Senate probe: Bernie Sanders claims nearly half of Amazon warehouse workers were injured during Prime Day 2019

A US Senate Committee led by Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has issued a report claiming nearly half of Amazon warehouse workers were injured during the week of Prime Day 2019. The Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee Chairman described the company’s behavior from five years ago as “incredibly dangerous.” For its part, Amazon claims Sen. Sanders is distorting and cherry-picking facts while ignoring others to fit a narrative.

The report cites internal company data, including injuries Amazon isn’t required to document for OSHA, allegedly showing warehouse workers suffered nearly 45 injuries per 100 workers during the week of Prime Day 2019. Meanwhile, of the “recordable” injuries serious enough that the company has to report them to OSHA, the report claims Amazon’s were more than double the industry average — over 10 per 100 workers.

“The incredibly dangerous working conditions at Amazon revealed in this investigation are a perfect example of the type of corporate greed that the American people are sick and tired of,” Sanders wrote Tuesday in a HELP Committee announcement. The Senator said Amazon treats its workers as “disposable” and “with complete contempt for their safety and wellbeing.”

Meanwhile, an Amazon spokesperson’s statement, shared with Engadget, claims the committee’s findings paint a misleading picture. The company says the committee’s conclusions drew from unverified anecdotes, misrepresented years-old documents and included factual errors and misguided analysis.

“For example, one of the false claims in the report implies that we’re not adequately staffed for busy shopping periods,” company spokesperson Kelly Nantel wrote in Amazon’s statement. “This is just not true, as we carefully plan and staff up for major events, ensure that we have excess capacity across our network, and design our network so that orders are automatically routed to sites that can handle unexpected spikes in volume.”

Amazon says it’s made “significant progress” in the five years since the data the report cited, including reducing its recordable incident rate (those requiring OSHA reports by law) by 28 percent in the US. The company says it also lowered its “lost time incident rate” (workers who suffer more significant injuries that require time off) by 75 percent.

No matter whose framing you prefer, this isn’t the first time Amazon has been criticized for its warehouse working conditions. Last year, a coalition of labor unions, citing OSHA data, claimed the company was responsible for 53 percent of all serious warehouse injuries recorded in the US in 2022. That report claimed Amazon’s warehouse workers were injured more frequently (and often more severely) than their non-Amazon counterparts.

Last month, the California Labor Commissioner’s office fined Amazon nearly $6 million for violating a state law requiring large companies to notify warehouse and distribution workers in writing about their expected quotas, how often they’re expected to perform certain tasks and what consequences they would face for failing to meet their quotas. That law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021, was drafted in reaction to Amazon workers claiming they would skip bathroom breaks or risk injury to optimize their output.

That followed a 2021 report by The Washington Post (ironically, owned by Jeff Bezos), claiming data shows Amazon's warehouse workers "suffer serious injuries at higher rates than other firms.” The company, still helmed by Bezos at the time, quickly changed its “Time Off Task” policy in response.

In addition, as CNBC notes, OSHA and the US Attorney’s Office are investigating conditions at some Amazon warehouses. The Department of Justice is also investigating whether the company underreports injuries — an accusation echoed by Sanders in the HELP Committee’s findings.

Perhaps The Coalition for Workplace Safety (CWS), an organization that tries to balance corporate and regulatory priorities (good luck with that), found a spin we can all agree on. “If [Sanders] wants to improve safety for delivery workers, he should start with the US Postal Service, as OSHA’s own data shows the USPS by far has the highest percentage of investigations resulting in citations compared to other large employers in the industry.”

The moral of the story? No matter what a company is accused of, there’s a good chance the US Postal Service sucks even more.