The Worst Mile: Production Pressure and the Injury Crisis in Amazon’s Delivery System

Read the report in PDF format.

Injury rates for Amazon-contracted delivery drivers shot up nearly 40% from 2020 to 2021, even as CEO Andy Jassy proclaimed the retail giant was keeping its workers safe, a new analysis of worker injury data released by the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration shows.

“The Worst Mile” examines Amazon’s last-mile delivery system, where unmanageably high production quotas create abusive pressures to delivery packages at a supercharged clip, producing sky-high injury rates even worse than Amazon’s notoriously dangerous warehouses.