About three years ago, Key’asia Hollis’s boyfriend, now her fiancé, helped her get a job as a boxer at Amazon, which paid $23 an hour. The new job enabled her to move out of the motel where she’d been living with her sister and her sister’s family. Hollis worked 12-hour overnight shifts packing and moving heavy boxes filled with the sundry items that Amazon customers regularly order.
But the company’s relentless focus on moving products as fast as possible from its warehouses into American homes has often created brutal working conditions. A 2021 report from the Strategic Organizing Center found that in 2020, Amazon’s warehouse workers experienced an injury rate of 6.5 out of every 100 full-time employees, much higher than the rate of 4 percent in non-Amazon warehouses.
Read the full report here.