In response to public scrutiny of high injury rates and growing worker organizing efforts at its facilities, Amazon recently published a report on its workplace health and safety record titled “Delivered with Care.” In this blog post, we sort out fact and fiction in Amazon’s key arguments in that report.
False Claim #1: Amazon’s injury rates should be compared with injury rates in the “Courier and Express Delivery Services” sector, not “Warehousing.”
First, Amazon claims its injury rates should be compared to those of businesses in the “Courier and Express Delivery” category, which are generally higher than those in the “Warehousing and Storage” category. While Amazon’s workforce does span both industry categories, what Amazon fails to mention is that most of Amazon’s delivery drivers are not employed directly by Amazon. Instead, Amazon subcontracts to a network of companies, which it refers to as “Delivery Service Partners” (DSPs) who in turn employ the drivers that deliver Amazon packages. Even though these workers work for DSPs that exclusively deliver Amazon packages, their injury rates are not reflected in the injury rates that Amazon reports.
A recent report by the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC) showed that the injury rates for Amazon drivers employed through the DSPs were even higher than the rates at Amazon warehouses. The report compares these numbers with companies in the “Courier and Express Delivery Services” category and shows that they are 50 percent higher than those at a comparable business such as UPS.
In “Delivered with Care,” Amazon also cherry picks a few industries with which to compare injury rates (p 12). One of them is pet stores. While pet stores do indeed have high injury rates, what Amazon does not mention is that Bureau of Labor Statistic (BLS) data show that about 30 percent of the reported injuries at pet stores are “cuts, lacerations or puncture wounds.” These pet store injuries are most likely pet bites, but Amazon seems to suggest that the injuries at its warehouses are somehow analogous. Despite these random comparisons, the facts are clear that Amazon’s injury rate is higher than the average for the entire warehouse industry and over two times as high as the national average for all private industry.
False Claim #2: Amazon has already implemented effective solutions to bring injury and illness numbers down at its warehouses.
No effort to adjust the dangerous pace of work at Amazon is mentioned in the report. The pace of work and the stressful, forceful movements workers must make every day in the manual material handling jobs at its warehouses cause musculoskeletal disorders. The Amazon report instead expounds on the company’s ”wellness” program and its training on proper lifting. Washington State OSHA just cited Amazon for exposing workers to hazardous conditions and violating the OSHA law, because the job pace is so fast workers don’t have time to follow their safety training, including safe lifting methods.
In the entire 35-page “Delivered with Care” report, the only specific improvement mentioned to reduce the widespread ergonomic hazards in their warehouses is the introduction of pallet lift tables to lessen the need for bending down to pick up objects off the conveyors. While this is a positive step, it represents just one of the many measures to improve warehouse safety recommended by OSHA.
These include using powered equipment instead of requiring manual lifting for heavy materials; reducing lifts from shoulder height and from floor height by repositioning shelves or bins; adding pneumatic lifts, adjustable tables, turntables, and adjustable steps, to name just a few of the other recommended measures Amazon could implement.
Much of Amazon’s ”wellness” training program is about what it calls ”conditioning” for the job (p. 16), as if it is workers’ lack of conditioning that is causing these injuries—implying that the workers are to blame for their own injuries. However, as Washington State OSHA has noted, musculoskeletal injuries at Amazon are primarily caused by ergonomic risk factors including high repetition and lifting, bending, reaching, pulling, and pushing. The solutions must address those adjustments to the job that are needed to prevent injuries—redesigning the job to make the job fit the worker.
Most of “Delivered with Care” refers to 2020 injury rates to back up its claims. However, as a recent Strategic Organizing Center report points out, the “Delivered with Care” report also uses 2021 injury rates when it refers to Amazon’s “Huddle” program (p 16), implying that the company already had its complete 2021 injury data at the time that “Delivered with Care” was published. But the authors of “Delivered with Care” withheld a key piece of information: Amazon’s overall injury rate actually increased by 20 percent from 2020 to 2021.
Even after the publication of “Delivered with Care,” Amazon has continued to misrepresent its injury rates by using outdated and out-of-context information. As recently as April 2022, CEO Andy Jassy sent a letter to shareholders using 2020 data instead of 2021 data to support a claim that Amazon’s injury rates were “misunderstood.” In response, Business Insider published a thorough fact-check of Jassy’s misleading use of those statistics.
This blog originally appeared at NELP on May 11, 2022. Reprinted with permission.
About the author: Irene Tung is a senior researcher and policy analyst for NELP.
