Prime Days See Increase in Injuries for Amazon Warehouse Workers

Washington, DC (WorkersCompensation.com) An interim report from the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee has found that Amazon workers are getting hurt at higher rates than previously reported by the company.

The committee, chaired by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., found that on the job injuries to Amazon warehouse workers are higher during busy times than the company has reported, and that the company may be manipulating OSHA regulations by not referring workers to outside medical care.

The committee’s investigation comes after workers at Amazon warehouses across the country have publicly called for safer working conditions, and higher wages. This year, OSHA cited Amazon warehouse STL8, a fulfillment facility, five times for failing to report injuries. In late July 2023, 14 STL8 Organizing Committee workers filed complaints with OSHA regarding job-related injuries they said stem from dangerous working conditions. The complaint also alleged that employees received inadequate treatment from the company’s in-house medical team, AmCare. Previously, workers at the facility walked off the job on Black Friday in 2022 to protest working conditions. Other Amazon workers and union representatives have called for the company to be held accountable for warehouse worker injuries.

For a year, the Senate committee reviewed internal Amazon documents regarding workers during peak shopping days, like Prime Day and the 2019 and 2020 holiday season. What the committee found was that these two periods are when the company has its highest injury rates for its workers.

In response, Amazon said the report is wrong on the facts and uses a small set of outdated data, unverified anecdotes and incorrect analysis to build a misleading narrative.

According to the committee’s report, Amazon sometimes does not refer its injured workers to outside medical care which circumvents reporting. Under OSHA rules, injuries that receive medical treatment beyond first aid must be disclosed. In the report, the committee said it heard from current and former Amazon employees who said the company treats them on site.

“It appears that Amazon is manipulating these regulations to keep its recordable injury rate low by engaging in medical mismanagement,” the report reads. “When Amazon workers are injured, they typically visit an on-site first-aid clinic called AmCare. If their injuries are minor and require only first aid, they are usually treated and sent back to work. But if their injuries are more serious and require additional attention, they are often still only given first aid and sent back to work instead of being sent to a doctor.”

Further, the report said, worker injuries treated on site are rendered not recordable, regardless of their severity.

The report found that nearly 45 percent of workers were injured during peak times in 2019, and that those injuries were the result of company management pressuring employees to work at unsafe speeds. During Prime Day 2019, Amazon’s recordable injury rate – the number of injuries Amazon is required to disclose to OSHA, was over 10 injuries per 100 workers; a rate more than twice the industry average.

In January 2023, OSHA cited Amazon centers in Florida, Illinois and New York for violating its rules by exposing workers to ergonomic hazards. Amazon officials said they have cooperated with OSHA during the investigation and are working to keep its employees injury free.

The company has reduced its recordable incident rate by 28 percent, Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel told NPR, including injuries that require more than basic first aid. Nantel said the lost time incident rate has been cut 75 percent, including injuries that require an employee to miss at least a day of work.

“The safety and health of our employees is and always will be our top priority, it comes before everything else we do,” Nantel said in a statement. “We’ve cooperated throughout this investigation, including providing thousands of pages of information and documents. But unfortunately, this report (which was not shared with us before publishing) ignores our progress and paints a one-sided, false narrative using only a fraction of the information we’ve provided. It draws sweeping and inaccurate conclusions based on unverified anecdotes, and it misrepresents documents that are several years old and contain factual errors and faulty analysis.”

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