Nearly Half of All Warehouse Injuries in 2021 Happened at Amazon Warehouses
- Truthout, April 12, 2022. Ed.
If a warehouse worker was injured on the job in 2021, there was about a 50% chance that they worked for Amazon, a new report highlighting dangerous working conditions at the company has revealed. Though Amazon employed only about 33% of warehouse workers in 2021, it was responsible for 49% of warehouse injuries that year, according to a damning new report from the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition between 4 major labor unions. The report analyzes data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
Overall, workers sustained nearly 40,000 injuries at Amazon facilities last year, representing a huge jump from the previous year; from 2020 to 2021, Amazon’s injury rate increased by 20%. Despite promises to become “Earth’s Safest Place to Work,” the company has shown to be quite the opposite. As SOC’s report and other analyses have found, Amazon’s serious injury rate is far higher than that of other companies. Serious injuries are ones that cause the worker to miss work or be reassigned to less strenuous tasks.
In 2021, the company’s serious injury rate was 6.8 per 100 full-time equivalent workers, the new report found. This is more than double the serious injury rate of other warehouses, which have an average rate of 3.3 per 100 workers. With 7.7 injuries of any type per 100 Amazon workers filed with OSHA last year, Amazon’s workers suffered injuries at a far higher rate than those in the rest of the industry, who experienced 4.0 injuries per 100 workers.
The report’s authors say that the reason for Amazon’s high injury rate is the company’s strict quotas and “obsession with speed,” which it monitors using invasive surveillance systems that track workers’ every move. Amazon also pushes hurt workers to keep working while they are recovering, even if the work will perpetuate the injury or make it worse. Musculoskeletal disorders like carpal tunnel or back pain are common among Amazon workers, investigations have found. Repetitive, strenuous movements place strain on workers’ bodies, and symptoms often linger long after the initial injury...https://truthout.org/articles/nearly-half-of-all-warehouse-injuries-in-2021-happened-at-amazon-warehouses/
- An Amazon delivery driver scans bags of groceries while loading a vehicle outside of a distribution facility on Feb. 2, 2021, Redondo Beach, Calif.