attorney’s Office are investigating conditions at some Amazon warehouses. The Justice Department is also investigating whether the company is underreporting injuries — a charge echoed by Sanders in the HELP Committee’s findings.
Perhaps the Coalition for Workplace Safety (CWS), an organization that tries to balance corporate and regulatory priorities (good luck with that), found a twist we can all agree on. “If [Sanders] wants to improve safety for delivery workers, it should start with the US Postal Service, as OSHA’s own data shows that USPS has the highest percentage of investigations resulting in citations compared to other large employers in the industry.
The moral of the story? No matter what a company is accused of, there’s a good chance the US Postal Service will absorb even more.