Amazon has much higher rates of injury in its warehouses than other companies do, according to new government data, putting pressure on the retail giant to change its working conditions.
Amazon, which is the second-largest business employer in the U.S. and one of the most valuable companies in the world, operates warehouses with more than double the rate of serious injuries than competing companies for most of the past four years, according to work-related injury data analyzed by the Washington Post from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
“The pace of work, and the amount of twisting and turning, is enormous,” Debbie Berkowitz, a former OSHA chief of staff and senior policy adviser, told the Post. “There is a constant pressure to work fast.”
The company paid its warehouse workers lower wages than competitors in many markets, according to Labor Department data and job postings analyzed by the newspaper.
In 2019, for every 200,000 hours that an Amazon warehouse worker clocked — roughly the equivalent of 100 warehouse employees working full time for a year — there were 7.8 incidents, according to the OSHA data.
That’s more than double the rate competing warehouses. One of Amazon’s biggest competitors, Walmart, had less than three serious cases per worker during the same time period.
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OSHA work-related injury and illness data from 2017 to 2020 calculated the rate of serious injury incidents at U.S. warehouses, including 638 Amazon warehouses and 4,773 non-Amazon facilities.
Amazon is reported to place particularly high physical demands on warehouse workers, with 12-hour shifts packing dozens of heavy boxes an hour with few breaks and little leeway if mistakes are made.
“They don’t care about your well-being,” Vanessa Melesio, a former Amazon warehouse box packer, told the Washington Post. “If you’re not efficient, you are not worth it to them.”
Amazon said in a statement it did not place undue burdens on its warehouse workers, justifying its use of performance metrics to measure worker productivity.
The tech giant also said it had spent more than $1 billion on safety measures in 2020. It has not directly commented on the OSHA warehouse data.
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“We don’t set unreasonable performance goals,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wrote in a letter to shareholders earlier this year, in which he commented on workplace labor issues. “We set achievable performance goals that take into account tenure and actual employee performance data.”
