While the world was sequestered in their homes at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, Amazon’s delivery empire skyrocketed. The e-commerce giant is now the second-largest private U.S. employer, with over 1.5 million workers.
As more and more people have begun to work at Amazon, the grueling realities of that labor have come into sharper focus.
A new National Employment Law Project report found that the injury rate at Amazon warehouses is significantly higher than at comparable facilities.
In 2023, Amazon had 6.5 injuries per 100 full-time equivalent warehouse workers, a rate more than 1.5 times that of TJX Companies and almost triple that of Walmart. Last year, large Amazon warehouses reported 23,059 injuries.
The report also found that injuries sustained while supporting the delivery business are almost certain to be severe enough to require taking time off or being moved to a different task.
Amazon’s high injury rate is especially disturbing considering that the firm employs 79 percent of all U.S. workers at warehouses with over 1,000 employees.
Amazon has seven times more warehouse employees than the next largest warehouse employer — Walmart — the NELP analysis of Occupational Safety and Health Administration data found.
Why is work at Amazon so dangerous? The company imposes aggressive performance standards, with harsh discipline for those who fail to meet undisclosed metrics.
In a recent University of Illinois Chicago study, 41 percent of surveyed Amazon workers reported feeling pressure to work faster all or most of the time.
“It’s part of my job to teach safety measures and ensure warehouse associates follow safety rules – but management is more concerned with speed and reaching unreachable quotas – what they call ‘making rate,’” Ron Sewell, an Amazon warehouse associate affiliated with the retail industry reform group United for Respect, said in a statement.
“That’s the #1 priority in the warehouse, which leads management and workers to bypass safety rules and work in the danger zone.”
This past week Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey introduced legislation aimed at protecting warehouse workers from harm.
The Warehouse Worker Protection Act would ban the kind of work speed quotas that Amazon and other large warehouse employers impose on their staff.
The legislation would also set stricter requirements for discipline transparency from companies and instruct OSHA to develop new management standards for injury avoidance.
The bill — which has also been introduced in the House — lines up closely with the recommendations for curbing injuries in the NELP report.
The organization also calls on Congress to finally pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, legislation that would shift the heavily employer-tilted balance of power in union campaigns toward workers.
Amazon is a notorious union-buster that has refused to enter contract negotiations with the one facility, JFK8 in Staten Island, that has won an election. The current labor law landscape has given it broad discretion to delay any legal consequences for interfering in elections or punishing organizers.
Unionizing would give workers a legally protected say in their conditions, letting them demand an end to onerous quotas that don’t leave them any time for a breather.
Chris Mills Rodrigo is the Managing Editor at Inequality.org.
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