Amazon Says Its Injury Rates Are Down. They’re Still the Highest in the Industry.

In March 2024, Amazon released its annual safety report, announcing a decline in its warehouse injury rate for 2023. The company touted “meaningful, measurable progress” due to investments in new technologies, training programs, and safety personnel. When Irene Tung at the National Employment Law Project (NELP) looked at the underlying data, she saw a different story. “They can congratulate themselves on improvement from an injury rate that was beyond the pale to merely horrific,” she told me. “But it doesn’t mean that there’s no crisis there.”

A new report released by NELP and over a dozen other workers’ rights groups, based on recently released data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), finds that Amazon workers experience a disproportionate share of injuries in the warehousing industry and that injuries at Amazon warehouses were more likely to be serious enough to require time off work. Amazon accounts for 79 percent of employment among warehouses with at least 1,000 workers, but 86 percent of all injuries. Last year, Amazon’s injury rate was more than one and a half times that of TJX (which owns T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, and other large retailers) and almost triple that of Walmart, the two comparable US warehouse employers.

That doesn’t surprise those working in the warehouse. Amazon has made same- or next-day delivery the core of its promise to customers, seemingly warping global supply chains to lightning speed for any and every product, from furniture to household supplies. Just this week, the company announced that it set new records for Prime delivery speeds in the first three months of 2024. The miraculously smooth customer experience is made possible by hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers, pushed to meet productivity quotas by a surveillance-based system of discipline.

“Amazon is well-known for its obsession with speed,” said G. Paul Blundell, who works at an Amazon delivery station outside Philadelphia. “Its intense digital tracking of employees is clearly designed to figure out how they can maximize the speed at which they get people to work. That speed is very much related to people getting injured because the vast majority of the injuries are repetitive stress injuries.” Keith Williams, a warehouse worker at the SWF1 warehouse in the Hudson Valley agreed. “They’ll always preach safety and taking your time, but then they’ll say, ‘This morning we need everyone to tackle the heavy stuff and get everything out as fast as possible.’” he said.

Williams is part of a coalition with other Amazon workers who have been pushing back against Amazon’s breakneck productivity goals, through organizing petitions in their workplaces and, now, calling for federal legislation. Today, Senator Ed Markey announced the introduction of the Warehouse Worker Protection Act, which would ban tracking by-the-second data like “time off task,” which measures the time between workers’ scans of items, and increase transparency around productivity quotas. It would also re-empower OSHA to create and enforce ergonomic work standards after decades of being prohibited from doing so without congressional authorization.

The OSHA report is based on the same self-reported injury rates that Amazon used in its in-house report. But according to NELP, the way Amazon framed its analysis was flawed. Amazon said that its injury rates, at 6.5 per 100 employees, were comparable to the average rate of warehouses with more than 1,000 employees. But since Amazon employs 79 percent of all workers in this sector, its own numbers have a disproportionate effect on that average. Using data from OSHA, NELP calculated what the average would be excluding Amazon. For non-Amazon warehouses with over 1,000 employees, the injury rate was 3.8 per 100 employees, making Amazon’s overall injury rate 71 percent higher than its peers’. (Amazon did not provide a statement on NELP’s analysis by the time of publication and referred back to its original report.)

In its report, Amazon highlights improvements in its “lost time” rate, referring to injuries that require missed days of work. But the report does not address another related rate: the “light duty” rate, or the rate of injuries that require a job transfer. Amazon is required to report “light duty” injuries to OSHA, and NELP found that the company’s “light duty” rate was 5.1 per 100 employees, almost double the national average for warehousing overall. That gap is even bigger when comparing Amazon’s “light duty” injury rate to the industry average excluding Amazon, which is just 1.6. A 2023 report by the Strategic Organizing Center found that Amazon may even be shifting cases that should have been classified as “lost time” to “light duty” to save money on workers’ compensation cases.

In August of 2023, Williams was working in a trailer alone when a stack of boxes fell, and a 45-pound box containing a computer desk hit the base of his neck. He was told he wouldn’t be able to recover at home and was instead directed to complete administrative tasks on a computer. After two and a half months of light duty, Williams returned to standard work, but quickly started to feel weakness in his wrists and elbows. “It got so bad that I couldn’t lift a one-pound box,” he said. His doctor told him that he had never fully recovered from the initial incident, which had caused a pinched nerve. Blundell said he knew many workers who had to use their personal leave for recovery time because the company didn’t grant it.

The most common injuries at Amazon are ergonomic—“strain, sprain, and pain.” In its report, Amazon touted ergonomic improvements made in 2023, but did not mention that many of these improvements were mandated by OSHA, which has cited Amazon for safety hazards resulting from prioritizing speed over safety. Before coming to Amazon, Blundell had worked on a farm and in construction. Within four months of working at Amazon, he had a rotator cuff injury in both shoulders and couldn’t lift his arms without sharp pain. Managers had assigned him to the same task every day since he started the job four months prior—stowing, one of the most physically rigorous tasks—because their rate tracking showed he was good at it. When he reported his injury, the regional safety manager who was visiting the building that day attributed it to his past work in construction, though by that time, Blundell hadn’t worked construction for a year.

Both the NELP analysis and Amazon workers point to the company’s surveillance-based pressure to make work rates as a key cause of injuries. Workers are more likely to strain themselves under an automatic discipline system based on continual monitoring of their work. Amazon managers dole out write-ups based on “time off task,” the number of seconds between a worker’s scans, including when they’re in the bathroom or addressing issues like a machine malfunction or damaged box. Williams said managers push workers to hurry back from their 15-minute breaks early to minimize their time between scans. Managers also try to incentivize workers to work faster through competitions for “swag bucks,” which allow workers to purchase company merch.