How Amazon hid its ergonomic crisis
Of Amazon’s transformation, he said, “It’s better for everybody.” Workers no longer would have to walk massive warehouse floors to find the right power drill – instead, robots would bring the drill directly to them. The hour or more it took to process a package had been shaved down to as little as 15 minutes. More Amazon customers could now get products delivered to their door the same day they clicked “Buy.”
The following July, Amazon rolled out another innovation: Prime Day. The holiday-shopping season was already an intense pressure cooker of warehouse activity known as “peak” inside Amazon. Now the company had just manufactured a second peak in the middle of the year: a brand-new holiday that would become pivotal to the company’s growth.
Indeed, in the six years since Clark stood in that cavernous warehouse and saw the future, the company’s value has leaped from less than $150 billion to more than $1 trillion, and CEO Jeff Bezos has become the richest person in the world. The company’s top leaders have fashioned a mythology around its growth, casting Amazon as a force for good. Its obsession with delighting customers fuels a “virtuous cycle,” they say, that ends up benefiting everyone – even Amazon’s more than 250,000 warehouse workers.
In fact, as senators have fired off letters to the company and workers have led walkouts over health and safety, Amazon has engaged in an unapologetic public relations campaign. Robots, Amazon insists, are good for workers. “They make the job safer,” Jeff Wilke, one of two CEOs under Bezos, told PBS FRONTLINE last September. And Prime Day and the holiday rush are so well orchestrated, Amazon has claimed, that injury rates stay flat or even go down during these buying frenzies. Thanks to “diligent record-keeping,” Amazon told Business Insider, “we know for a fact that recordable incidents do not increase during peak.”
But a new cache of company records obtained by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting – including internal safety reports and weekly injury numbers from its nationwide network of fulfillment centers – shows that company officials have profoundly misled the public and lawmakers about its record on worker safety. They reveal a mounting injury crisis at Amazon warehouses, one that is especially acute at robotic facilities and during Prime week and the holiday peak – and one that Amazon has gone to great lengths to conceal. With weekly data from 2016 through 2019 from more than 150 Amazon warehouses, the records definitively expose the brutal cost to workers of Amazon’s vast shipping empire – and the bald misrepresentations the company has deployed to hide its growing safety crisis.
The internal reports cheer incremental progress in a specific month or region; call out problem warehouses with the worst injury numbers; and detail safety initiatives, action items and pilot projects. While the reports show a committed drive to improve processes with technology or design changes, they don’t propose reducing the intense workload for Amazon’s warehouse employees, which is what helps drive Amazon’s speed.
Amazon often points to the tens of millions of dollars it has invested to enhance safety practices. Yet Amazon’s injury rates have gone up each of the past four years, the internal data shows. In 2019, Amazon fulfillment centers recorded 14,000 serious injuries – those requiring days off or job restrictions. The overall rate of 7.7 serious injuries per 100 employees was 33% higher than in 2016 and nearly double the most recent industry standard.
The data back up the accounts of Amazon warehouse workers and former safety professionals who say the company has used the robots to ratchet up production quotas to the point that humans can’t keep up without hurting themselves. For each of the past four years, injury rates have been significantly higher at Amazon’s robotic warehouses than at its traditional sites.
And for years, the internal data show, injury rates have spiked during the weeks of Prime Day and Cyber Monday, contrary to Amazon’s public claims. Those two weeks had the highest rate of serious injuries for all of 2019.
Monthly bulletins from Amazon’s environment, health and safety team show that the famously data-obsessed company is well aware of its safety problems. Each month, company officials sent out detailed updates – marked “Privileged & Confidential” – to warehouse safety managers across the country with data, charts and FAQs. They set safety goals and monitor progress closely. But the internal documents show that the company has failed to hit these targets. In 2018, Amazon aimed to lower its injury rate by 20%. Instead, injury rates went up. The next year, the goal was more modest: a 5% decrease. But the rate rose again.
In May, Bezos told shareholders that he welcomed scrutiny of the company’s operations. “It’s good for us,” he said. “Nothing is more important,” he added, “than the health and well-being of our employees.”
Amazon declined Reveal’s interview request and did not respond to detailed questions about the accuracy of its public statements. Instead, a company spokesperson provided a general statement about its warehouse safety initiatives.
“Nothing is more important than the health and safety of our teams. So far in 2020, we have committed over $1B in new investments in operations safety measures, ranging from technology investments in safety to masks, gloves, and the enhanced cleaning and sanitization required to protect employees from the spread of Covid-19,” spokesperson Rachael Lighty said in the email.
She said the company has seen improvements through an array of programs inside its warehouses, such as installing guardrails to separate forklifts from pedestrians, increasing safety staffing and offering wellness exercises. “Our investments in safety training and education programs, in technology and new safety infrastructure are working,” Lighty said.
Yet her email didn’t say how the company justifies its claim that these initiatives are working, while injury rates have continued, year after year, to rise.
