BURSTA report by Senate Democrats released Monday accused Amazon of manipulating data on worker injuries and brushing aside workplace concerns.
The report, released Sunday by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), alleged Amazon cherry-picks data to portray its warehouses as safer than they actually are.
The 160-page report, titled “The ‘Injury-Productivity Trade-off’: How Amazon’s Obsession with Speed Creates Uniquely Dangerous Warehouses,” points to an analysis that showed Amazon warehouses recorded over 30 percent more injuries than the warehouse industry average in 2023.
“Amazon forces workers to operate in a system that demands impossible rates and treats them as disposable when they are injured,” Sanders wrote in a statement.
“It accepts worker injuries and their long-term pain and disabilities as the cost of doing business. That cannot continue.”
Amazon fiercely pushed back against the report, describing it as “wrong on the facts” and containing “selective, outdated information that lacks context and isn’t grounded in reality.”
“There’s zero truth to the claim that we systemically under-report injuries," Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel wrote in a statement to The Hill.
The report is the final component of an 18-month investigation into Amazon’s warehouse safety practices led by Sanders and HELP Committee Democrats.
The report looked at the past seven years of Amazon’s injury data, featuring more than 130 interviews with Amazon workers and an analysis of more than 1,400 documents, photos and videos provided by the workers.
The committee's report claimed Amazon provided “extremely limited information” to the HELP Committee, equal to about 280 documents, despite repeated information requests.
Nantel said the report’s claim that Amazon was uncooperative in the probe is “disappointing and untrue.”
“Sen. Sanders requested a wide array of information, and we’ve voluntarily responded to those requests in good faith from the beginning,” she said. “We produced thousands of pages of information and data regarding our safety program, investments, and operations. We’ve also had numerous meetings with Sen. Sanders’ staff, including a multi-hour briefing with one of our lead ergonomists.”
In each of the past seven years, Amazon workers were nearly twice as likely to be injured as workers in other warehouses, according to the report. The report also alleged that more than two-thirds of Amazon’s warehouses have injury rates exceeding the industry average.
Numerous workers told the HELP Committee they experienced “debilitating” injuries, chronic pain and a diminished quality of life as a result of Amazon’s alleged disregard for safety.
Nantel pushed back: “The facts are, our expectations for our employees are safe and reasonable– and that was validated both by a judge in Washington after a thorough hearing and by the State’s Board of Industrial Insurance Appeals, which vacated ergonomic citations alleging a hazardous pace of work,” referring to a years-long battle in Washington over workplace safety allegations.
“We’ve made and continue to make meaningful progress on safety — improving our recordable incident rates by 28 percent in the U.S. since 2019, and our lost time incident rates (the most serious injuries) by 75 percent.”
The report challenged Amazon’s claims of declining injury rates, stating the e-commerce company cites numbers compared to an “outlier year.”
The report also included new information on two internal studies conducted at Amazon, including a 2021 study to determine the maximum number of times a warehouse worker could perform the same physical tasks without increased risk of harm, the report stated.
The study, conducted by an Amazon team called “Project Elderwand,” created a method to ensure workers did not exceed that number, but chose not to implement the changes after conducting a test to see how it would impact “customer experience,” according to the report.
Amazon rejected the report’s characterization of the study, stating it simply demonstrated how the company's ergonomists examine its safety processes.
The company said it chose not to implement the proposed changes because they were “ineffective” and touted a series of other changes made to reduce the rate of back issues among workers.
In another 2020 study by Amazon, called "Project Soteria," the tech giant sought to identify risk factors for injuries and proposed changes to lower injury rates, according to the report. The probe said Amazon did not implement the recommendations despite the study demonstrating a “connection between speed and injuries.”
Nantel cited a senior Ph.D. economist at Amazon who said the Project Soteria team found “’no’ casual relationship between pace of work and higher injury rates.”
“It's wrong to rely on analytically unsound documents like the Project Soteria paper in any objective report – yet, it’s relied on here while disregarding and minimizing the evidence that shows Soteria is unsound,” Amazon staff wrote in Monday’s blog.
Sanders is a longtime critic of Amazon. Earlier this year, he released a separate report claiming nearly half of Amazon workers were injured during the company’s Prime Day sale in 2019.
Amazon has faced mounting criticism over its workplace practices, repeatedly clashing with the National Labor Relations Board, which has accused the company of implementing policies that make it more difficult for workers to organize and retaliate against those who do.
Thousands of Amazon workers around the world went on strike during last month’s Black Friday weekend in demand of more pay and better working conditions. The strike, dubbed “Make Amazon Pay,” had demonstrations in more than 20 countries.