The US Senate Committee headed by Bernie Sanders (I-VT) released information report Amazon claims that nearly half of its warehouse workers were injured during the week of Prime Day 2019. The chairman of the Health, Education, Work and Pensions (HELP) Committee called the company’s behavior five years ago “incredibly dangerous”. For its part, Amazon claims that Senator Sanders is misrepresenting the facts and ignoring others.
The report cites internal company data, including injuries that Amazon is not required to document to OSHA, which allegedly show warehouse workers suffered about 45 injuries for every 100 workers during the week of Prime Day 2019. the company must report them to OSHA, which the report claims is twice Amazon’s industry average — more than 10 per 100 workers.
“The incredibly dangerous working conditions at Amazon revealed in this investigation are a perfect example of the kind of corporate greed that the American people are sick and tired of,” Sanders wrote to the HELP Committee on Tuesday. announcement. The senator said Amazon was treating its workers “dismissively” and with “total disregard for their safety and well-being.”
Meanwhile, an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement shared with Engadget that the committee’s findings paint a misleading picture. The company says the committee’s findings consist of unverified anecdotes, documents dating back years of misrepresentation, and factual errors and faulty analysis.
“For example, one of the false claims in the report is that we are understaffed for busy shopping periods,” company spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said in an Amazon statement. “This is simply not true because we carefully plan and prepare staff for large events, ensure we have excess capacity on our network, and design our network so that orders are automatically routed to sites that can handle unexpected spikes in volume.”
Amazon says it has made “significant progress” in the five years since the data cited in the report, including a 28 percent reduction in the rate of reported incidents (those required by law to be reported by OSHA) in the United States. The company says it also reduced “lost time incidents” (workers with more serious injuries requiring time off) by 75 percent.
Regardless of whose framework you choose, this isn’t Amazon’s first criticism of its warehouse practices. Last year, a coalition of labor unions alleged that the company cited OSHA data responsible for 53 percent of all serious warehouse injuries Recorded in the USA in 2022. That report claimed that Amazon warehouse workers were injured more often (and often more severely) than their non-Amazon counterparts.
Last month, the California Labor Commissioner’s office Amazon was fined about 6 million dollars for violating a state law that requires large companies to provide warehouse and distribution workers with written notices of expected quotas, how often they are expected to perform certain tasks, and what consequences they will face if they do not meet their quotas. That law Signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2021It was developed in response to Amazon workers claiming they would skip bathroom breaks or risk injury to optimize their performance.
After that, a 2021 report by The Washington Post (ironically owned by Jeff Bezos) claims that Amazon’s warehouse workers “have a higher rate of serious injuries than other firms.” The company, which was then still run by Bezos, soon Changed the “Task Time” policy in response.
In addition, as 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 underreported injuries — an accusation echoed by Sanders in the HELP Committee findings.
Perhaps the Workplace Safety Coalition (good luck with that), an organization trying to balance corporate and regulatory priorities, has found a twist we can all agree on. “If [Sanders] if it wants to improve the safety of its 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 is a good chance The US Postal Service is even worse.
