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).

Today, the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued citations to Amazon for failing to keep workers safe. The actions come after OSHA carried out inspections at three Amazon warehouses in New Windsor, New York, Waukegan, Illinois and Deltona, Florida and found evidence of job hazards and medical mistreatment.

In response, Eric Frumin, Health and Safety Director at the Strategic Organizing Center, released the following statement.

“Amazon warehouses produce more serious injuries than the rest of the warehouse industry combined.

“As OSHA’s investigations have repeatedly documented for almost two years, Amazon’s illegal production system and workloads are a daily threat to the safety and the basic job security of Amazon’s own nearly 400,000 warehouse workers — and indeed throughout the warehouse industry.

“Today’s OSHA citations are the latest evidence that Amazon has companywide, corporate-level policies and practices that create hazardous workplaces, and may result in medical mistreatment or denial of treatment for seriously injured workers. Amazon treats its workers from the warehouse to the delivery route as disposable in its relentless drive for profit.

“The violation for maintaining an excessive work pace — and mandating reduced work hours and added work breaks — is the first in the 50-year history of Federal OSHA.

“On behalf of all warehouse workers, we again call on Amazon to drop its relentless resistance to OSHA’s orders to fix these hazards.

“Amazon should start by immediately suspending its inhuman monitoring and discipline system that OSHA has directly connected to the high rates of warehouse injuries, and give Amazon workers the relief breaks OSHA has said they urgently need to protect themselves from injury.

“From these citations it appears Amazon not only maintains unsafe workplaces, but then denies proper medical treatment to the workers who are harmed by this inhuman system. The full range of state medical and licensing authorities should take notice and investigate Amazon’s potential violations of state laws meant to ensure injured workers receive proper treatment.”

Background:

For over two years, the US Department of Labor’s OSHA and its sister agency in Washington State have been investigated worker complaints of serious job hazards from abusive workloads, issued violations for workload hazards in WA State in 2021 and 2022, and ordered prompted “abatement” of those violations – even during Amazon’s interminable appeals of those violations.

These violations have found that the illegal dangers not only involved heavy lifting and 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.

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).

The Strategic Organizing Center (formerly Change to Win) is a democratic coalition of labor unions representing millions of working people and is dedicated to improving their lives.

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“Washington OSHA’s unprecedented citation sends a clear message to Amazon: your punishing profit model is under sharper scrutiny than ever before, and you will be held accountable for failing to protect workers from serious injuries.

“As the Strategic Organizing Center’s analyses have shown, Amazon treats its workers from the warehouse to the delivery route as disposable in its relentless drive for profit. The company’s merciless focus on volume and work pace, coupled with constant surveillance of its employees, directly puts workers’ health and safety at risk. It’s time for the federal government to join state efforts to hold Amazon to its legal, ethical and moral responsibility to protect its own employees from the very real danger of career-threatening injuries.”

-Eric Frumin, Health & Safety Director, the Strategic Organizing Center

Background:

Washington State OSHA today announced a citation for multiple “Willful Serious” health and safety violations at the global retailer’s flagship warehouse and fulfillment center in Kent, Washington, finding a “direct connection” between the company’s “very high pace of work” and “monitoring and discipline system,” and the high risk of “workplace musculoskeletal disorders.”

The latest citation ratchets up pressure on the global retail giant, which has come under fire across the country for rampant disregard of worker safety. WA OSHA previously issued citations for similar health and safety violations at two other Amazon warehouses, however, Monday’s announcement marks the first time the state body has found violations at Amazon to be “Willful” — the worst category of OSHA violation. Nationally, only 0.4% of OSHA violations are classified as “Willful.”

The citation also finds that Amazon violated WA OSHA regulations by failing to report COVID cases to WA OSHA, as recently as September. It orders Amazon to pay $60,000 and to fix the hazards by May 11, 2022.

The Strategic Organizing Center last year released a bombshell report showing workers at Amazon facilities sustained more than 24,000 serious injuries in 2020 — a serious injury rate nearly two times that of the non-Amazon warehousing and storage industry. The report, ‘Primed for Pain,’ used never-before analyzed data over a four-year period through 2020, and showed that even as Amazon faced growing public scrutiny of its safety record, its workers were injured at substantially higher rates than non-Amazon workers in the same industries. Amazon workers continued to suffer these higher rates of injury despite years of protests against the company’s high-pressure working environment and production quotas.

Last year, SOC also released a report, ‘Hidden Pandemic,’ showing that Amazon put workers’ lives at risk by depriving federal and state OSHAs of information about COVID-19 cases in its facilities, undermining their ability to identify workplace hazards and to hold the company accountable for unsafe conditions. The company, despite, having announced publicly in October 2020 that it had identified nearly 20,000 COVID cases nationally among its employees, subsequently reported only 27 cases of “respiratory conditions” (the category in which COVID cases are reported) to OSHA for all of 2020.

In February, the Strategic Organizing Center released a factsheet disputing Amazon’s self-published workplace safety report, challenging the analysis as a “misleading, self-serving assessment” of the global retail giant’s disturbing track record on workplace safety.

Earlier this year, Washington State lawmakers introduced SB5891, a bill that would prohibit warehouse operators such as Amazon from enforcing unsafe work quotas.

The Strategic Organizing Center (formerly Change to Win) is a democratic coalition of labor unions representing millions of working people and is dedicated to improving their lives.

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For Immediate Release: Tuesday, November 30

Read the report here

New analysis finds Amazon brazenly failed to report infections to federal authorities, risking workers’ lives

Retail giant continues to put production, profits over safety as holiday surge ramps up, Omicron variant hits

Washington, D.C. — A coalition of major national labor unions and worker centers Tuesday called on the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to investigate Amazon after a new report revealed the global online retail giant may have committed a “criminal violation” of federal health and safety laws and put workers’ lives at risk by vastly under-reporting the number of COVID-19 cases in its massive network of warehouses to federal authorities.

In a complaint sent Tuesday to OSHA Assistant Secretary Douglas Parker, the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Warehouse Workers Resource Center and the Awood Center urge OSHA to investigate Amazon’s “disturbing pattern of misleading or grossly incomplete” information provided to authorities around COVID-19 cases in its warehouses.

The pattern is described in a new report released Tuesday by the SOC that shows Amazon repeatedly and brazenly misled federal health officials about the extent of widespread COVID-19 outbreaks in its warehouses. The company’s systematic failure to record COVID-19 cases undercut the federal government’s ability to protect workers, according to the report.

“Allowing Amazon to continue to evade effective federal oversight on COVID safety risks sending the message that the company can continue to prioritize its profits over its workers’ health,” the groups write in their complaint.

SOC’s analysis found that despite having announced publicly in October 2020 that it had identified nearly 20,000 COVID cases nationally among Amazon employees, and acknowledging hundreds of cases in Amazon workplace outbreaks to state and local health departments, Amazon subsequently reported only 27 cases of “respiratory conditions” (the category in which COVID cases are reported) to OSHA for all of 2020.

“Amazon has failed to explain why it believes that out of the tens of thousands of its employees infected with COVID-19, virtually none of them were infected at work,” the organizations write in their complaint. “This persistent pattern of apparent non-compliance would be alarming on its own at any employer– not to mention the second-largest private employer in the entire country. However, these evident failures have also happened with little or no federal oversight.”

‘Go Back to Work’

By recording only 27 work-related COVID illnesses for all of 2020, Amazon is claiming to OSHA that almost none of the tens of thousands of infections among its workers it announced publicly in October 2020 were work-related–”an accomplishment so extraordinary as to be unbelievable,” according to the report.

“From the first days of the pandemic, it quickly became normal to hear everyone coughing and seeing sweat on peoples’ foreheads because everyone had a fever. It became normal to hear people vomiting and see people passing out,” said Natalie Monarrez, an Amazon warehouse worker at JFK8 in Staten Island, New York. “It’s rare that a day goes by when someone hasn’t tested positive. But Amazon abandoned testing, tracing, sanitizing, and other safety precautions months ago. Whenever we tried to ask for protection, they would tell us to go back to work.”

Amazon, the nation’s second-largest private employer, put workers’ lives at risk by depriving OSHA of information about COVID-19 cases in its facilities, undermining the agency’s ability to identify COVID safety problems and to hold the company accountable for fixing them, according to the SOC analysis. Despite hundreds of complaints from Amazon workers about COVID hazards, OSHA’s data system indicates that OSHA has done only 30 inspections at Amazon facilities since April 1, 2020, and only three were COVID-related.

“It is a criminal violation of federal law to file false reports with OSHA, as Amazon may have done in this case,” the report reads.

The SOC analysis examines annual injury and illness reports employers are legally required to submit to OSHA for any workplace with 20 or more employees. The report looks at Amazon’s data for 753 facilities, which appear to include every significantly-sized warehousing facility in its U.S. logistics network.

“Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon prioritized profits and production while sweeping massive COVID-19 outbreaks at its warehouse facilities under the rug,” said Eric Frumin, SOC’s health and safety director. “This isn’t a minor mistake in record keeping — it’s a concerted, systematic campaign waged by the nation’s second largest employer to avoid government oversight and sacrifice worker safety. As we approach the holiday rush and a potential new winter wave of the virus, OSHA must investigate and hold the company accountable for putting workers at risk.”

‘All About Profit Over People’

In addition to analyzing data provided to OSHA by Amazon, the report includes a new nationwide survey of Amazon warehouse workers, conducted between August and September of 2021. A total of 790 Amazon warehouse workers at facilities across 40 states responded to the survey, reporting the following:

• Amazon relaxed safety precautions, increased production pressure in face of the Delta surge. Warehouse workers were asked to compare Amazon’s COVID-safety practices during the latest surge in COVID-19 cases with earlier periods in the pandemic. Over half (53 percent) of workers said during the Delta surge, Amazon conducted less enforcement of social distancing rules than before, seven in 10 said Amazon conducted fewer temporary checks, while over half (51 percent) said Amazon pressured workers to meet production requirements more or much more than in earlier periods.
• Workers report pressure to work while sick during COVID-19 pandemic. Of the workers who responded to the SOC survey, one in four (26 percent) reported going to work even though they felt sick. Of these workers, more than six out of 10 reported the reason they went to work feeling sick was because Amazon does not provide enough paid sick leave (64 percent) or because they were afraid they would be disciplined, lose hours, or be penalized in another way by management for not showing up to their shis (61 percent). Almost two-thirds (63 percent) of workers reported witnessing co-workers coming to work while sick.
• Workers report Amazon notification and contact tracing procedures were insufficient. Nearly four in 10 (37 percent) workers reported being exposed to co-workers who tested positive for COVID-19. Of the exposed workers, only one in four (25 percent) were immediately notified by Amazon of their exposure.
• Workers report an atmosphere of fear, intense production pressure continued through COVID-19 pandemic. According to almost six in ten (58 percent) workers, since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon has terminated, disciplined, or threatened to discipline workers for failing to keep up with the pace of work, also known as the rate. Over four in 10 (42 percent) reported that the company terminated, disciplined, or threatened to discipline workers for missing work to care for themselves or others (including children out of school); almost one in three (31 percent) for refusing to work without necessary personal protective equipment (PPE) or other safety equipment; and almost one in four (23 percent) for speaking out for better safety protections.

“Managers never talked to us directly about COVID-19. But they would get in your face if production levels dropped even a little bit,” said an Amazon worker in San Bernardino, California. “It was like a hot-bed. It’s really easy to get COVID-19 at Amazon warehouses, especially now due to the hiring for peak season. And they’re not doing anything to keep us safe. Peak season at Amazon is all about profit over people.”

The Strategic Organizing Center (formerly Change to Win) is a democratic coalition of labor unions representing millions of working people and is dedicated to improving their lives.

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In response to Amazon’s announcement Thursday about workplace injuries, Strategic Organizing Center Health and Safety Director Eric Frumin and Tulsa, Oklahoma Amazon worker Bobby Gosvenor released the following statements.

Eric Frumin, director, health and safety, Strategic Organizing Center

“Amazon executives have known about the company’s serious injury problem for years, and have done nothing to fix it, allowing tens of thousands of additional workers to be injured. Now, after getting some bad press last week, the company wants us to believe that it has seen the light and will change its ways. No one should trust a corporation with such a terrible track record to reform itself.

“Despite years of the highest injury rates in the entire logistics industry, Amazon has continued to pressure workers to work faster, which the data suggests leads to more injuries. And in the last few weeks, as Amazon was confronted with overwhelming evidence of the injury crisis, the company chose a PR blitz about Zen meditation rooms rather than real, substantive change to prevent injuries.

“OSHA has now found Amazon to be violating the OSHAct at the most dangerous Amazon warehouse in the nation, in part because of the “very high pace of work.” OSHA determined there is a “direct connection between Amazon’s employee monitoring and discipline systems and workplace [injuries]” – an unprecedented finding in OSHA’s history, which Amazon is appealing and seeking to delay.

“We call on Amazon to immediately guarantee that no warehouse or delivery employee will be disciplined for taking breaks needed to prevent an injury. We also call on Amazon to immediately drop its appeal of OSHA’s orders to prevent injuries. And we call on Amazon to agree to both stop its abusive discipline system everywhere — and install the essential and simple equipment needed to reduce or eliminate dangerous workloads in all warehouse jobs.”

Bobby Gosvenor, Amazon Worker, Tulsa Oklahoma. Bobby sustained a herniated disc in his neck while working at Amazon that required surgery.

“I was one of more than 24,000 Amazon workers to sustain a serious injury in 2020. Executives know there is a problem with safety, but the focus on growth and profits has come at the expense of those of us who help make those profits possible. So excuse me if I’m skeptical about the company’s latest announcement. Workers have been raising the alarm about safety at Amazon for years, and nothing has changed. They’ve told us to meditate, get massages and change our diet, but so far, the company has refused to take real steps to keep us safe. Amazon will not become ‘Earth’s Safest Place to Work’ without some major changes. These should start with valuing the safety and health of the people who do the work over profits.”

Background

Amazon’s announcement comes the week after a report released by the Strategic Organizing Center showed workers at Amazon facilities sustained more than 24,000 serious injuries in 2020, resulting in a serious injury rate nearly two times the non-Amazon warehousing and storage industry. The report, which analyzes new data submitted by Amazon to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), examines a four-year period through 2020, and shows that even as Amazon faced growing public scrutiny of its safety record, its workers were injured at substantially higher rates than non-Amazon workers in the same industries.