Amazon knew of warehouse injury problem, Senate probe finds

For years, Amazon has faced accusations that the pressure the company puts on its warehouse workers to work more quickly has led to higher rates of injuries.

Now, an investigation by a U.S. Senate committee led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has found that Amazon itself made the link between productivity quotas and injuries and that Amazon executives refused to make changes over concerns they would harm business.

In a report on its findings released this week, the Senate’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions concluded that in 2023 Amazon warehouses recorded more than 30% more injuries than the industry average and that the company portrays its warehouses inaccurately to the public by “cherry-picking” injury data. Amazon also discourages injured workers from receiving outside medical care, and its internal practices force workers who need care to return to work too soon, the report said.

As part of the probe, which was launched by Sanders in June last year, Senate committee staff examined seven years of Amazon workplace injury data and hundreds of internal documents provided by the company, as well as conducted interviews with 130 workers. The report, however, says Amazon refused to hand over much of the information the committee requested.

“I don’t even use Amazon anymore, I’d rather wait … than have some poor employee in an Amazon warehouse get battered and bruised so I can get my book within six hours,” one worker told investigators. “People don’t see that, they think it just appears by magic. But it doesn’t, it appears by blood, sweat, and tears.”

Amazon vigorously criticized the report’s findings, the committee and Sanders in a blog post it published on its website Monday. The post, titled “Senator Bernie Sanders continues to mislead the American public on workplace safety at Amazon,” contended that the internal documents the report referenced were flawed and said that over the last five years the company has increased delivery speeds and decreased injury rates.

“Sen. Sanders’ report is wrong on the facts and weaves together out-of-date documents and unverifiable anecdotes to create a pre-conceived narrative that he and his allies have been pushing,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in an emailed statement.

The report described two studies Amazon conducted to examine injury rates.

Project Soteria in 2020 sought to determine why the company’s injury rates improved during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. It recommended pausing a practice of disciplining workers for missing productivity targets and providing workers with more time off. Amazon leadership rejected the recommendations, the report said.

Amazon, however, said in its post that the project’s methodology had been evaluated by Amazon economists and was determined to be inaccurate.

Regulators in Washington previously cited Amazon for safety violations and referenced Project Soteria in its case, but a state judge tossed out many of the citations this year after a monthslong trial, finding the state did not establish a clear link between work speed and injury rates.

Project Elderwand, launched in 2021, found that the likelihood of a worker suffering a back injury increased as the number of items they handled over the course of a shift increased, the report said. To remedy this, the study proposed limiting the number of repetitive motions required of an employee during a shift and using a software program to enforce work breaks — a proposal Amazon rejected.

Project Elderwand concluded about 216 motions per hour during a 10-hour shift was the upper limit that an employee could safely perform, but Amazon workers on average handle nearly 2,400 items over a 10-hour shift — more than 266 items per hour, according to the Senate committee’s report.

The company said in its Monday statement that Project Elderwand found that forced breaks to reduce the pace of work was an ineffective intervention and that the company has made other “meaningful ergonomic enhancements over the last few years.”

It’s unclear whether government scrutiny of Amazon will change under the incoming Trump administration. Although Trump has garnered support from the Teamsters, a powerful union that has been critical of Amazon and has led the charge to unionize its warehouses, the administration is reportedly considering Heather MacDougall, a former Amazon vice president overseeing workplace health and safety, to lead the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

California in 2021 passed landmark legislation seeking to crack down on harsh warehouse work conditions. In June, the state fined Amazon nearly $6 million for failing to provide employees at two Inland Empire fulfillment centers with adequate explanations of quotas that they were expected to meet as they prepared orders for shipment. Amazon has appealed the citations.