The US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions has released the results its probe into Amazon, concluding the company prioritizes speed and productivity over safety.
Amazon has often come under criticism for the demands it places on workers, with accusations of it not taking safety seriously enough dogging the company for years. The Committee’s report acknowledges those accusations as the basis for the investigation.
Amazon’s warehouse workers have raised the alarm for years about unsafe working conditions and a corporate culture that prioritizes speed and profit over worker health and safety. Many of these workers live with severe injuries and permanent disabilities because of the company’s insistence on enforcing grueling productivity quotas and its refusal to adequately care for injured workers. These workers’ concerns have formed the basis of efforts to organize warehouses in New York, Kentucky, Florida, Alabama, Missouri, and beyond. As one warehouse worker explained:
I don’t even use Amazon anymore, I’d rather wait . . . than have some poor employee in an Amazon warehouse get battered and bruised so I can get my book within six hours. People don’t see that, they think it just appears by magic. But it doesn’t, it appears by blood, sweat, and tears.
Recognizing the severity of Amazon’s injury crisis, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP Committee), launched an investigation into Amazon’s workplace safety practices on June 20, 2023.7 This investigation aimed to uncover why Amazon’s injury rates far exceed those of its competitors and to understand what happens to Amazon workers when they are injured on the job.
In the course of its 18-month investigation, the Committee conducted 135 interviews and collected stories from 500 workers. The workers gave the Committee more than 1,400 supporting documents, photographs, and videos. In contrast, the Committee says that Amazon “provided extremely limited information,” despite detailed requests and numerous follow-ups. All told, Amazon provided a mere 285 documents.
Key Findings
The Committee’s 180-page report detailed 10 key findings:
1) Amazon manipulates its workplace injury data to portray its warehouses as safer than they actually are. Amazon claims that its warehouses are nearly as safe as the industry average—but it does so by cherry-picking data rather than grappling with its uniquely dangerous warehouses. The Committee’s review of the company’s publicly reported data found that Amazon chooses misleading comparisons in an effort to obscure the fact that the company’s warehouses have significantly higher injury rates than both the industry average and nonAmazon warehouses. An analysis of the company’s data shows that Amazon warehouses recorded over 30 percent more injuries than the warehousing industry average in 2023. The Committee also found that in each of the past seven years, Amazon workers were nearly twice as likely to be injured as workers in warehouses operated by the rest of the warehousing industry. Alarmingly, this problem is common across the company’s facilities: more than two-thirds of Amazon’s warehouses have injury rates that exceed the industry average.
2) Contrary to its public claims, Amazon imposes speed and productivity requirements on workers, commonly called “rates.” These requirements force workers to move at an extremely fast and often dangerous pace. To ensure compliance with the requirements, Amazon closely tracks workers’ movements throughout each shift. When workers cannot keep up, Amazon uses automated systems to initiate disciplinary procedures. These disciplinary procedures progress in severity and eventually result in termination.
3) Amazon forces workers to move in unsafe ways and to repeat the same movements hundreds and thousands of times each shift, resulting in extremely high rates of musculoskeletal disorders. Although Amazon is aware that these repetitive movements—made over 10- to 12-hour shifts—cause musculoskeletal disorders, the company refuses to take action to protect workers.
4) Although Amazon has safety procedures in place, the company’s required rates make those procedures nearly impossible to follow. Workers report having to regularly bypass safety measures, such as properly using ladders or asking a teammate for help to lift a heavy item, to keep up with the company’s productivity requirements. As a result, workers are forced to choose between following safety procedures and risking discipline and potential termination for not moving fast enough.
5) Amazon’s failure to ensure safe working environments—based in large part on its unsustainable rates and productivity quotas—results in debilitating injuries. Workers reported chronic pain, loss of mobility, temporary and permanent disabilities, and diminished quality of life because of the injuries they experienced at Amazon’s warehouses.
6) Amazon has studied the connection between speed requirements and worker injuries for years, but it refuses to implement injury-reducing changes because of concerns those changes might reduce productivity. In 2020, Amazon launched a multi-team initiative, called “Project Soteria,” to identify risk factors for injuries in its warehouses and to propose changes that would lower injury rates. Although Project Soteria found evidence of a connection between speed and injuries, and made recommendations based on this connection, Amazon did not implement policy changes in response.
Project Soteria studied two policies that Amazon had put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic: pausing disciplinary measures for workers who failed to meet speed requirements and giving workers more time off. Project Soteria found that both policies resulted in lower injury risks. Although the policies were intended to be temporary, the Project Soteria team requested they be formally adopted. But Amazon denied the request. In explaining their reasoning, the company’s senior leaders expressed concern about “negatively impacting rate/productivity and the ability to deliver on time to customers.”
Amazon leadership then directed the Project Soteria team to switch its focus from reducing injuries to finding ways to “maximize rates/productivity” without increasing injuries. Project Soteria referred to this as the “injury-productivity trade-off.” Two years later, the Project Soteria team again found a connection between speed and injuries, and proposed slowing down the pace of work for workers in the roles and facilities studied. Amazon rejected that proposal. (Page 80) That same year, Amazon leadership directed a different team to audit Project Soteria’s findings—specifically its finding of a connection between speed and injuries. That second team hypothesized that worker injuries were actually the result of workers’ “frailty” and “intrinsic likelihood of injury.” During the Committee’s investigation, Amazon repeatedly characterized this team’s analysis as accurate.
In 2021, another Amazon team, called “Project Elderwand,” determined the maximum number of times per shift a warehouse worker in a certain role could do the same physical tasks before increasing the risk of harm to themselves, with the goal of reducing the significant risk of back injuries in this role. The Amazon team also developed a method for ensuring workers did not exceed that maximum number. After conducting tests to assess how implementing that change would impact “customer experience,” Amazon decided not to implement the change to limit workers’ movements. Workers in this role continue to far exceed the maximum number that Amazon identified, risking injuries that Amazon could reduce.
7) Amazon actively discourages injured workers from receiving outside medical care, putting injured workers further at risk. Amazon has multiple internal practices that operate to delay workers from receiving needed medical care and force workers who need medical care to return to work too soon, exacerbating their injuries.
8) Workers who need short-term or permanent workplace accommodations for work-related injuries and disabilities experience significant challenges obtaining appropriate accommodations. In addition, Amazon’s accommodations processes do not appear to involve an interactive process.
9) Amazon terminates workers injured in the company’s warehouses who are on approved medical leave. These terminations are often the result of failures by the company’s time-tracking systems. As a result, workers are left without access to Human Resources and other resources and are forced to recover from injuries without income or support.
10) Amazon deflates the injury numbers it records for federal regulators. Staff at Amazon’s on-site first aid centers, called “AMCARE,” often delay workers from being referred to outside medical providers. Those same first aid providers regularly treat workers in-house instead of referring them to outside medical providers. These tactics effectively reduce the number of injuries that Amazon must record and disclose to the federal government. The Committee’s review of Amazon’s internal data also raises serious questions about whether the company accurately records injuries.
Amazon Workers Suffer a High Rate of Musculoskeletal Disorders
Another key finding of the Committee’s report is that Amazon workers experience a high rate of musculoskeletal disorders as a result of the way they are forced to move when carrying out their jobs.
Musculoskeletal disorders, commonly called “MSDs,” are “disorders of the muscles, nerves, tendons, ligaments, joints, cartilage, or spinal discs” that are “caused by sudden or sustained force, vibration, repetitive motion, or awkward postures.” MSDs are serious and can cause long-term consequences, including restrictions on the ability to work, limited mobility, and diminished quality of life. Common MSDs include muscle strains and sprains, lower back injuries, rotator cuff injuries, ruptured discs, and carpal tunnel syndrome.197 The likelihood of a worker developing an MSD is based on aspects of their job that include the posture workers are required to adopt, the amount of force they are required to exert, the number of repeated movements they are required to complete, and the duration of time they are required to work.
Unfortunately, the repeated actions workers have to perform put them at a much higher risk of MSDs.
Many Amazon workers perform a single task hundreds and thousands of times each shift, requiring repetitive bending, lifting, and twisting under pressure.202 The company’s intense speed requirements force workers to make those repetitive motions quickly and for long periods of time—putting them at higher risk for MSDs. An Amazon Warehouse Safety Specialist, whose job involves conducting risk assessments for different positions, told the Committee that he saw “many injuries where repetitive motions and the rate required to work were directly correlated.”
To make matters worse, the rate of MSDs within the company appears to be increasing.
MSDs make up a significant portion of the workplace injuries that Amazon has recorded and disclosed to OSHA. In 2021, 45 percent of Amazon’s recordable injuries were MSDs. That number keeps rising, suggesting that the problem is getting worse as Amazon promises increasingly shorter delivery times: MSDs made up 55 percent of recordable injuries in 2022 and 57 percent of recordable injuries in 2023.
Amazon data show a high number of MSDs both in recordable injuries and total injuries.243 The Committee reviewed an Amazon report that included information on the number of MSDs at one type of facility. The report states that from 2018–2020, Amazon documented more than 18,000 total MSDs and 5,775 recordable MSDs among workers at “Traditional Non Sort” facilities, a category of non-robotics facilities in the company’s fulfillment network.
Although the Committee has repeatedly requested that Amazon provide the total number of MSDs across all types of facilities for 2023, Amazon has refused to do so. Nonetheless, the Committee’s own analysis suggests Amazon workers sustained more than 16,600 recordable MSDs in all types of facilities in 2023 alone. Given the disparity between Amazon’s “total MSDs” and “recordable MSDs” in the report mentioned above, combined with evidence of Amazon’s underrecording of injuries, the true total is likely higher.
Amazon Accused of Inadequately Accommodating Injured Workers
Further exacerbating the issues, the Committee says Amazon inadequately accommodates injured employees, thanks to a system that is uncharacteristically ineffective for a company that has one of the most effective logistics systems in the world.
Amazon is an incredibly sophisticated company with some of the most advanced logistics capabilities in the world: there is no doubt that Amazon knows how to design and implement efficient and effective processes. But by Amazon’s standards—indeed, by any standards— Amazon’s accommodations process for injured and disabled workers is shockingly deficient. It is confusing, convoluted, and sometimes even cruel. At every step of the process, from the initial request for accommodations to implementation and enforcement, workers are confronted with significant obstacles. The accommodations process is so difficult that, from workers’ perspectives, it sometimes appears designed to discourage them.
Workers seeking accommodations frequently encounter unclear and shifting requirements, miscommunication between on-site and off-site teams, and a lack of meaningful engagement from the company. Even when accommodations are granted, they are often poorly implemented, leaving workers vulnerable to dangerous working conditions, discipline, and retaliation. In addition, Amazon’s reliance on automated systems has led to wrongful terminations, exacerbating the difficulties already faced by workers with injuries or disabilities. Together, these issues reflect a systemic failure to adequately support warehouse workers, creating unnecessary hardship and perpetuating unsafe workplace practices.
The Committee’s Conclusion
The Committee’s final conclusion describes a company that knows its demands on employees lead to unnecessary injuries, yet has done little to nothing to change the status quo.
Amazon has undertaken at least two internal studies that each independently found a relationship between worker speed and injuries. But the Committee has seen no evidence that Amazon made policy changes to reduce the risk of worker injuries in response to these studies or their recommendations. In fact, the documents show that Amazon rejected policy changes that would improve worker safety because of concerns they might limit productivity.
That evidence is consistent with what the Committee has heard from workers: Amazon prioritizes productivity and speed, even if it harms workers, and the company will not make changes to protect workers if those changes could hurt the company’s bottom line. One Amazon employee—responsible for making regional injury prevention recommendations—told Amazon fulfillment leadership that the volume and pace of work was creating a safety hazard. “They laughed,” he told the Committee. “They said:‘the pace, forget about it. I know you’re new here, but we don’t talk about that . . . the pace is what it is.’”
Amazon’s conduct—its inaction in the face of problematic findings, its continued prioritization of productivity over worker safety, and its efforts to undermine Project Soteria’s findings— demonstrate that the company is not interested in making real policy changes to prevent worker injury if those changes could hurt Amazon’s bottom line. Based on this evidence, the Committee finds that the company has failed to address underlying issues that create unsafe working conditions, knowingly putting workers at risk.
Amazon’s Response
Amazon has written a detailed response to the report, disputing the findings and calling the entire premise of the Committee’s study false.
The title of the report is “The ‘Injury-Productivity Trade-off’: How Amazon’s Obsession with Speed Creates Uniquely Dangerous Warehouses.” If that were accurate, what you’d see is that as our productivity and speed goes up, injuries go up. But what’s actually happened over the past five years is exactly the opposite – we’ve increased our delivery speeds, while decreasing the injury rates across our network. How is that possible? Because speedy delivery doesn’t come from pushing people harder – it comes from getting products closer to customers and reducing the number of steps involved in going from a supplier to a customer. We’ve spent years re-designing our network to do just that.
The company goes on to say that it provided “thousands of pages of information, data, and details” to the Committee, a statement that would seem to contradict the Committee’s claim that Amazon only provided 285 documents. In point of fact, the two statements can both be accurate, as “documents” can often be used to refer to multi-page collections of documents. Hence, it’s entirely possible that Amazon provided 285 “documents,” containing a total of “thousands of pages.”
Ultimately, Amazon claims the investigation was not a fact-finding investigation, but aimed at creating a narrative about the company.
While we respect Sen. Sanders and his work chairing the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), the senator has issued another report that’s wrong on the facts and features selective, outdated information that lacks context and isn’t grounded in reality. Our voluntary, good-faith cooperation with this investigation was premised on the reasonable expectation that any report would be even-handed and truthful, even if that truth was inconvenient for people who want to claim that our workplace is anything other than safe. We’re proud of the progress we’ve made and our commitment to continuously improving, and we were eager to share that progress with the Committee. Unfortunately, it’s now clear that this investigation wasn’t a fact-finding mission, but rather an attempt to collect information and twist it to support a false narrative. Here are some actual details about our record and the false claims in this report.
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