The committee’s investigation found that Amazon’s internal data attributes high injury rates around major sales events to understaffing, “unsustainable productivity demands” and “ignored” safety protocols, the report said.
Sanders, who chairs the panel, told the Washington Post that the “extraordinarily high level of injuries” uncovered in the investigation “speaks to Amazon’s irresponsibility” and that he was “giving serious thought” to holding a hearing where Amazon executives would be asked to testify.
TO CATCH UP
Stories to keep you informed
“For all their wealth and profits, (Amazon and its executives) end up doing everything they can to stress out their employees and push them as hard as they can to make as much money as possible,” Sanders said.
In an emailed statement, Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said that “the safety and health of our employees is and always will be our top priority, above everything 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 the total number of injuries. Nantel disputed the veracity of the Senate committee’s report, saying it “draws broad and inaccurate conclusions based on unverified anecdotes and misrepresents documents that are years old and contain factual errors and flawed analyses.”
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns the Post.
The report comes the week of Amazon’s Prime Day, which this year takes place on July 16 and 17 and offers discounts to millions of Amazon Prime members. The event is a major revenue generator for the e-commerce giant, which generated $12.7 billion in sales over two days last year, according to data from Adobe Analytics. The popularity of Prime Day sales has led Amazon to launch additional sales events throughout the year.
As chairman of the Senate HELP Committee, Sanders has targeted the labor practices of large companies, including Amazon and Starbucks, as well as inflated drug prices at pharmaceutical companies and medical debt incurred by the health care industry.
The Senate investigation also found that warehouse workers suffered “recordable” injuries at a rate more than twice the warehouse industry average during Prime Day week in 2019. Employers are required to report to the federal government recordable injuries that require medical attention beyond basic first aid and other enhanced care.
Data provided by Amazon shows that warehouse injuries decreased in 2020 after implementing Covid protocols.
The report’s authors suggest those rates are underestimated, noting that the company has been hit with dozens of violations of federal and state record-keeping rules, such as “failure to record injuries and illnesses” and “misclassification of injuries and illnesses.”
The Senate committee relied on injury data from 2019 and 2020 because that’s what Amazon provided for the investigation, a Sanders spokesperson said. Committee investigators also interviewed more than 100 workers and relied on other Amazon documents.
Amazon’s Nantel said that “allegations that we systematically underreport injuries and that our actual injury rates are higher than those 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 had been repeatedly told to return to Amazon’s internal first aid clinic for the same injuries, rather than seeking outside medical care.
“Workers cannot actually receive ‘first’ care for the same acute injury on the 10th, 20th or 30th visit,” the federal investigator’s letter to Amazon in January said.
Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, has often singled out Amazon in his fervent speeches about inequality, corporate greed and union busting. But the future of the Senate investigation is uncertain. If Democrats lose the chamber in November, Sanders will no longer be president, which would quickly end his Amazon investigation and other initiatives.
Labor advocates have long criticized Amazon for workplace safety in its warehouses. In addition to the Senate investigation, the tech giant is also being investigated over 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 designed to protect warehouse workers from aggressive productivity quotas that put their health and safety at risk.
The report also says that understaffing is a major reason why workplace accidents are common around Prime Day.
In an internal Amazon memo cited in the Senate report, titled “2021 Prime Day Lessons Learned,” the company said that heading into that year’s sales event, it had fallen short of its hiring goals. Amazon met 71% of its hiring goals from May through the end of June that year, ending the week of Prime Day. In the previous month, Amazon “met its hiring goal by only 54.7%,” according to the report.
The memo said these staffing levels “negatively impact the business and pose a risk to Prime Day.”
Nantel said the understaffing allegations were false. “We carefully plan and staff for major events, ensure we have excess capacity across our network, and design our network so that orders are automatically routed to locations that can handle unexpected volume spikes,” it said in its statement.
“That’s simply not true, because we carefully plan and staff for major events, ensure we have excess capacity throughout our network, and design our network so that orders are automatically routed to locations that can handle unexpected volume spikes. If anyone really wants to understand the facts about our safety record and our progress toward becoming 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 the report presents preliminary findings and the committee plans to release further results of its investigation.