Noam Scheiber, Amazon Disregarded Internal Warnings on Injuries, Senate Investigation Claims, NYTimes, Dec. 16, 2024.
Internal company documents collected by Mr. Sanders’s investigators show that Amazon health and safety personnel recommended relaxing enforcement of the production quotas to lower injury rates, but that senior executives rejected the recommendations apparently because they worried about the effect on the company’s performance.
The report also affirmed the findings of investigations undertaken by a union-backed group showing that injury rates at Amazon were almost twice the average for the rest of the industry.
“The shockingly dangerous working conditions at Amazon’s warehouses revealed in this 160-page report are beyond unacceptable,” Mr. Sanders said in a statement. “Amazon’s executives repeatedly chose to put profits ahead of the health and safety of its workers by ignoring recommendations that would substantially reduce injuries.”
Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokeswoman, said the internal studies and recommendations that Mr. Sanders’s report cited were later found by the company to be invalid. “Senator Sanders’s report is wrong on the facts and weaves together out-of-date documents and unverifiable anecdotes to create a preconceived narrative,” she said.
She noted a recent ruling by a judge in Washington State that rejected a regulator’s allegations that Amazon required employees to work at an unsafe pace, and said the injury rates had recently improved. “The facts are, our expectations for our employees are safe and reasonable,” Ms. Nantel said.
Later:
Amazon has said that it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars improving safety in recent years, and that injury rates have declined as a result, including a large drop for the most serious injuries. The company has long maintained that it doesn’t have strict or “fixed” quotas. It says it has performance targets that are evaluated over longer periods and that take into account factors beyond sheer productivity, like an employee’s experience level and how other worklabers at the site are performing.
But employees have said for years that they are subject to warnings or disciplinary action if they fail to complete a certain number of actions per hour, and interviews conducted by Mr. Sanders’s office affirm this. Amazon workers told investigators that they could be disciplined for failing to pick items from shelving units at target rates in the hundreds per hour.
The report also identifies what it says are flaws in how Amazon compares its own injury rates with the rest of the industry. While Amazon says its injury rates are roughly average for large warehouses, Mr. Sanders’s team argued that this calculation was heavily skewed by including Amazon in the overall data set, which drives up the average. Amazon also tends to restrict the comparison to warehouses with 1,000 or more employees even though it operates many smaller warehouses.
When Amazon is removed from the average and compared with other companies, and when the analysis includes warehouses of any size, its injury rates were more than 1.8 times that of other companies in each of the past seven years, Mr. Sanders’s report concludes. The findings are similar to those of a union-backed group.
There's more at the link.
