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Sanders-Led Investigation Finds Amazon 'Manipulates' Workplace Injury Data
"Amazon's executives repeatedly chose to put profits ahead of the health and safety of its workers by ignoring recommendations that would substantially reduce injuries at its warehouses," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Dec 16, 2024
The online retailer Amazon repeatedly ignored or rejected worker safety measures that were recommended internally—and even misleadingly presents worker injury data so that its warehouses seem safer than they actually are, according to report from the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions that was unveiled on Sunday.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is chairman of the HELP Committee, called the revelations in the report "beyond unacceptable."
"Amazon's executives repeatedly chose to put profits ahead of the health and safety of its workers by ignoring recommendations that would substantially reduce injuries at its warehouses. This is precisely the type of outrageous corporate greed that the American people are sick and tired of," added Sanders, who has scrutinized Amazon's safety record in the past.
According to the report, Amazon's warehouses are "far more dangerous" than competitors' or the warehousing industry in general. The committee found that in comparison with the industry as a whole, Amazon warehouses tallied 31% more injuries than the average warehouse in 2023, when comparing Amazon's reported data and industry averages calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
What's more, the company's injury rate is nearly double the average injury rate for all non-Amazon warehouses stretching back to 2017, according to the report.
This runs counter to how Amazon frames their injury rates in public statements. For one, according to the report, the company touts a 30% decline in injury rates since 2019, but that year saw a spike in injuries compared to the two years prior, meaning that the comparison is misleading. In fact, the injury rate for 2020 and 2023 were essentially the same, 6.59 and 6.54, respectively.
The report also alleges the company manipulates injury data by repeatedly comparing injury numbers stemming from Amazon warehouses of all sizes to the industry average for just large warehouses, a category that includes warehouses with 1,000 employees or more and tend to have a higher injury rate. Only 40% of Amazon's warehouses fall in this category, making the comparison a "false equivalence," the report states.
The report, which was based on an investigation that began in 2023 and included interviews with over 130 Amazon workers, also concluded that the company does in practice impose productivity quotas on workers—even though Amazon claims publicly that it does not—and this drive toward productivity and speed contributes to the company's unsafe working environment.
"Most workers who spoke to the Committee had experienced at least one injury during their time at the company; those injuries ranged from herniated disks and torn rotator cuffs, to sprained ankles and sharp, shooting muscle pains.Workers also reported torn meniscuses, concussions, back injuries, and other serious conditions," according to the report.
Amazon itself is aware of the connection between speed and worker safety, but "refuses to implement injury-reducing changes because of concerns those changes might reduce productivity," the report argues.
For example, four years ago the company launched an initiative called "Project Soteria," which found evidence of a link between speed and injuries and made a recommendations based on this link—but Amazon did not implement changes in response to the findings, per the report.
Later, in 2021, another team called "Project Elderwand" calculated the maximum number of times workers who have a specific role can repeat a set of physical tasks before increasing their risk of injury. That team developed a method to make sure that workers do not exceed that number, but upon learning how much this would impact the "customer experience," the company decided not to implement the change, the report states.
"My first day was the day [the facility] opened. People of all ages were there. Most were like me, though—young and healthy. Within weeks everyone is developing knee and back pain," said one former Amazon worker, who was quoted anonymously in the report.
In a public statement released Monday, Amazon rejected the HELP Committee's findings, writing that the premise of the report is "fundamentally flawed" and, in response to the report's section on injury rates, "we benchmark ourselves against similar employers because it's the most effective way to know where we stand."
The company also calls the Project Soteria paper "analytically unsound" (the report details that Amazon audited the initial findings of Project Soteria, and a second team hypothesized that "worker injuries were actually the result of workers' 'frailty'") and says that Project Elderwand is merely proof that the company regularly looks at its safety processes to "ensure they're as strong as they can be."
"As we have publicly disclosed and discussed with committee members during this investigation, we've made, and continue to make, meaningful progress on safety across our network," according to the statement.
Amazon's record on worker safety has been under close scrutiny in recent years. The Strategic Organizing Center, which is a democratic coalition of multiple labor unions, has also put out research on injuries at Amazon. Safety was among the reasons that workers at an Amazon facility in Staten Island chose to unionize in 2022. That Amazon facility and another in New York recently authorized a strike. Additionally, over the summer, California's Labor Commissioner's Office fined Amazon nearly $6 million for tens of thousands of violations of a California law aimed at curbing the use of worker quotas.
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Voices From the Front Lines of the Flint Water Crisis
Feb 18, 2016
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder's successive emergency managers are now gone from Flint, but the wreckage of their rule there still pollutes many homes. The crisis in Flint is, on the surface, about water. In April 2014, the city switched from the Detroit water system, which it had used for more than 50 years, to the Flint River, ostensibly to save money. The Flint River water made people sick, and is likely to have caused disease that killed some residents. The corrosive water, left untreated, coursed through the city's water system, leaching heavy metals out of old pipes. The most toxic poison was lead, which can cause permanent brain damage. The damage to the people of Flint, the damage to the children who drank and bathed in the poisoned water, is incalculable. The water is still considered toxic to this day.
The Flint debacle also is about democracy. As a team of us from the "Democracy Now!" news hour traveled to Flint last weekend to report on the crisis, we received a text message from a native son of that city, Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. "Lead isn't the poison in Michigan. Fascism is," Michael wrote. "How do u toss a democratic election in the garbage and get away with it?"
Moore had just visited Flint to help organize a rally calling for the arrest of the governor. Rick Snyder ran for governor in 2010 as a fiscal conservative, and won in the tea-party wave of electoral victories that year. He pushed for a strengthened emergency-manager law, which would give him broader powers to take over city governments and school districts that were deemed (by a board that Snyder appointed) to be in a state of "financial emergency." The governor could then appoint an emergency manager with sweeping powers, overriding elected city councils and mayors, imposing severe austerity measures, selling off public assets and breaking existing contracts with labor unions. He did this primarily in black communities.
"We don't have just a water problem. We've got a democracy problem. We've got a dictatorship problem," Claire McClinton told me in Flint. She is a lifelong resident of the city, from a union family, and a lead organizer with the Democracy Defense League. She and her group were meeting just across the Flint city line at a restaurant in Flint Township, which never switched off the Detroit water. As they met, a woman approached them. Kawanne Armstrong was visibly upset, desperate to get clean water for her newborn grandson. Audrey Muhammad, one of those attending the meeting, offered her water that she had just bought for herself, which she had in her car. These two women, both, like 60 percent of Flint's residents, African-American, walked into the bitter cold to move gallon jugs of water from one car trunk to another. "It's for my grandson. He was born February 6. ... That's my concern," Armstrong told us.
We left that meeting and went to a Catholic church in Flint, where scores of people were preparing to head out, canvassing door to door to distribute water and water filters, and to assess the needs of each household. Union members from Detroit, social workers and plumbers from Ann Arbor, and many Flint residents were volunteering their time on a bitter-cold winter Saturday afternoon.
Last October, under enormous pressure, the governor was forced to switch Flint's water back to the Detroit source, but the damage to the pipes has been done, and toxins continue to leach into the water. Melissa Mays was in the church, as a founder of Water You Fighting For, an activist group. "All three of my sons are anemic now. They have bone pain every single day. They miss a lot of school because they're constantly sick. Their immune systems are compromised," she told us. She, too, is sick. "Almost every system of our bodies have been damaged." Despite her illness, she was out helping others.
The emergency manager is now gone, and the people of Flint have elected a mayor, Karen Weaver, who can actually represent them. She immediately declared a state of emergency, focusing national media attention on the crisis. She has demanded $55 million to jump-start the immediate repair of Flint's water system. Gov. Snyder has countered with a fund of $25 million, and insists that it be spent on contractors of his choice--conditions that Weaver rejects. "We're going to get rid of these lead pipes one house at a time, one street at a time, one neighborhood at a time, until they are all gone," Mayor Weaver said. "We cannot afford to wait any longer."
Two parallel investigations, state and federal, are underway in an attempt to determine if any crimes have been committed. The first step to healing Flint has been taken, though: the restoration of democratic control. All else will flow, like water, from that.
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Dialogue, Peace, & Democracy: Tunisian Labor and Rights Coalition Wins Nobel
Award hailed as 'tribute to Tunisian working class'
Oct 09, 2015
The Norwegian Nobel Committee on Friday awarded its prestigious Nobel Peace Prize to Tunisia's National Dialogue Quartet--the coalition of labor unions and human rights groups that forged a path to political compromise following the country's 2011 "Arab Spring" uprising.
The announcement was immediately met with cries of Mabrouk, or congratulations, to the ordinary people and left-wing forces whose tenacious efforts made the initiative possible.
Established in 2013, the quartet is a coalition of the Tunisian General Labor Union (UGTT); the Tunisian Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts (UTICA); the Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH); and the Tunisian Order of Lawyers.
The Nobel committee formally recognized the coalition "for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011."
"[Award] proves dialogue is the only way to solve a crisis and not weapons."
--Ben Moussa, Human Rights League
"Congratulations to Tunisia, to the quartet and to all parties that facilitated the mission of the quartet," UGTT secretary general, Houcine Abassi, told the Tunisian Radio Mosaique FM station. "This prize came at the right time because our country is still threatened by different security challenges."
Ben Moussa, president of the LTDH, told the same program that the prize "proves dialogue is the only way to solve a crisis and not weapons."
"This prize rewards the role of civil society in supporting the aspirations of the Tunisian people for democracy and human rights," Moussa added in a separate statement.
"The quartet paved the way for a peaceful dialogue between the citizens, the political parties, and the authorities, and helped to find consensus-based solutions to a wide range of the challenges across political and religious divides," said Kaci Kullmann Five, chair of the Nobel Committee, emphasizing that the prize is intended "as an encouragement to the Tunisian people."
However, many say that the recipients of the prize are the ones who have set an example for the world.
The parties to the award "united labor and the rights movement to insist on an all-party road-map for political compromise," scholar and activist Vijay Prashad told Common Dreams. "This landmark move secured the Constitution and some element of stability in Tunisia. It was led by the Tunisian working class, through the UGTT, and not by the United Nations or the West."
What's more, many say that the award honors Tunisia's fallen, from Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation sparked what many refer to as the Arab Spring, to Chokri Belaid, the left politician who was assassinated in 2013. Farhat Hached, who played a critical role in building the UGTT, was assassinated by French colonial forces in 1952.
"It is a great tribute to Hached, Belaid, and to the Tunisian working class that they have won the Nobel Prize for Peace," said Prashad.
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