SOC Responds to Latest OSHA Actions on Worker Safety at Amazon
Read the full press release in PDF format.
Today, the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued new citations to Amazon for failing to keep workers safe. OSHA carried out an unprecedented group of coordinated inspections at Amazon warehouses and found overwhelming evidence of job hazards and medical mistreatment, resulting in today’s citations for facilities in Castleton, NY, Aurora, CO, and Nampa, ID, and citations issued January 17 for facilities in Waukegan, IL, New Windsor, NY, and Deltona, FL.
In response, Eric Frumin, Health and Safety Director at the Strategic Organizing Center, released the following statement.
“For the second time in two weeks, the federal government has told Amazon it is violating federal law by failing to keep its workers safe.
“Yet despite clear evidence and increasing pressure from OSHA and the DOJ, Amazon refuses to take responsibility for its notorious distinction of leading the warehouse industry in workplace injuries. Instead of fighting federal orders to design truly safe jobs, Amazon must start by admitting that its business model prioritizes speed and profit over safety. Amazon’s illegal production system and workloads are a daily threat to the safety of its nearly 400,000 warehouse workers.
“The SOC calls on Amazon to tell the truth, drop its relentless resistance to federal worker protection orders, and finally give workers the breaks they need to keep them from getting hurt on the job.”
Background
For over two years, the US Department of Labor’s OSHA and its sister agency in Washington State have been investigating Amazon worker complaints of serious job hazards from abusive workloads. They issued violations for workload hazards in Washington in 2021 and 2022, and ordered prompt “abatement” of those violations – even during Amazon’s interminable appeals of those violations.
These violations have found that the illegal dangers not only involve heavy lifting/awkward lifting and moving packages causing high risks of serious injuries – but also that the very speed of the work itself, combined with the company’s strict discipline system, “[put] pressure … on workers to maintain that pace without adequate recovery time to reduce the risk of MSDs. There is a direct connection between Amazon’s employee monitoring and discipline systems and workplace [injuries].”
Federal OSHA has now found similar violations in which Amazon’s equipment, production operations (including Amazon’s own robots) and HR systems together combine to create extraordinary risks of serious injuries. These include the kinds of severely disabling back and shoulder injuries that can prevent workers from ever again doing the manual work which delivers the orders to American consumers every day.
OSHA also found in 2022 that Amazon’s workload hazards were “Willful” violations – a rare determination in OSHA investigations anywhere in any industry.
While Federal and state OSHA agencies have been doing safety inspections at Amazon for far longer, their recent inspections of abusive workloads – launched on a coordinated basis nationally – are unprecedented in OSHA’s 50-year history.
New Justice Department investigation of potential financial fraud
At the same time, the Department of Justice’s US Attorney for the Southern District of NY announced that it is specifically investigating possible misrepresentations by Amazon to its creditors regarding Amazon’s safety problems, under the 1989 Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act. In 2022, the SOC filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission which raised similar concerns that CEO Andy Jassy had made misleading statements to shareholders regarding Amazon’s safety record.
For further details about the history of worker injuries and OSHA investigations at Amazon, see SOC testimony to the US House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor, Nov. 17, 2022. For further details, see SOC’s 2022 analysis of Amazon’s injury reports – “The Injury Machine”. Over the last several years SOC has emerged as a leading voice working to hold Amazon accountable for the health and safety of its workers.
*“DART RATE” is the rate of “serious” injuries per 100 “Full-Time Equivalent” workers; “serious” means that the injury was medically serious enough to require the workers involved to either stop working entirely or to stop doing their regular jobs. These data are based on the annual summaries of workplace injuries at individual worksites that Amazon has submitted to OSHA for 2021 (latest year available).
