Amazon has faced ongoing scrutiny over the safety conditions in its warehouses and the number of injuries sustained by its workers. Earlier this year, the company touted the progress it had made toward improving workplace safety across U.S. warehouses, claiming that its recordable incident rate—a metric that reportedly comprises all injuries requiring “more than basic first-aid treatment”—had improved by 24% since 2019.
In a report released last week, however, the National Employment Law Project (NELP) challenges Amazon’s interpretation of its injury data. After conducting an analysis of injury reports filed with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the warehousing category, NELP found that Amazon’s overall injury rate in 2023 was 71% higher than that of other employers in the sector. According to NELP’s analysis—which focused on warehouses with 1,000-plus workers—79% of warehouse workers in the U.S. are employed by Amazon, and the company’s share of overall injuries is 86%.
“Amazon is now the largest private sector employer in quite a few states,” says Irene Tung, a senior researcher and policy analyst at NELP and one of the authors behind the report. “As that kind of large employer, they have a unique responsibility to provide jobs that are high-quality jobs.”
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The report’s publication coincides with the introduction of the Warehouse Worker Protection Act, a bill sponsored by Democratic senators that seeks to address the issues that reportedly drive up injury rates for warehouse workers, such as productivity quotas. The bill comes after politicians passed state-level legislation in California, New York, Oregon, Washington, and Minnesota. Those efforts were spearheaded by Amazon workers who have organized with the Teamsters union. Some states have tacked on provisions that are intended to mitigate ergonomic risk factors.
NELP’s Tung says some of the workers covered by state laws have already seen positive change, at least anecdotally, since those laws took effect. “Nobody has done an academic study on this yet,” she says. “[But] what we’ve been hearing from workers on the ground is that they have been able to use the new laws, to ask for their quotas and work speed data in a way that creates more transparency and improves their ability to protect themselves from injury.”
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Read the full article at fastcompany.com.
