Amazon’s allegedly “dangerous and illegal” warehouses spur Senate probe

Amazon must answer for its "abysmal safety record" after Amazon warehouse workers last year "suffered more serious injuries than all of the other warehouse workers in the country combined," the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) announced yesterday.

Launching an investigation, HELP Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) sent a letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy alleging that "Amazon makes decisions" "at every turn"—from setting its unreasonable pace of work requirements to providing subpar onsite medical care—"that actively harm workers in the name of its bottom line."

In 2022, Amazon warehouse workers suffered nearly 39,000 injuries, Sanders' letter said, reporting injury rates that more than double what other US warehouses report. The majority of injuries—95 percent—are serious enough to require time off work or a modification of the workers' duties.

But Sanders said that the problem goes beyond the high number of injuries. There's an entire cycle of abuse where Amazon deliberately treats workers as disposable, Sanders alleged.

The cycle works like this. Injured workers visit Amazon's on-site medical clinics, Sanders wrote, which "are designed to undertreat and underreport injuries." This gets workers back on the floor as fast as possible "when they likely needed additional medical attention," while helping Amazon evade "responsibility for any long-term consequences workers suffer." Inevitably, Sanders wrote, many workers get stuck with both the costs of long-term recovery and higher medical bills. Then, when workers finally recover enough that they are actually ready to return to work, Sanders alleges that Amazon makes it hard to come back—by putting "up a million hurdles" and seemingly resisting any attempts to accommodate an injured worker. This is why Amazon warehouses maintain a high rate of employee turnover, Sanders wrote.

After receiving dozens of workplace health and safety citations since 2015, Amazon knows how to make warehouses safer, Sanders alleged. The company simply chooses not to implement safety solutions proven to reduce worker injuries for one reason, Sanders said: "unacceptable corporate greed."

Many of these safety solutions are "straightforward," Sanders wrote, like "regularly cycling tasks to avoid repetitive strain injuries and using motorized tools so workers do not have to lift and move heavy items themselves." Instead of taking these measures, Sanders wrote that Amazon has claimed that using robotics in some facilities has improved worker safety. However, Sanders disputed that claim, writing that "data shows that the injury rates at the company’s robotic facilities are 28 percent higher than at its non-robotic facilities."

"That is unacceptable," Sanders wrote. "Amazon is one of the most valuable companies in the world worth $1.3 trillion and its founder, Jeff Bezos, is one of the richest men in the world worth nearly $150 billion. Amazon should be one of the safest places in America to work, not one of the most dangerous."

According to Sanders, Amazon is "uniquely dangerous" because warehouse conditions impact "hundreds of thousands of people across the country" who work at Amazon warehouses. These workers must meet "aggressive productivity goals" without knowing exactly what those goals are, while their "every move" is actively monitored to keep workers from slowing down.

"Amazon uses this information to pressure and intimidate workers into working as hard and fast as possible, pushing their bodies to—and in many cases, past—the breaking point," Sanders wrote. "That cannot be allowed to continue."