Amazon, which is the second-largest business employer currently in the United States and one of the most valuable companies in the entire world, operates warehouses with more than double the rate of serious injuries than competing companies for most of the past four years, according to work-related injury data analyzed by the Washington Post from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
In 2020, there were 5.9 serious injuries for every 100 Amazon warehouse workers, which is nearly 80% higher than the serious injury rate at non-Amazon warehouses, the Strategic Organizing Center wrote in a new report published Tuesday. The SOC said serious injuries include any injuries that require employees to either miss work entirely, known as “lost time injuries,” or be placed on light or restricted duty.
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“The pace of work, and the amount of twisting and turning, is enormous,” Debbie Berkowitz, a former OSHA chief of staff and senior policy adviser, revealed to the Post. “There is a constant pressure to work fast.”
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According to Labor Department data and job postings analyzed by the newspaper, the company paid its warehouse workers lower wages than competitors in many markets.
In 2019, for every 200,000 hours that an Amazon warehouse worker clocked — approximately the equivalent of 100 warehouse employees working full time for a year — there were 7.8 incidents, according to the OSHA data.
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That comes to more than double the rate of competing warehouses. One of Amazon's biggest competitors, Walmart, had less than three serious cases per worker during the same time period.
OSHA work-related injury and illness data from 2017 to 2020 calculated the rate of serious injury incidents at U.S. warehouses, including 638 Amazon warehouses and 4,773 non-Amazon facilities.
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Amazon is reported to place particularly high physical demands on warehouse workers, with 12-hour shifts packing dozens of heavy boxes an hour with few breaks and little leeway if mistakes are made.
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“They don’t care about your well-being,” Vanessa Melesio, a former Amazon warehouse box packer, told the Washington Post. “If you’re not efficient, you are not worth it to them.”
Amazon claimed in a statement it did not place undue burdens on its warehouse workers, justifying its use of performance metrics to measure worker productivity.
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The tech giant also revealed that it had spent more than $1 billion on safety measures in 2020. It has not directly commented on the OSHA warehouse data.
“We don’t set unreasonable performance goals,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wrote in a letter to shareholders earlier this year, in which he commented on workplace labor issues. “We set achievable performance goals that take into account tenure and actual employee performance data.”
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