Serious Injuries At Amazon Fulfillment Centers Topped 14,000, Despite the Company's Safety Claims (techcrunch.com) 59
Even as Amazon spends tens of millions on new robotics and technologies to automate its warehouses, workers are still paying the price with more than 14,000 serious injuries -- requiring days off or job restrictions -- reported in fulfillment centers in 2019, according to a report from Reveal. TechCrunch reports: Overall, the company saw 7.7 serious injuries per 100 employees, a number that's 33% higher than it was four years ago and double the most recent industry standard, despite significant investments and claims that safety is improving at its facilities, the report said. A document dump from the Center for Investigative Reporting given to Reveal, internal safety reports and weekly injury numbers from Amazon's network of national fulfillment centers shows that Amazon has misled the public about its safety record. And that the company's biggest shopping days -- during Prime week and the long holiday season -- are the most dangerous for its workers.
In a statement, Amazon called Reveal's report "misinformed" and quibbled over the terminology, while claiming that "we continue to see improvements in injury prevention and reduction" through a variety of programs, though documents in the report suggest otherwise. Bulletins sent out every month reveal a grim tally of injuries and safety problems, problems that the company was well aware of. Updates marked "Privileged & Confidential" and reportedly obtained by Reveal indicate that the company has failed to hit safety targets. Despite its intentions to reduce injury rates by 20% in 2018, rates rose. In 2019, when the company decided to try and lower its injury rates by a more modest 5%, the number of injuries still went up.
In a statement, Amazon called Reveal's report "misinformed" and quibbled over the terminology, while claiming that "we continue to see improvements in injury prevention and reduction" through a variety of programs, though documents in the report suggest otherwise. Bulletins sent out every month reveal a grim tally of injuries and safety problems, problems that the company was well aware of. Updates marked "Privileged & Confidential" and reportedly obtained by Reveal indicate that the company has failed to hit safety targets. Despite its intentions to reduce injury rates by 20% in 2018, rates rose. In 2019, when the company decided to try and lower its injury rates by a more modest 5%, the number of injuries still went up.
Bezos response (Score:1)
"I've told you once and I'm telling you again: don't walk in the robots area!"
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Amazon's warehouses are much more manual than makes sense to me.
Why is a trillion-dollar company having so much difficulty automating their warehouses?
Re:Bezos response (Score:4, Informative)
Why do you think they have trillions? It's cheaper to just hire humans than to develop, repair, and test robots.
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Because making a robot pick up an arbitrary object from a bin, and then place it in a box and pack it do it doesn't get damaged is actually a really hard problem.
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Not if you use the "I don't care" methodology that many Amazon employees apparently do. My experience in general has been that Amazon itself couldn't pack an item properly if they tried, and the only proper packing jobs are done by vendors that use "Fulfilled By Amazon" and pre-pack the item before Amazon gets their hands on it.
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I read somewhere that they are expected to pack 400 boxes an hour, so that's 9 seconds per box.
Re: Bezos response (Score:2)
You have to scan the label (which is sometimes difficult and needs to be entered by hand) to verify that the box is going into the right truck. Then you have to stack the box into a series of 10 foot "walls" (think tetris because that is exactly what it feels like) so the truck is efficiently packed. And yes each box must be packed in nine seconds. It is pretty zen when you get good at it and I agree it is hard to imagine a machine doing this efficiently. Scannin
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"I've told you once and I'm telling you again: don't walk in the robots area!"
It's Bender-logic. Warehouse staff are told to think and behave like robots. If the robots injure a worker then the workers are clearly not behaving robotically enough.
RSI injuries (Score:5, Interesting)
“The company exposed employees to ergonomic risk factors including stress from repeated bending at the waist and repeated exertions, and standing during entire shifts up to 10 hours, four days a week and sometimes including mandatory overtime shifts.” The federal agency recommended measures – such as an extra rest break and rotating employees to different jobs throughout the day – that Amazon has yet to implement across its warehouse network.
These are RSI injuries from lifting boxes over and over. The summary made me worry that people were getting run over by forklifts, or otherwise injured by the robot uprising.
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Re:RSI injuries (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:RSI injuries (Score:4, Insightful)
I can confirm this, I work as a mechanic, I previously did carpentry work, and my wife is a metalworker. RSI and HAVS [hse.gov.uk] are both very serious, especially if you have an employer who has never picked up a tool in his life and thinks it's "just an ache" or an "allergy to work".
This is why unions are important, especially ones willing to torch a manager's car if he talks back.
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This is why unions are important, especially ones willing to torch a manager's car if he talks back.
This is why I hate fucking unions.
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Yeah, it's fine because people aren't being run over by forklifts. ~
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Meaningless number (Score:5, Informative)
Number of Incidents x 200,000 / total number of hours worked in a year
14,000 injuries or 7.7 injuries per 100 workers means nothing in any context which matters to worker safety.
Source: I'm an occupational safety professional.
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How dare you provide context to the story! That's going to take the wind out of their sails. One perfectly good FUD story may have just been ruined by that bit of context.
Terrible, next you know they might learn that the big scary number isn't so scary after all.
Re:Meaningless number (Score:5, Insightful)
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When employees at one company have double the injuries of another's, that would seem to indicate an issue with the company. Would you suggest they're going out of their way to attract careless employees? Or is it more likely that something about the work environment promotes carelessness?
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"The number of injuries is meaningless unless one knows the number of hours worked over a given period (year) and the total number of employees during that period."
In July they had 1000.000 employees.
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I love autist math. I wouldn't take a job with those numbers.
Re: Meaningless number (Score:1)
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The number of injuries is meaningless unless one knows the number of hours worked over a given period (year) and the total number of employees during that period. With this, an injury rate of the given classifications can calculated... you know, the same way OSHA does..
Regulatory agency data is collected and measured by metrics that are specific, rigid and clearly defined. The intent is to use the same data set across a wide variety of industries, and work environments.
That does not automatically invalidate, nor render meaningless, any other frequency of injury and/or accident measurements that fall outside their standards. Additional metrics exist, often industry specific. Example: railroads use ton-miles as the preferred productivity m
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14,000 injuries or 7.7 injuries per 100 workers means nothing in any context which matters to worker safety.
How about "double the most recent industry standard". No numbers at all, but somehow I think it's meaningful.
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Not a very good one if you think a rate of 7.7 injuries per 100 workers for 14000 injuries means nothing.
Your quoted This is why unions are important, especially ones willing to torch a manager's car if he talks back. metric tells us incidents per hour worked (multiplied for some weird reason by 200k). So fucking what. 7.7 serious injuries per 100 workers in a single year is very clearly far too fucking many.
It's a simple metric that the board can understand, that managers can understand and that the people
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Sigh. Editing error.
Your quoted This is why unions are important, especially ones willing to torch a manager's car if he talks back. metric
Should read:
Your quoted OSHA metric
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Comment (Score:1, Informative)
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So you don't think that insurance costs are an incentive?
Good luck getting that insurance (Score:4, Interesting)
In short it's cheaper to let the employees get hurt and lobby for rules that make it impossible to use the various safety nets.
That Safety Net you think is there? It's made of cotton candy. Looks nice, but you'll fall right through it.
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It costs less than you think (Score:3)
I used to work for a call center company that had 6 month turnover baked into their business model. The training got written off their taxes so you and me paid for it. After 6 months they wanted you gone because you were eligible for benefits they didn't want to pay.
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Har-de-har har.
I worked for the Scummy Mortgage Co in Austin, TX in '87-'88. Three months after I was hired they froze everyone's salary (though the execs got their annual bonuses). They hired what was then "Anderson Consulting", for half a mill, to "empower employees and improve morale".
When I left in late summer '88, turnover was 10%-15%... A MONTH. Met a former coworker a year or two later, who told me that they'd *finally* unfrozen salaries about 9mos after I left, so they had them frozen for two years.
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Workman's comp is incredibly hard to get. The Boards that decide on it are packed with employers and employer reps.
Have a friend in OH who got injured on the job, got some of it, then they kept having her go back to doctors, and finally said, whoops, sorry, statute of limitations, doesn't matter that we kept you from doing it all in time, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
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Manpower is expensive. Training is expensive. Employee turnover is expensive.
Amazon pays shit, has an environment which requires little training, and probably does very little interviewing. The only thing that could possibly make them care is to make it much more expensive to overuse employees, and there is little appetite for that among politicians because they are profiting from the same shit system.
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OK, but does it cost more than how they're doing business now? Amazon is pretty damned good at crunching numbers. They pay fuck-all and they just replace cogs with cogs when they fail. If it weren't profitable, how did Bezos get so much money?
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Turnover barely costs anything in a warehouse. Get rid of them before 18 months and they can't file for unemployment benefits. Plus, the new guy doesn't get health insurance for the first 3 months.
A few hours of training at minimum wage, and a couple of hours for Peggy in HR to do the paperwork, pales in comparison. The health insurance alone probably outweighs it.
Besides, stuff is getting out the door even when one guy's out with an injury. Have you ever worked anywhere that pays $10-15/hr? Half th
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There's only one real incentive: unionize.
Amazon also uses power to cover up injuries (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.gq.com/story/amazo... [gq.com]
Read this, it's literally about Amazon buying and pressuring their way into having OSHA higher-ups change a fatal accident report, to ultimately blame the dead victim. And the honest/ethical OSHA employees (the grunts doing their job) were punished or pushed out.
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How difficult is it to run a warehouse? If people are getting back injuries because of lifting things, the work is not properly organised. This is just basic shop floor health and safety. Are workers being pressured into cutting corners? For example, one worker lifting where two people should do the job, or not using the appropriate lifting gear.
So now we know... (Score:1)
Who cares lets worship some money! (Score:2)
7 per 100 per "what"? (Score:2)
Per year?
Seriously? 7.7 of 100 workers injured per year? A company like that would be shut down in europe and depending on the injuries the mid management in jail.
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The article did suggest it's per year, yes. Although it's 7.7 injuries per 100 workers, which almost certainly means fewer than 7.7 workers per 100 workers were injured.
I do completely agree that this feels excessive anyway.
Battlebots at Amazon (Score:2)
OSHA's Website (Score:1)
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44 inspections is too few? I'm not familiar with OSHA but I'm sure they don't inspect every workplace injury.