The online retailer Amazon repeatedly ignored or rejected worker safety measures that were recommended internally—and even misleadingly presents worker injury data so that its warehouses seem safer than they actually are, according to report from the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions that was unveiled on Sunday.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is chairman of the HELP Committee, called the revelations in the report “beyond unacceptable.”
“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 at its warehouses. This is precisely the type of outrageous corporate greed that the American people are sick and tired of,” added Sanders, who has scrutinized Amazon’s safety record in the past.
According to the report, Amazon’s warehouses are “far more dangerous” than competitors’ or the warehousing industry in general. The committee found that in comparison with the industry as a whole, Amazon warehouses tallied 31% more injuries than the average warehouse in 2023, when comparing Amazon’s reported data and industry averages calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
What’s more, the company’s injury rate is nearly double the average injury rate for all non-Amazon warehouses stretching back to 2017, according to the report.
This runs counter to how Amazon frames their injury rates in public statements. For one, according to the report, the company touts a 30% decline in injury rates since 2019, but that year saw a spike in injuries compared to the two years prior, meaning that the comparison is misleading. In fact, the injury rate for 2020 and 2023 were essentially the same, 6.59 and 6.54, respectively.
The report also alleges the company manipulates injury data by repeatedly comparing injury numbers stemming from Amazon warehouses of all sizes to the industry average for just large warehouses, a category that includes warehouses with 1,000 employees or more and tend to have a higher injury rate. Only 40% of Amazon’s warehouses fall in this category, making the comparison a “false equivalence,” the report states.
The report, which was based on an investigation that began in 2023 and included interviews with over 130 Amazon workers, also concluded that the company does in practice impose productivity quotas on workers—even though Amazon claims publicly that it does not—and this drive toward productivity and speed contributes to the company’s unsafe working environment.
“Most workers who spoke to the Committee had experienced at least one injury during their time at the company; those injuries ranged from herniated disks and torn rotator cuffs, to sprained ankles and sharp, shooting muscle pains.Workers also reported torn meniscuses, concussions, back injuries, and other serious conditions,” according to the report.
Amazon itself is aware of the connection between speed and worker safety, but “refuses to implement injury-reducing changes because of concerns those changes might reduce productivity,” the report argues.
For example, four years ago the company launched an initiative called “Project Soteria,” which found evidence of a link between speed and injuries and made a recommendations based on this link—but Amazon did not implement changes in response to the findings, per the report.
Later, in 2021, another team called “Project Elderwand” calculated the maximum number of times workers who have a specific role can repeat a set of physical tasks before increasing their risk of injury. That team developed a method to make sure that workers do not exceed that number, but upon learning how much this would impact the “customer experience,” the company decided not to implement the change, the report states.
“My first day was the day [the facility] opened. People of all ages were there. Most were like me, though—young and healthy. Within weeks everyone is developing knee and back pain,” said one former Amazon worker, who was quoted anonymously in the report.
In a public statement released Monday, Amazon rejected the HELP Committee’s findings, writing that the premise of the report is “fundamentally flawed” and, in response to the report’s section on injury rates, “we benchmark ourselves against similar employers because it’s the most effective way to know where we stand.”
The company also calls the Project Soteria paper “analytically unsound” (the report details that Amazon audited the initial findings of Project Soteria, and a second team hypothesized that “worker injuries were actually the result of workers’ ‘frailty'”) and says that Project Elderwand is merely proof that the company regularly looks at its safety processes to “ensure they’re as strong as they can be.”
“As we have publicly disclosed and discussed with committee members during this investigation, we’ve made, and continue to make, meaningful progress on safety across our network,” according to the statement.
Amazon’s record on worker safety has been under close scrutiny in recent years. The Strategic Organizing Center, which is a democratic coalition of multiple labor unions, has also put out research on injuries at Amazon. Safety was among the reasons that workers at an Amazon facility in Staten Island chose to unionize in 2022. That Amazon facility and another in New York recently authorized a strike. Additionally, over the summer, California’s Labor Commissioner’s Office fined Amazon nearly $6 million for tens of thousands of violations of a California law aimed at curbing the use of worker quotas.
