December 17, 2024
The U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) released its findings following an 18-month investigation that reviewed seven years of the retailer’s injury data.
A Senate committee investigation, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), has accused the nation’s largest online retailer of manipulating workplace injury data to portray its warehouses as safer than they are.
The U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) released its findings after an 18-month investigation that reviewed seven years of the retailer’s injury data and included interviews over 130 Amazon workers.
The conclusion: Amazon is putting its workers at risk for injuries in the name of speed and profit.
“Many of these workers live with severe injuries and permanent disabilities because of the company’s insistence on enforcing grueling productivity quotas and its refusal to adequately care for injured workers,” according to the report.
The investigation came after warehouse workers nationwide raised alarm for years about “unsafe working conditions” and “a corporate culture that prioritizes speed and profit over worker health and safety,” the report read.
“Amazon chooses misleading comparisons to obscure the fact that the company’s warehouses have significantly higher injury rates than the industry average and non-Amazon warehouses,” according to the report. “An analysis of the company’s data shows that Amazon warehouses recorded over 30 percent more injuries than the warehousing industry average in 2023.”
Members found Amazon workers were nearly twice as likely to be injured as workers in the rest of the warehousing industry.
“Alarmingly, this problem is common across the company’s facilities: more than two-thirds of Amazon’s warehouses have injury rates that exceed the industry average,” the report observed.
The online retailer says its employees’ safety is and will always be a top priority.
“We’re proud of the progress we’ve made and our commitment to continuously improving, and we were eager to share that progress with the Committee,” Amazon said in a statement. “Unfortunately, it’s now clear that this investigation wasn’t a fact-finding mission, but rather an attempt to collect information and twist it to support a false narrative.”
According to NPR, this isn’t the first time Amazon has faced scrutiny for having injury rates that exceed national warehouse averages. Amazon, however, has said its injury reports are only “slightly above the industry average.”
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