Amazon has faced ongoing scrutiny over the safety conditions in its warehouses and the number of injuries sustained by its workers. Earlier this year, the company touted the progress it had made toward improving workplace safety across U.S. warehouses, claiming that its recordable incident rate—a metric that reportedly comprises all injuries requiring “more than basic first-aid treatment”—had improved by 24% since 2019.
In a report released last week, however, the National Employment Law Project (NELP) challenges Amazon’s interpretation of its injury data. After conducting an analysis of injury reports filed with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the warehousing category, NELP found that Amazon’s overall injury rate in 2023 was 71% higher than that of other employers in the sector. According to NELP’s analysis—which focused on warehouses with 1,000-plus workers—79% of warehouse workers in the U.S. are employed by Amazon, and the company’s share of overall injuries is 86%.
“Amazon is now the largest private sector employer in quite a few states,” says Irene Tung, a senior researcher and policy analyst at NELP and one of the authors behind the report. “As that kind of large employer, they have a unique responsibility to provide jobs that are high-quality jobs.”
Warehouse safety rates
In 2023, Amazon’s warehouse injury rate was 6.5 cases per 100 workers. That’s not far off from the latest average rate (6.8) for the overall category, as compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the NELP report argues that Amazon’s outsize presence skews the average injury rate for the entire warehousing category—which means the company is effectively using its own data as a benchmark. (For non-Amazon warehouses in that category, the injury rate in 2023 was 3.8.)
“NELP and their supporters continue to mislead people by misconstruing data or intentionally leaving out important context in order to fit a false narrative,” said Amazon spokesperson Sharyn Ghacham in a statement to Fast Company. “The fact is, nothing is more important than our employees’ health and safety, and we’ve made meaningful and measurable progress over the last four years. Since 2019, our recordable-incident and lost-time rates have improved by 24% and 77% respectively in the United States and 30% and 60% globally. But we’re not satisfied and we won’t be until we’re best in class.”
Amazon contests the accuracy of NELP’s analysis, claiming that it does not account for the injury data from major companies like Walmart and Target that is classified under other OSHA categories. NELP largely compared Amazon’s data against Walmart and TJX Companies—the parent company of T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods—since those are the only other companies in the warehousing category that operate more than 10 facilities with 1,000-plus workers.
Light duty vs. lost time
The report also highlights the “light duty” injury rate, which represents the types of injuries that require workers to make a job transfer because they’re not able to perform their usual job functions. NELP’s analysis found that, per OSHA data, Amazon’s light-duty rate was significantly higher than the average rate for all warehouses—not just those with 1,000-plus workers.
In its own safety report, Amazon had noted a drop in the “lost time” incident rate, which accounts for more serious injuries that require workers to take days off, but did not delve into the light-duty rate. NELP posits, however, that by excluding the light-duty rate the company did not provide a full picture of worker injuries; the combined injury rate of 6.2 is a significant jump up from the lost-time rate of just 1.1. (Amazon claims that transferring workers is not unusual and allows them to continue working while recovering from an injury, and that placing workers on light duty is not intended to cover up more serious injuries.)
NELP points to a number of reasons for why Amazon’s injury rate remains high, including the company’s use of productivity metrics and its resistance to unionizing efforts. Amazon has repeatedly denied using fixed quotas—but as NELP notes, internal documents obtained by the media indicate the company has previously terminated employees for not meeting productivity rates. “Amazon has not taken the steps that OSHA and other state regulators have pointed to around slowing down the pace of work and fundamentally changing the way that it disciplines its workers,” Tung says.
The impact of new tech
Amazon has started testing new robotics technology in its warehouses over the last few months and says the tech will help address safety issues—but the company has also made clear that one of the main goals is to boost productivity and shorten delivery times. (Labor organizers and critics have contested the idea that increased automation leads to better safety outcomes at Amazon warehouses.)
Ergonomic job design is another factor, Tung points out—something Amazon itself noted as a priority for further investment in 2024. The NELP report says its findings are based on injuries that employers have documented with OSHA, and therefore do not account for injuries that the company failed to report—an issue that has been flagged by OSHA and is also the subject of an investigation by the Department of Justice.
State and federal protections
The report’s publication coincides with the introduction of the Warehouse Worker Protection Act, a bill sponsored by Democratic senators that seeks to address the issues that reportedly drive up injury rates for warehouse workers, such as productivity quotas. The bill comes after politicians passed state-level legislation in California, New York, Oregon, Washington, and Minnesota. Those efforts were spearheaded by Amazon workers who have organized with the Teamsters union. Some states have tacked on provisions that are intended to mitigate ergonomic risk factors.
NELP’s Tung says some of the workers covered by state laws have already seen positive change, at least anecdotally, since those laws took effect. “Nobody has done an academic study on this yet,” she says. “[But] what we’ve been hearing from workers on the ground is that they have been able to use the new laws, to ask for their quotas and work speed data in a way that creates more transparency and improves their ability to protect themselves from injury.”
While the federal Warehouse Worker Protection Act is focused on improving working conditions in warehouses, it also draws attention to the broader prevalence of workplace surveillance tools, which many companies started using to monitor office employees during the pandemic. “It’s important to understand these new state laws and also this federal bill in the context of conversations about surveillance and AI more broadly,” Tung says. “Amazon has this system called time off task. But there are versions of that for remote workers with mouse trackers—different versions that operate on the same principle.”
