By D. Maan, Jadetimes News
Amazon Prime Day and Holiday Season Increase Injury Risks for Warehouse Workers, Senate Investigation Reveals
Amazon’s warehouses become particularly hazardous for employees during the company’s annual Prime Day event and the holiday season, according to a recent US Senate investigation.
Held this year on Tuesday and Wednesday, Prime Day has been identified as “a major cause of injuries for the warehouse workers who make it possible,” stated a report released on Monday by Senator Bernie Sanders, chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. The report highlighted “the extremely unsafe conditions in Amazon warehouses” during these peak periods and urged the company to enhance protections for its workers.
The investigation found that during Prime Day and the holiday season, Amazon’s (AMZN) warehouses experience “an extremely high volume” of work and “intense pressure to work long hours and ignore safety guidelines.”
For the first time, the report disclosed Amazon’s internal data on warehouse injury rates. The data revealed that during Prime Day 2019, the rate of “recordable” injuries—those Amazon must report to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) exceeded 10 per 100 workers, more than twice the average rate in the US warehousing and storage industry.
Moreover, the total injury rate, including those not reported to OSHA, was nearly 45 per 100 workers, according to the report. “These injury rates are especially egregious given the incredible revenue the company generates and the resources it has available to make its warehouses safe for workers,” it added. Amazon achieved $12.7 billion in sales during Prime Day 2023 and reported July 11 as the single biggest sales day in its history. For the first quarter of 2024, the company reported a profit of $10.4 billion.
Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, responded to the report, stating, “The safety and health of our employees is and always will be our top priority. Since 2019, we’ve made significant progress, reducing our recordable incident rate in the US by 28%.”
Nantel disputed the total injury rate mentioned in the Senate report, arguing it was based on a five year old internal document with “flawed methodology and gaps in the research,” which experts in data analysis had rejected.
“One of the false claims in the report implies that we’re not adequately staffed for busy shopping periods. This is just not true, as we carefully plan and staff up for major events, ensure excess capacity across our network, and design our network so orders are automatically routed to sites that can handle unexpected spikes in volume,” Nantel added.
Over the years, some Amazon workers have described their “grueling” experiences of long hours spent racing around massive warehouses, equivalent in size to 28 football fields, under constant surveillance tracking their every move.
In a letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy last year, Senator Sanders wrote, “Amazon must stop pushing workers past their limits. In its endless pursuit of profits, Amazon sacrifices workers’ bodies under the constant pressure of a surveillance system that enforces impossible rates of work. When faced with worker injuries, Amazon provides minimal medical care.”
Amazon holds Prime Day annually in July to boost sales during the typically slow summer months.
