Amazon Prime Day leading cause of warehouse worker injuries, Senate review finds

NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon’s popular Prime Day sales event was a “leading cause of injuries” among warehouse workers who pick and pack customer orders at the e-commerce giant’s facilities across the U.S., according to a report released Tuesday by Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The report, which draws on information from a year-long Senate committee investigation into safety practices at Amazon and relies on internal company data from 2019 and 2020, finds that peak shopping periods — including the holiday shopping season — result in the “highest weekly number of accidents” among warehouse workers.

The initial report from Sanders’ office also relied on interviews with more than 100 current and former Amazon employees. This year’s two-day Prime Day event began Tuesday.

In a statement, Sanders said the “extremely unsafe working conditions at Amazon” highlighted in the report are “a perfect example of the kind of corporate greed that Americans are sick and tired of.”

“Despite generating $36 billion in profits last year and paying its CEO more than $275 million in compensation over the past three years, Amazon continues to treat its employees as disposable and has a complete disregard for their safety and well-being,” said the Vermont Independent, which has criticized Amazon and supports workers’ efforts to unionize at the company. “This is unacceptable and must change.”

Labor unions and safety experts have long criticized Amazon, saying the company’s emphasis on speed and rapid deliveries puts workers at risk. In recent years, some states have passed laws targeting Amazon to limit its use of warehouse capacity limits, although the company says it does not enforce them.

According to the Senate report, 45 of 100 Amazon warehouse workers suffered injuries during Prime Day 2019. That number included minor injuries that the company was not required to disclose to the federal government, such as bruises and superficial cuts, but also serious ones, such as concussions, that should have been reported, it said.

Amazon disputed these findings.

“Claims that we systematically underreport injuries and that our actual injury rates are higher than publicly reported are false,” Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said in a prepared statement. “We are required to report any injury that requires more than basic first aid, and that is what we do.”

While Amazon “may occasionally make clerical errors,” a six-month federal investigation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found “no intentional, deliberate or systemic errors” in the company’s reporting, Nantel said.

The report also alleged that Amazon had a habit of not referring workers for outside medical care because it could affect whether an injury should be considered “recordable” and referred to OSHA. Even if the injuries were serious and could require additional medical care, workers often received first aid before returning to work, rather than seeing a doctor, the report said.

Amazon has acknowledged in the past that injury rates at its warehouses were higher than those of its competitors. Federal safety investigators have issued fines to the company in recent years after inspections of some of its warehouses. Some of the inspections resulted from referrals to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which is also investigating worker safety at the company through its civil division.

Last month, California fined Amazon a total of $5.9 million, accusing the company of violating the state’s warehouse quota law at two facilities.

A spokesman for Sanders’ office said the commission relied on occupational injury rate data from 2019 and 2020 because that was the data Amazon provided for the investigation.

But Amazon spokeswoman Nantel said the Senate review ignored the progress the company has made since 2019 in reducing the number of recordable incidents — those that require more attention than basic first aid — by 28%. The company has also improved the number of serious injuries that require an employee to be off work for at least one day by 75%, she said.

“We cooperated throughout the investigation, including providing thousands of pages of information and documents,” Nantel said. “Unfortunately, this report (which was not made available to us prior to publication) ignores our progress and paints a one-sided, false narrative using only a fraction of the information we provided. It draws sweeping and inaccurate conclusions based on unverified anecdotes and misrepresents documents that are several years old and contain factual errors and flawed analysis.”

The report also said Amazon failed to adequately staff warehouses during peak shopping hours, a claim the company disputed. Amazon said in March that it had spent more than $750 million on safety measures this year.