The top US workplace safety regulator and the Department of Justice are pressing Amazon to explain safety practices that have led to injury rates for warehouse workers that, on average, are nearly double that of the company’s competitors and, in one case, five times higher.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) issued subpoenas against Amazon in six stores in December 2022, January 2023 and February 2023 about unsafe working conditions, ergonomic hazards, and failure to properly report injuries.
Warehouses include ALB1 in Castleton, New York; DYO1 in New Windsor, New York; DEN5 in Aurora, Colorado; BOI2 in Nampa, Idaho; MDW8 in Waukegan, Ill.; and MCO2 in Deltona, Florida.
A seventh store in Colorado Springs, Colorado, DCS3, was aforementioned in February 2023 for exposing workers to ergonomic risks. There are currently dozens from Amazon warehouses with open Osha investigations in the US
A judge extended the investigation’s six-month statute of limitations for three of Amazon’s warehouses to comply with the subpoenas, as it had failed to provide all the documents required as part of the investigation.
A worker at BOI2’s packaging department in Nampa, Idaho, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said they have yet to see any changes since the Osha citations were issued.
“I am not surprised that they found violations in the warehouse. Management is pushing production targets on workers around the clock and safety seems to be an afterthought,” they said. “For each process route, there is a certain production rate that is expected to be met every hour. In the packaging department I work in, they expect at least 200 units per hour, and failure to reach that number often leads to write-ups, warnings, and coaching by a trainer. They send out hourly reminders to everyone about what the expected rate is and how you are doing as an individual in terms of that production goal.”
Michael Verrastro, who worked at Amazon’s ALB1 warehouse in Castleton, New York, for more than a year until he was laid off in September 2022, weeks before union elections were to be held at the site, said he often spoke about the Lack of compliance with safety regulations. . ALB1 had the higher injury rate from any Amazon warehouse in 2021, with 19.8 serious injuries per 100 workers.
Verrastro was injured in March 2021. “I had to be taken by ambulance from the warehouse to a local hospital. I tripped over the safety wire of a cage, fell backwards, and hit my head on the frame of the conveyor belt. There was a large amount of blood on the ground,” he said. “It’s a bit hypocritical for Amazon to claim that security is their number one problem. It is a fallacy that they like to expose that they are more concerned with security, when clearly they are not. They are more concerned with profits.”
Tia Leanza, 61, who has worked in ALB1’s packaging department for 18 months, stated that no modifications have been made to the warehouse since the Osha citations were issued, and that safety is constantly overlooked in the warehouse favors an emphasis on productivity, despite claims that it is a priority.
“Amazon really needs to get its act together. They need to put action on their words,” Leanza said. “We have the highest injuries of anyone in the country. I know some people who have left in ambulances and have not returned.
Amazon has faced scrutiny from government officials, labor groups and workers over high injury rates in recent years. From 2017 to 2021, Amazon warehouse injury rates were significantly higher than injury rates for warehouse workers overall. Amazon workers reported various problems after being injured on the job, from being forced to go back to work to being denied workers’ compensation to fighting to get proper medical care.
In 2021, Amazon warehouses had an injury rate of 7.7 injuries per 100 workers, compared to 4.0 injuries per 100 workers at all other warehouses. Amazon’s serious injury rate was 6.8 per 100 workers, compared with 3.3 per 100 workers at all other warehouses. Recent Osha Appointments Too include record-keeping violations at six warehouses, and Amazon failed to properly record worker injuries and illnesses.
Washington State Department of Labor and Industries (DLI) aforementioned an Amazon warehouse in Kent, Wash., BFI4, in March 2022 for injury hazards, the third The Amazon warehouse in the state will receive citations for the issue. Amazon has appealed those subpoenas and archived a lawsuit against the DLI to stay its hazard mitigation orders during the appeals process, after a court had to step in and order Amazon will stop interfering in security investigations.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has filed numerous complaints related to the safety and organization of workers, and recently issued a formal complaint against Amazon regarding the company suspending a union organizer, Brett Daniels, at the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island in New York after the union led a strike protesting safety concerns following a fire that exploded in the warehouse in October 2022. Osha is also doing research the retaliation claims, which Amazon has denied.
“Instead of respecting our legal right to protest, the company responded by suspending all workers involved,” Daniels said. “Amazon’s consistent disregard for security is by design. Like many corporations, Amazon puts profit over people.”
An Amazon spokesperson said in response to Osha’s subpoenas: “We take the safety and health of our employees very seriously, and we don’t believe the government’s allegations reflect the reality of safety at our sites. We have cooperated with Osha and demonstrated how we work to mitigate risks and keep our people safe, and our publicly available data shows that we reduced injury rates in the US by nearly 15% between 2019 and 2021. There will always be more to do, and we will continue working to be better every day.”
Amazon noted that it is appealing all of the Osha and Washington DLI citations because it disagrees with them. The company also denied having productivity quotas, claiming it only has performance expectations, and called claims of worker quotas false.
Regarding the delays in the delivery of the requested documents, the spokesperson added: “We have cooperated with the government since the beginning of its investigation and began producing documents and witnesses immediately. We have provided nearly 50,000 documents and dozens of witnesses despite often unreasonable and ever-changing deadlines, and we will continue to honor your requests.”
The US Department of Justice is also currently investigating Amazon over injury rates and workplace safety, which encompasses all warehouses.
in a citation Issued by the Justice Department in September 2022, Amazon was ordered to provide all documents related to statements made by the company’s executives and management about health and safety, injury rates, compliance with laws and regulations employment, including all documents related to the statements made by the executives and managers of the company. safety department about the pace of work, worker injuries or illnesses that were or may have been caused by the pace of work, any productivity requirements for workers, and how the requirements were developed.
Among the law firms that Amazon has retained to represent the company in proceedings with Osha and the justice department is Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, where former Trump Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia currently works as a partner.
While with the firm in 1999, Scalia cattle an appeals case to overturn Osha’s high-injury/illness-rate targeting and cooperative compliance program under the Clinton administration and fought to overturn rules setting ergonomic safety standards for workplaces, which experts in the department of job noted would have prevented 600,000 injuries a year.
At her appointments, Osha delivered alert Letters about ergonomic hazards in Amazon warehouses detailing risk assessments that found that numerous jobs in Amazon warehouses exposed workers to “high risk of serious musculoskeletal disorders.”
“These are methods that ergonomics experts have used for years,” said Eric Frumin, director of health and safety at the union coalition’s Center for Strategic Organizing. “Here are the same methods that Amazon’s own internal corporate ergonomics program says the company should use, so when you look at the Osha docs it says, among other things, that to fix this mess, you need to apply your own internal ergonomics program. ergonomics, which is one of the reasons Washington State classified the violations as intentional, because the company knew how to fix these violations, how to identify these hazards, they just didn’t.”
Frumin emphasized the level of focus and attention that Osha was putting into the investigations at Amazon and the broad reach of the Department of Justice, which included the entire management structure of the company.
He also questioned whether Amazon is cooperating with these investigations, given the extensions that judges had to grant due to Amazon’s delays in providing the cited documents and claims from Washington officials that the company tried to undermine the security regulator’s investigations.
“What we just saw in the citation violation letters are specific recommendations for things that Osha thinks the company could do today or in the near future to make these jobs safer, and it’s up to the workers to say if they’re going to wait for the legal process to be done, or they are going to demand those changes now,” Frumin added.
