NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon’s popular Prime Minister’s Day the sales event was “a major cause of injury” to warehouse workers who pick and pack customer orders at the e-commerce giant’s facilities across the United States, according to a report released Tuesday by Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The report, which draws information from one year Senate committee investigation into Amazon’s safety practices and relied on internal company data from 2019 and 2020, said peak shopping times — including the holiday shopping period — resulted in the “highest weekly injury rates” for workers. warehouse.
The preliminary report from Sanders’ office was also based on interviews with more than 100 current and former Amazon employees. This year’s two-day Prime Day event started on Tuesday.
In a statement, Sanders said the “incredibly dangerous working conditions at Amazon” highlighted in the report are a “perfect example of the kind of corporate greed that the American people are sick and tired of.”
“Despite making $36 billion in profits last year and offering its CEO over $275 million in compensation over the past three years, Amazon continues to treat its workers as dispensable and with utter contempt for their safety and well-being,” said the Vermont independent. , who has been critical of Amazon and supports the worker efforts to unite in the company. “This is unacceptable and this has to change.”
Labor unions and security experts have long criticized Amazon, claiming the company has focused on speed and fast delivery puts workers at risk. In recent years, several states have passed laws aimed at Amazon to curb its use of warehouse productivity quotas, although the company claims it does not use them.
According to the Senate report, 45 of 100 Amazon warehouse workers sustained injuries during the 2019 Prime Minister’s Day event. The number includes minor injuries that the company was not required to disclose to the federal government, such as superficial bruises and cuts, but also those serious as concussions that should have been reported, he said.
Amazon disputed the finding.
“Claims that we systematically underreport injuries and that our actual injury rate is higher than publicly reported are false,” Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said in a prepared statement. “We’re required to report any injuries that need more than basic first aid, and that’s what we do.”
While Amazon “could make the occasional clerical error,” a six-month federal investigation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found “no intentional, deliberate or systematic error” in the company’s reporting, Nantel said.
The report also alleged that Amazon had a failed practice of referring workers for outside medical care because that could affect whether an injury should be considered “recorded” and referred to OSHA. Even when injuries were serious and might have required additional medical attention, workers often received first aid before returning to work instead of a doctor, he said.
Amazon has admitted in the past that its warehouse damage rate was higher than its peers. Federal security investigators imposed fines on the company in recent years following inspections at some of its warehouses. Some of the inspections stemmed from referrals made to the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which is also investigating worker safety at the company through its civil division.
Last month, California fined Amazon a total of $5.9 million, accusing the company of violating the state’s Warehouse Quota Act at two facilities.
A spokesman for Sanders’ office said the committee relied on workplace injury rate data for 2019 and 2020 because that’s what Amazon provided to the inquiry.
However, Amazon spokesperson Nantel said the Senate review was ignored Progress the company has since 2019 reduced the rate of recorded incidents – those requiring more care than basic first aid – by 28%. The company has also improved the rate of significant injuries that require an employee to miss at least one day of work by 75%, she said.
“We have cooperated throughout this investigation, including providing thousands of pages of information and documents,” Nantel said. “But unfortunately, this report (which was not shared with us before publication) ignores our progress and paints a one-sided, false narrative using only a fraction of the information we provided. He draws sweeping and inaccurate conclusions based on unverified anecdotes and misrepresents documents that are several years old and contained factual errors and flawed analysis.”
The report also says Amazon failed to adequately staff its warehouses during peak shopping hours, which the company disputed. Amazon said in March that it distributed more than $750 million to security efforts for this year.