By Lauren Kaori Gurley and Caroline O’Donovan; Washington Post
An investigation by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee finds Prime Day sales event, happening this week, is “major cause” of worker injuries.
Amazon’s annual Prime Day sales event, which starts Tuesday, has been a “major cause” of warehouse worker injuries, finds a year-long Senate investigation into workplace safety at Amazon, released by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
The committee’s probe found that Amazon’s internal data attributes high injury rates around major sales events to understaffing, “unsustainable productivity requirements,” and “ignor[ed]” safety protocols, the report said.
Sanders, who chairs the panel, told The Washington Post that the “extraordinarily high level of injuries” discovered in the investigation “speaks to the irresponsibility of Amazon,” and that he is “giving serious thought” to holding a hearing where Amazon executives are asked to testify.
“Despite all their wealth and profits, [Amazon and its executives] end up doing everything they can to stress out their workers and push them as hard as they possibly can to make as much money as they possibly can,” Sanders said.
In an emailed statement, Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said “the safety and health of our employees is and always will be our top priority — it comes before everything else we do.”
Nantel said Amazon’s recordable injury rate has improved significantly since 2019, from 8.7 injuries per 200,000 hours worked in 2019 to 6.3 in 2023. The company was not immediately able to provide more recent data on total injuries. Nantel disputed the veracity of the Senate committee report, saying “it draws sweeping and inaccurate conclusions based on unverified anecdotes, and it misrepresents documents that are several years old and contained factual errors and faulty analysis.”
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.
The report arrives the week of Amazon Prime Day, which falls this year on July 16 and 17 and offers discounts to millions of Amazon Prime members. The event is a major source of revenue for the e-commerce giant that amounted to $12.7 billion in sales over two days last year, according to Adobe Analytics data. The popularity of Prime Day sales has led Amazon to introduce additional sales events throughout the year.
As chairman of the Senate HELP Committee, Sanders has targeted labor practices at major businesses, including Amazon and Starbucks, as well as inflated drug prices at pharmaceutical companies and medical debt incurred from health-care industries.
The Senate review also found that warehouse workers sustained “recordable” injuries at more than twice the warehouse industry average during the week of Prime Day in 2019. Employers are required to report recordable injuries that require medical attention beyond basic first aid and other heightened care to the federal government.
Data provided by Amazon shows that warehouse injuries fell in 2020 after the implementation of covid protocols.
The report’s authors suggest these rates are an underestimate, noting that the company has been hit with dozens of federal and state recordkeeping violations, such as “failing to record injuries and illnesses” and “misclassifying injuries and illnesses.”
The Senate committee relied on injury data from 2019 and 2020 because that’s what Amazon provided it for the inquiry, a Sanders spokesperson said. The panel’s investigators also interviewed more than 100 workers and relied on other documentation from Amazon.
Amazon’s Nantel said “claims that we systemically underreport injuries, and that our actual injury rates are higher than publicly reported, are false” and that federal labor investigations have not found “intentional, willful, or systemic errors in our reporting.”
The Senate report found that in January, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration sent a letter to an Amazon warehouse near St. Louis, saying that injured warehouse workers have been repeatedly told to return to Amazon’s in-house first-aid clinic for the same injuries, rather than seek outside medical care.
“Workers cannot truly receive ‘first’ aid for the same acute injury on the 10th, 20th, or 30th visit,” the federal investigator’s January letter to Amazon said.
Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, has often singled out Amazon in fervent speeches on inequality, corporate greed and union busting. But the future of the Senate probe is unclear. If the Democrats lose the chamber in November, Sanders would no longer be chairman, bringing a swift end to his Amazon investigation and his other initiatives.
Labor advocates have long criticized Amazon for the workplace safety in its warehouses. In addition to the Senate probe, the tech giant is also under investigation for its warehouse injury rate by federal workplace safety regulators and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. In May, California labor officials fined Amazon $5.9 million for violating a state law aimed at protecting warehouse workers from aggressive productivity quotas that put their health and safety at risk.
The report also says that understaffing is a key reason elevated work injuries occur around Prime Day.
In an internal Amazon memo cited in the Senate report, titled “2021 Prime Day Lessons Learned,” the company said that in the lead-up to the sales event that year, it did not reach its hiring goals. Amazon met 71 percent of its hiring targets from May through the end of June that year, ending the week of Prime Day. In the month or so before, Amazon “had only a 54.7 percent rate of success meeting its hiring target,” the report said.
The memo said these staffing levels, “creat[ed] a negative impact on the business and risk to Prime Day.”
Nantel said allegations of understaffing are false. “[W]e carefully plan and staff up for major events, ensure that we have excess capacity across our network, and design our network so that orders are automatically routed to sites that can handle unexpected spikes in volume,” she said in her statement.
“This is just not true, as we carefully plan and staff up for major events, ensure that we have excess capacity across our network, and design our network so that orders are automatically routed to sites that can handle unexpected spikes in volume. If someone wants to truly understand the facts about our safety record and our progress toward being the safest company in the industries in which we operate, we encourage them to review our annual safety report or come visit one of our fulfillment sites to see for themselves,” Nantel added.
Sanders said this report features preliminary findings and that the committee plans to release further results from its investigation.
