A report released on Dec. 15 by the US Senate's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt), concluded, after an 18-month investigation, that Amazon warehouses had 30% more injuries than the industry's rate in 2023.
The report said that in each of the past seven years, Amazon workers were nearly twice as likely to be injured compared to other warehouses. The report also said that more than two-thirds of Amazon’s warehouses have injury rates that exceed the industry average.
In a press release Sanders said, “Amazon manipulates its workplace injury data to make its warehouses seem safer than they actually are."
Amazon said the premise of the report is fundamentally flawed. The report’s title – How Amazon’s Obsession with Speed Creaets Uniquely Dangerous Warehouses – is wrong, the company said. "If that were accurate, what you’d see is that as our productivity and speed goes up, injuries go up. But what’s actually happened over the past five years is exactly the opposite – we’ve increased our delivery speeds, while decreasing the injury rates across our network. How is that possible? Because speedy delivery doesn’t come from pushing people harder – it comes from getting products closer to customers and reducing the number of steps involved in going from a supplier to a customer. We’ve spent years re-designing our network to do just that.”
The company explained that from 2019-2023 their recordable incident rate in the US decreased by 28%, and they reduced their lost time incident rate by 75%.
Amazon also questions how the report is using a benchmark standard. saying that they benchmark themselves against similar employers. "In warehousing, we compare ourselves against the average for employers with over 1,000 employees. The senator alleges that it’s improper for us to benchmark against employers with more than 1,000 employees because many of our buildings are smaller than that. But what he misses or ignores is that we have on average 1,400 employees at the buildings that are included in this particular comparison. As a result, it makes sense to compare ourselves to employers of that size, and putting ourselves in a different category would be misleading. “
There is also the question of whether this particular industry is facing unfair scrutiny. In a recent EHS Today interview with Phillip Russell, partner at Ogletree Deakins, he made the following comment when talking about OSHA might change under the new administration. “I'll point out one in particular, the warehousing and distribution industry. I think this industry has had an inordinate amount of attention and resources focused on it. And I don’t think there is data to show that it's the most hazardous."