It’s the final day of Amazon’s 48-hour Prime Day sale, where the multinational e-commerce corporation is offering a wide range of discounts on its endless catalog of products, from $24 Hydro Flask tumblers to $80 Beats earbuds. It’s a deal few can turn down, made even sweeter by Amazon’s same-day, one-day or two-day delivery services.
Unsurprisingly, it’s an incredibly profitable day for Amazon. Last Prime Day, the company saw $12.7 billion sales and 375 million items were purchasedIn 2015, it marked the highest number of views since Prime Day was launched nearly 10 years ago. Adobe Analytics, a firm that studies e-commerce data, predicts this year’s sales will be another record-breaker, forecasting $14 billion dollars sales
But Amazon’s Celebrating the self-proclaimed customer comes at a cost. While Prime members can easily purchase products with a few clicks throughout the year, getting millions of products to their doorstep in just a day or two is much more intensive — and even dangerous, because Research And investigation At the Company Show — for warehouse workers and delivery drivers that Amazon employs and relies on. Speed and scale are worse on prime days, when more consumers are buying things.
Workers have long been vocal about the risks they face in keeping up with consumer demand. On July 15, the eve of Prime Day, a group of former and current Amazon employees shown at the New York City office of the Corporation to provide stories from workers about injuries and deaths on the job and to request a meeting with Amazon’s Vice President of Global Workplace Health and Safety, Sarah Rhodes.
the speakers to share They experience injuries, overwork, and being denied workers’ compensation. A banner held by the workers read, “Same day delivery, lifelong injury.”
It should come as no shock to anyone that working long hours in a warehouse can be hard, tiring work. But the frequency with which Amazon workers get injured on the job — with injuries that develop from musculoskeletal disorders Repetitive, uncomfortable movements and heavy lifting per broken bones – Not industry standard.
Prime Minister’s Day pressure on workers
Cat Cole, a worker at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York, and an organizer for the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) Democratic Reform Caucus, said that Amazon warehouses are difficult to work a shift, no matter the time of year. But the pressure increases during prime day sales week.
Cole told Vox, “You’ve got people breathing down your neck. He added that increased workload puts stress on workers and leads to more injuries. Even outside of Prime Day and other big sales weeks, he’s no stranger to injuring himself.” I go home at least once a week with at least one black and blue mark on my leg.”
He says his colleagues have suffered a variety of injuries and illnesses while on the job: concussions, slipped discs, a sprained wrist, a broken ankle.
Luke Cianciotto, an Amazon delivery driver in the North Chicago area, said the increased workload doesn’t just include more deliveries. To accommodate the influx of work on prime days, he said more drivers have been hired for it, and more experienced drivers have been tasked with their training.
“What ends up happening is you put these drivers on the road, setting them up for failure,” Cianciotto told Vox. “They do bad things. And they don’t deserve it.”
Cianciotto and his fellow delivery drivers are on Strike for last three weeksHis experience with Prime Day in the past has included drivers working late into the night, delivering hundreds of packages that fill their vans “wall to wall, floor to ceiling.”
In an average week for full-time Amazon warehouse workers, shifts can be anywhere from 10 to 12 hours. Cole said that in weeks with increased consumer demand from events like Prime Day, it’s common for Amazon to schedule “mandatory overtime” — extra hours or days added to workers’ shifts to accommodate the increase, on top of already demanding schedules. .
With Prime Day in mid-July, some Amazon employees aren’t just working under extreme stress — they’re also working in sweltering heat, with warehouse temperatures soaring to 85 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit. At the JFK8 facility, Cole and his fellow union organizers took it upon themselves to hand out Gatorade and ice pops to his coworkers before they started their shifts. Cole said Amazon will put up signs reminding people the company cares and takes breaks. Amazon will try to “lighten the mood,” Cole said, with novelties like DJs or lemonade. But he says that workers are not needed.
“They need the warehouse to be cool, they need a safe work environment, they need to know they can take those breaks if they need to without punishment or retribution,” Cole said. “That’s what we need.”
Shipping may be free, but the labor behind it comes at a price
In today’s market, companies are competing with Amazon by offering their own versions of Prime Day sales and faster delivery dates. But even with increasing competition from the likes of Target and Walmart, Amazon is still one of the leaders of the pack of e-commerce giants — and that includes leading the way in workplace injuries.
In April 2021, the company revealed A letter from then-CEO Jeff Bezos About the promise to be “the safest place on earth to work”. Just one month after that, the company announcement Its health and safety program WorkingWell aims to halve its recordable incidence rate (RIR) – or the number of times an injury or illness occurs at work per 100 full-time employees – by 2025.
According to Amazon’s most recent data, when the announcement was made, the RIR was 7.6 per 100 full-time workers. Annual Safety Report. Amazon would need to reduce its incident rate by at least 10 percent each year to cut the RIR in half. In 2022, the RIR was 6.7, an 11.8 percent decrease from the previous year, appearing to be on track.
but one Report Released this past May Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition of labor unions, challenges Amazon’s self-reporting The center analyzed data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and found that 6.9 injuries occurred for every 100 full-time employees in 2022, compared to 7.9 in 2021. This reduced injuries to 12.7 percent. Amazon facilities, including warehouses, logistics and delivery facilities. While these numbers differ slightly from those found in Amazon’s security report, it’s still a significant reduction. But in 2023, the SOC found in its report that those numbers had dropped to just 6.5 injuries per 100 full-time employees — a 5.8 percent reduction, a little more than half of what’s needed on average each year.
The SOC researchers also noted that while these numbers will decrease from 2021 to 2023, injuries requiring workers to be reassigned to light duties increased, while injuries requiring loss of work time decreased. There are two ways to explain this: One is that Amazon has taken steps to meaningfully reduce serious injuries that require absence from work. Another possibility is that Amazon has shifted workers to lighter duties so they can rest and recover from injuries, which is distracting and puts workers at risk of re-injuring themselves.
The latter is what SoC claims Amazon is doing. Amazon’s own reasoning isn’t too far from that claim: In its 2022 annual safety report, the company said one of the main drivers of reducing the number of injuries requiring time away from work was its “return to work” program, which allows workers to “work with Continuing to work while recovering from related injury or illness.”
Cole – who was born with only one arm and uses a prosthetic arm – experienced a quick return to work after the injury Once during a shift, he injured his hand Amcare, Amazon’s in-house primary care clinic. “I was in a lot of pain,” Cole said. After wringing his hands, management told him to go back to work. “I said, ‘Listen, I have an arm. I am living by this hand. And now injured. I’m not going back to the floor to hurt it more.’
The SOC report also found that of the more than 38,300 recordable injuries at Amazon facilities in 2023 alone, 94 percent of the injuries identified by the SOC were serious — meaning employees were either put on light duty or forced to miss work entirely. It also found that Amazon’s serious injury rate was more than double that of non-Amazon warehouses.
Injuries also become more common during events like Prime Day and other big sales. In the week leading up to Prime Day 2023, Amazon facilities recorded 1,066 serious injuries, according to the SOC report — the highest number of injuries recorded all year and well above the average of 691 injuries per week. These incidents represented a 48 percent increase in injuries from the previous week and were closely followed by cases recorded on Cyber Monday (1,015 serious injuries) and Prime Big Deals Day (898 serious injuries).
Additionally, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee has launched a year-long investigation into Amazon’s labor practices. According to The Washington PostThe HELP committee’s investigation found that nearly 45 out of 100 employees were injured during the week of Prime Day in 2019, and that injuries peaked again during other holiday sales.
The HELP committee isn’t the only federal investigation into security problems at Amazon. From January 2023 to August 2023, Several investigations Available from OSHA on Amazon open Staff are well known Ergonomic hazards, such as constantly lifting packages up and down, handling heavy objects, and bending and twisting in awkward positions, all for hours at a time. “Amazon’s operating procedures are creating hazardous work conditions and processes, resulting in serious worker injuries,” Assistant Secretary for Occupational Safety and Health Doug Parker said in February 2023. Press release.
OSAA also found that when Amazon workers were injured, the company failed to provide treatment. A news release from OSHA, the agency wrote That “at least six employees with head injuries and four with back injuries did not receive the necessary medical attention in time.”
The Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which won just one election with workers at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York, made safe working conditions one of its primary goals in a first contract. However, Amazon still refuses to recognize the union and, as a result, has made no moves on its behalf to bargain a collective agreement. It happened clash between unions on how to best bring Amazon into the bargain and organize other warehouses.
But in June A.L.U Affiliate voting With the International Brotherhood of Teamsters — a powerful union with resources that can help turn the tide for workers at JFK8 and other Amazon facilities. Passed by the New York State Assembly the same month Warehouse Worker Injury Reduction ActWhich now sits on Governor Cathy Hochul’s desk.
Amazon has done it repeatedly rejected claim That it is not working meaningfully Improving workplace safety. But even if we take it at its word, the data shows it still has a long way to go before it can call itself the “world’s safest place to work.”
