Amazons famous speed and technological innovation have driven the companys massive global expansion and a valuation well over $800 billion. Its also helped make Amazon the nations second-largest private employer behind Walmart, and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, one of the richest humans on Earth. Now an investigation by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting has found that the companys obsession with speed has turned its warehouses into injury mills.
Reveal amassed internal injury records from 23 of the companys 110 fulfillment centers nationwide. Taken together, the rate of serious injuries for those facilities was more than double the national average for the warehousing industry: 9.6 serious injuries per 100 full-time workers in 2018, compared with an industry average that year of 4.
While a handful of centers were at or below the industry average, Reveal found that some centers, such as the Eastvale warehouse, were especially dangerous. Dixons was one of 422 injuries recorded there last year. Its rate of serious injuriesthose requiring job restrictions or days off workwas more than four times the industry average.
According to Amazons own records, the risk of work injuries at fulfillment centers is alarmingly, unacceptably high, said David Michaels, the former head of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, who is now a professor at George Washington Universitys public-health school. Amazon needs to take a hard look at the facilities where so many workers are being hurt and either redesign the work processes, replace the top managers, or both, because serious-injury rates this high should not be acceptable to any employer.
Amazon officials declined repeated interview requests. Instead, a company spokesperson, Ashley Robinson, provided a written response to some of Reveals questions. Robinson said Amazons injury rates are high because its aggressive about recording worker injuries and cautious about allowing injured workers to return to work before theyre ready.
We know that by making a conservative choice to not place an injured associate back into a job, we are elevating restricted and lost time rates as a company, but with the intent to benefit the associate, Robinson wrote.
Many workers said that was not their experience. They spoke with outrage about having been cast aside as damaged goods or sent back to jobs that injured them further. Dixon said she had doctor orders not to pull or lift heavy objects and to alternate between sitting and standing, but she wasnt given a chair and heavy boxes kept coming her way. ... The company does instruct workers on the safe way to move their bodies and handle equipment. But several former workers said they had to break the safety rules to keep up. They would jump or stretch to reach a top rack instead of using a stepladder. They would twist and bend over to grab boxes instead of taking time to squat and lift with their legs. They would hoist extra-heavy items alone to avoid wasting time getting help. They had to, they said, or they would lose their jobs. So they took the risk.
Then, if they got hurt, they would lose their jobs anyway. Even some workers who loved the pace, camaraderie, and compensation at Amazons fulfillment centers told Reveal that they were quickly replaced as soon as their bodies broke down.
The problems Reveal uncovered go far beyond common sprains, strains, and repetitive stress injuries. When a gas leak inundated the Eastvale warehouse where Dixon used to work, managers wouldnt slow down, several workers said, even though they were dizzy and vomiting. They were told that theyd have to use personal time off if they wanted to leave.
The root of Amazons success appears to be the root of its injury problem, too: the blistering pace of delivering packages to its customers.
Amazons busiest season, which the company calls peak, begins with the run-up to Black Friday. Amazon said it shipped Prime members more than a billion items last holiday season. This year, Amazon has a new promise: free one-day delivery for Prime members.
Its also crunch time for the human body. Employees face the exhaustion of mandatory 12-hour shifts, and warehouses are crammed with seasonal workers unaccustomed to the grind. The companys 2018 logs show that weekly injury counts spiked at two distinct moments when Amazon offered special deals: Cyber Monday and Prime Day.
Robinson, the Amazon spokesperson, said total injuries do go up during those peak times, but thats only because the company brings on more workers then. Robinson said the rate of injuries historically has stayed steady, or even decreased, at peak times. Amazon declined to provide data to back up that claim.
As ever-increasing production targets flow down from corporate, regional managers lean on warehouse directors, who put pressure on the supervisors, who oversee all those water spiders, stowers, pickers, and packers. And the key to advancement is great production numbers.
It incentivizes you to be a heartless son of a bitch, said a former senior operations manager who had leadership roles at multiple facilities.
The former senior operations manager described going from the omniscient ADAPT system to an Amazon competitor, where he had to search occasionally updated Excel spreadsheets to find productivity numbers.
Marc Wulfraat, president of the supply-chain and logistics consulting firm MWPVL International, described Amazon as more aggressive than any other industry player in what the company expects from workers. And they will not waste time hanging on to people who cant perform, he said.
The Amazon tenure of Parker Knight, a disabled veteran who worked at the Troutdale, Oregon, warehouse this year, shows the ruthless precision of Amazons system. Knight had been allowed to work shorter shifts after he sustained back and ankle injuries at the warehouse, but ADAPT didnt spare him. Knight was written up three times in May for missing his quota.
The expectations were precise. He had to pick 385 small items or 350 medium items each hour. One week, he was hitting 98.45 percent of his expected rate, but that wasnt good enough. That 1.55 percent speed shortfall earned him his final written warningthe last one before termination.
You are expected to meet 100 percent of the productivity performance expectation, the warning reads. Days later, the company informed him he was being fired because of an earlier confrontation over workers-compensation paperwork.
The efforts of Indiana state officials to vie for Amazons interest were about to intersect with the life of one local Amazon employee, 59-year-old Phillip Lee Terry.
Terry had been at Amazon for about two years. He started as a picker in a Plainfield fulfillment center, then moved to the maintenance department. He had a background in an unrelated fieldmarketingbut quickly took on the task of handling complicated industrial equipment.
Terry made a surprisingly strong impact on his co-workers, even at a big, busy warehouse. Hed chat them up and make them laugh whenever he could, said Jennie Miller, who worked picking orders with Terry.
Theres only kind of a few people that you ever meet in your life that have those kinds of sparkling personalities, she said.
On September 24, just a few days after hed been eating ice cream and watching college football with his grandkids, Terry showed up for work and was sent to do maintenance on a forklift. He walked under the machines forks and metal platform to work on it with a wrench. Suddenly, the 1,200-pound piece of equipment dropped down and crushed him.
His body lay there for nearly two hours before a co-worker noticed the pool of blood. ... As he surveyed the site of the accident, Stallone quickly figured out the problem: A tall pole, lying just feet away, should have been used to prop up the forklift during maintenance. In a recording he made of his inspection, Stallone asked an Amazon manager whether there was any written documentation of Terry being trained on that.
No, sir, the supervisor says on the recording. He told Stallone that Terry had been informally trained by a co-worker.
Stallone interviewed a co-worker of Terrys, who put the blame on Amazons safety culture coming in second to production demands. ... Stallone repeatedly pressed Amazon to provide records showing Terry had been trained on that piece of equipment. In the end, he found that Amazon failed to provide adequate training, exposing Terry to a fatal hazard.
Indiana OSHA issued four serious safety citations, for a total fine of $28,000. Stallone sought more, but he was getting pushback. On November 20, 2017, Stallone joined his boss, Indiana OSHA Director Julie Alexander, as she called Amazon officials. He secretly recorded the conversation, which is legal in the state, and shared the recording with Reveal.
During the call, Alexander told the Amazon officials what shed need from them in order to shift the blame from the company to employee misconduct, according to the recording.
And she walked them through how to negotiate down the fines. We sometimes like to consider grouping citations to lower the penalty amounts, she said.
She suggested Amazon could partner with her agency as a leader in safety to kick off a program promoting best practices in the logistics industry.
After hanging up with Amazon, Alexander said: Theyre wanting to probably take this offer and go back and look and say, Hey, were partnering with Indiana. Were going to be the leader. ... Stallone said he was disgusted. But the pressure to placate Amazon didnt stop there.
Days after the conference call with Amazon officials, Stallone said Indiana Labor Commissioner Rick Ruble pulled him into his office. The governor was there, too, standing by the commissioners desk, according to Stallone.
He recalled that Gov. Holcomb told him how much it would mean to Indiana if the state won the Amazon headquarters deal. Then, Stallone said, the commissioner told him to back off on the Amazon caseor resign.
This is the only article I've read where it actually compares Amazon conditions to other warehouse work. We're finally having someone do some real journalism here.
Anyway, it sounds like it's time for Amazon warehouse employees to unionize. Unions have a lot of issues but they are pretty successful at making sure that employees have safe working conditions and aren't forced back to work after an injury. Safety should be the number one concern here. ---
Is it possible Amazon reaches a point where they can't keep up with their own production quota and either fall out or seriously slow down their services
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Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
As a previous Amazon warehouse worker, I believe all of this. Hell, I had two friends that were fired after another co-worker claimed to have seen them getting it on in one of their cars in the parking lot while he was eating lunch in his. No investigation, nothing. Just canned them. Less than a couple weeks or so they tried to apologize and re-hire them, but one was too embarrassed to go back and the other already found another job. They easily could have sued the shit out of them but for whatever dumb reason never did. The irony is the co-worker who made up that BS was caught in the past making out with his wife in the aisles of the warehouse. He was never punished. Amazon has the worst HR and at the end of the day don't give a shit about you. Just as long as you go back out and work your little ass off as they sit in an office all day typing away.
Is it possible Amazon reaches a point where they can't keep up with their own production quota and either fall out or seriously slow down their services
i have to wait till friday to get my shit so it's more of a problem of a slowdown :(. paid for prime too. ---
The act of treachery is an art, but the traitor himself is a piece of **** - Mike Tyson
