Thousands of Teamster workers overwhelmingly voted in the past week to authorize strikes at two major Amazon warehouses in New York City and one near Chicago at the height of the holiday shopping season in an effort to force the company to recognize their union and come to the bargaining table.
The Teamsters, a major labor union, says Amazon is violating federal labor law by refusing to negotiate a contract that addresses the company’s “low wages and dangerous working conditions.” The union set a December 15 deadline for contract negotiations, one that it said the company ignored. That means Amazon workers in New York and Illinois could go on strike at the busiest time of the year.
“If these white-collar criminals want to keep breaking the law, they better get ready for a fight,” Teamsters’ General President Sean O’Brien said in a statement.
On the heels of the strike authorization vote, Sen. Bernie Sanders released a report detailing the dangers of the corporate culture at Amazon that obsesses over speed and productivity at the expense of worker safety. The result of an 18-month investigation by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, which Sanders chairs, the report found that Amazon warehouses recorded 30 percent more injuries than the warehouse industry average in 2023.
In each of the past seven years, Amazon workers were nearly twice as likely to be injured on the job than workers at other warehouses, according to the report’s analysis of company and industry data. The problem is widespread, with injury rates at more than two-thirds of Amazon warehouses exceeding the industry average.
“The shockingly dangerous working conditions at Amazon’s warehouses revealed in this 160-page report are beyond unacceptable,” Sanders said in a statement on Monday. “Making matters even worse: Amazon’s executives repeatedly chose to put profits ahead of the health and safety of its workers by ignoring recommendations that would substantially reduce injuries at its warehouses.”
Amazon has pushed back on the report, pointing out that it was released by Sanders and his staff, not the Democratic majority on the HELP Committee. In a statement, the company alleged that the documents and testimonies the report relies on are anecdotal, outdated and taken out of context.
“Sen. Sanders’ report is wrong on the facts and weaves together out-of-date documents and unverifiable anecdotes to create a pre-conceived narrative that he and his allies have been pushing for the past 18 months,” said Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel in an email.
Workers have raised alarm over health and safety at Amazon warehouses for years, especially during the holiday rush, when customers expect millions of gifts to be delivered on time. As part of its investigation, the Senate HELP Committee conducted 135 interviews with 500 Amazon workers who provided more than 1,400 documents to back up their stories.
“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,” one Amazon warehouse worker told the committee last year. “People don’t see that; they think it just appears by magic. But it doesn’t, it appears by blood, sweat, and tears.”
Concern over low wages and injuries on the job inspired union organizing efforts at Amazon warehouses in Kentucky, Alabama, Florida, Missouri, New York, and beyond. Amazon has responded with a yearslong union-busting campaign and spent $14 million on anti-union consultants in 2022 alone.
That year, Amazon workers at the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island made history by voting to form the company’s first union. Since then, the union has voted to affiliate with the Teamsters and expanded to represent a second warehouse, DBK4, which is the company’s largest delivery station in New York City. Both of those warehouses authorized strikes last week.
The Teamsters represent Amazon workers at a total of 10 facilities across the United States, but the union says Amazon has “repeatedly failed in its legal obligation to bargain with its unionized workforce.”
“Amazon is pushing its workers closer to the picket line by failing to show them the respect they have earned,” O’Brien said. The Teamsters say Amazon is leaving its employees with no choice besides a strike that would disrupt “key operations for customers nationwide” during the most profitable season in retail.
“We aren’t asking for much,” said James Saccardo, a worker at JFK8, in a statement. “We just want what everyone else in America wants — to do our jobs and get paid enough to take care of ourselves and our families. And Amazon isn’t letting us do that.”
The report released by Sanders sheds light on the conditions stoking the unionization push at Amazon. Sanders said the committee’s investigation uncovered new evidence that Amazon knows its productivity standards for workers are the reason so many get injured but continues to ignore internal recommendations to improve safety.
Sanders lashed out at Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO and the world’s second richest person, for running a company that made more than $30 billion in profits last year while failing to protect its workers. Amazon should be one of the safest places to work, not one of the most dangerous, Sanders said in a statement.
“Amazon forces workers to operate in a system that demands impossible rates and treats them as disposable when they are injured,” Sanders said. “It accepts worker injuries and their long-term pain and disabilities as the cost of doing business.”
The report’s key findings suggest that Amazon’s widely-publicized efforts to improve working conditions are largely window dressing. The committee found that Amazon manipulates and cherry picks data on injuries to obscure the fact that its warehouses suffer from higher rates of injury than the industry average.
Nantel said the company’s public data on injuries is accurate. Data reported to the federal government shows a 28 percent drop in injuries since 2019, Nantel said.
“There’s zero truth to the claim that we systemically under-report injuries,” Nantel said.
Contrary to the company’s public claims, Amazon imposes “speed and productivity requirements,” commonly known as “rates,” on workers, according to the report. Amazon closely monitors its workers’ every movement during a shift with scanning devices and AI-powered cameras, and an automated system initiates disciplinary proceedings when workers can’t keep up.
Amazon does have many safety protocols and measures in place, but the required “rates” force workers to regularly bypass safety measures in order to meet the company’s labor demands, according to worker testimony.
Amazon workers are also required to move in unsafe ways and repeat the same movements thousands of times over the course of 10- or 12-hour shifts. Although the company is aware such repetitive movement causes musculoskeletal disorders, Amazon refuses to take action to prevent such injuries, according to the report. Warehouse workers also reported chronic pain, loss of mobility, temporary and permanent disabilities and diminished quality of life because of the injuries on the job.
Alarmingly, Amazon executives appear to be well aware of the connection between worker injuries and its demand for speed and productivity. In 2020, Amazon launched “Project Soteria” to identify risk factors for injuries in its warehouses and to propose changes. Project Soteria found a connection between the speed required of workers and their injuries and made recommendations for improvement, but Amazon did not implement policy changes in response, according to the report:
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.”
Nantel said teams at Amazon are encouraged to question and evaluate company practices in order to improve safety, and Project Soteria was part of that process.
“Project Soteria is an example of this type of team evaluation, where one team explored whether there’s a causal link between pace of work and injuries and another team evaluated the methodology and findings and determined they weren’t valid,” Nantel said.
The report released by Sanders relies heavily on testimony from workers. One of these workers, named in the report as “RS,” fell while working at an Amazon warehouse in Missouri when an unsecured mat slipped from underneath her feet. RS hit the floor hard and was in pain, so she reported to the company’s on-site first aid facility. RS said her pain was severe, but she was only provided ibuprofen and pain-relieving cream, told to stretch her hip, and sent back to work.
Three days later, RS was once again in debilitating pain. Amazon sent her to Concentra, the company’s preferred occupational health care provider, which did no internal imaging and prescribed physical therapy for a strained hip. Two months later, RS was back at work experiencing shooting pain through her leg and back, but Amazon’s in-house health provider said they could do nothing and sent her home.
Four months after her fall, RS finally saw a specialist for a second opinion, who discovered that she had a dislocated joint on her lower back and several bulged discs that required surgery to fix. The report found RS was just one of many workers who said Amazon dismissed their pain and delayed referral to outside care, which in some cases contributed to worse medical outcomes and long-term impacts to quality of life.
“When I started, I thought the company was there for you,” RS told the Senate HELP Committee. “They told us to report any injuries. Then I got injured and saw what it really was and couldn’t believe that a huge company that preaches how they’re there for workers really treats people.”
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