The U.S. Senate committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), which is led by Senator Bernie Sanders, has released the findings of an 18-month investigation into the injury rates at Amazon warehouses, which the committee said “reveals a deeply troubling picture of how one of the largest corporations in the world treats its workforce.”
HELP Accuses Amazon of Persistently Dangerous Warehouse Conditions
The damning 160-page report, titled The “Injury-Productivity Trade-off”: How Amazon’s Obsession with Speed Creates Uniquely Dangerous Warehouses, accuses Amazon of a range of unsafe and deceptive practices, including that Amazon:
- Manipulates its workforce safety data to make it appear that its warehouses are safer than they are;
- Continues to impose dangerous speed and productivity requirements on its warehouse workers that make safety procedures nearly impossible to follow;
- Forces workers to move in unsafe ways, leading to high rates of musculoskeletal disorders;
- Refuses to implement changes that would reduce injuries for fear of hurting productivity levels;
- Discourages workers from receiving outside medical care; and
- Has deflated the injury numbers it records for federal regulators, among other charges.
“Through its investigation, the committee found extensive evidence of a corporate culture obsessed with speed and productivity,” said the committee in its report. “Amazon expects workers to move at unsafe rates and in unsafe conditions that cause workers to be injured far more frequently than they are at other warehouses.”
Amazon Accuses Sanders of Unfounded Smear Campaign
Amazon has vehemently denied the findings of the report, saying in a statement that “our employees’ safety is and always will be our top priority” and accusing Sanders of “misleading the American public on workplace safety at Amazon.”
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The statement goes on to say that “the senator has issued another report that’s wrong on the facts and features selective, outdated information that lacks context and isn’t grounded in reality.” The mention of “another report” appears to be in reference to statements Sanders made in a public letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in June 2023 when the committee launched its investigation. The investigation was prompted in part by a swath of citations in 2023 by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for workplace safety violations at Amazon warehouses in Florida, Colorado, New Jersey and New York.
“Our voluntary, good-faith cooperation with this investigation was premised on the reasonable expectation that any report would be even-handed and truthful, even if that truth was inconvenient for people who want to claim that our workplace is anything other than safe,” the Amazon statement continued. “We’re proud of the progress we’ve made and our commitment to continuously improving, and we were eager to share that progress with the committee. Unfortunately, it’s now clear that this investigation wasn’t a fact-finding mission, but rather an attempt to collect information and twist it to support a false narrative.”
HELP Urges Passage of Laws that Would Strengthen OSHA
Part of the larger problem that Sanders’ and the HELP committee hope to address with their investigation is what they deem to be the relative toothlessness of OSHA penalties: “Amazon is able to operate this way because the penalties for its behavior are, by law, far too low to serve as a deterrent for a company with a market cap of over $2 trillion,” according to the HELP report. “OSHA’s maximum penalties are just over $16,000 for each serious violation. Even for a company like Amazon, which repeatedly violates federal regulations, these penalties amount to very little: OSHA’s proposed penalties for more than 50 violations included in citations to Amazon over a two-year period totaled less than $300,000. That is approximately 1% of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s total compensation in 2023.”
The HELP report goes on to encourage Congress to pass a number of bills currently being considered, including the Warehouse Worker Protection Act in the Senate and the Protecting America’s Workers Act in the House, both of which would require stronger regulation and enforcement action by OSHA.
Amazon Cites Proof of Safety Improvements
Amazon has framed the report as an “an attempt to collect information and twist it to support a false narrative,” saying that the main premise of the investigation is “fundamentally flawed” and citing internal data from the last five years showing that despite increasing delivery speeds across its fulfillment network over that time, injury rates have decreased. “How is that possible?” queries the Amazon statement. “Because speedy delivery doesn’t come from pushing people harder — it comes from getting products closer to customers and reducing the number of steps involved in going from a supplier to a customer. We’ve spent years re-designing our network to do just that. The false information in this report doesn’t change reality: Our safety progress is well documented, and we’re proud of it.”
Both the HELP report and Amazon’s response include a series of detailed accounts amounting to back-and-forth bickering about how much Amazon cooperated with the committee’s investigation and the proper methodology for recording and reporting injury rates, but the basic battle boils down to this: Amazon says its performance expectations of its warehouse employees are “reasonable and achievable,” and HELP says they are not — at least not safely.