Amazon is facing workplace safety investigations from OSHA, Washington state’s Department of Labor and the U.S. Department of Justice.
Earlier this year, after roughly six months of inspections, OSHA determined Amazon failed to keep its workers safe. It pointed to, among other things, the weight of items handled by workers, awkward motions like twisting, bending and lifting, and long hours.
Kennelly went to her personal physician the day after her injury, according to a doctor’s note viewed by The Seattle Times. That physician recommended limits on her work, including not lifting packages weighing more than 15 pounds. Kennelly said she brought the note to Amazon that day. An Amazon employee makes sure a box riding on a belt is not sticking out at the Amazon Fulfillment center in Robbinsville Township, N.J. After six months of interviewing workers, inspecting injury logs and watching videos taken inside an Amazon warehouse, federal regulators determined Amazon had failed to create a safe workplace.
Amazon, for its part, has recognized that its warehouses could be safer but says it has already taken steps to improve. Founder Jeff Bezos pledged to make the company “Earth’s Safest Place to Work” in 2021. Amazon committed to pour $300 million into safety projects and new technologies. In July, OSHA opened inspections at three warehouses in Deltona, Florida; Waukegan, Illinois; and New Windsor, New York. It began investigating three more facilities in Aurora, Colorado; Nampa, Idaho; and Castleton, New York, in August.In New York, OSHA found workers were lifting packages that weighed more than 50 pounds above shoulder-height. In some facilities, OSHA said Amazon’s in-house medical team discouraged workers from reporting injuries.
In response to this allegation, Vogel said OSHA did not say that the games were the cause of alleged injuries. And, Vogel added, the games are optional. “Regardless of the penalty, Amazon is going to challenge these citations and OSHA knows that,” she said. “Clearly these citations show it’s not the worker’s fault, that the work is designed in such a way that you can’t work safely.”
While inspecting Amazon’s Waukegan, Illinois, warehouse, OSHA studied five years of injury logs to determine how often workers were struck by packages while working. Before her injury, Kennelly usually spent the first half of the night getting packages into the right bag to go to the right delivery route. She spent the second half with an assigned route, finding the bags for the van that would serve it.
The night she was injured, Kennelly and her colleagues were particularly rushed working to catch up from deliveries that had been delayed after an ice storm, she said. When Kennelly returned for a follow-up a month later, she was improving “slower than expected,” according to her medical records. In BF14, one of several Amazon facilities in Kent, workers move at a pace that increases the chances of injury, the department found. Ten of the 12 processes the department inspected “create a serious hazard” for back, shoulder, wrist and knee injuries.
In court filings, Amazon also argued it didn’t have enough time to gather expert opinions given the “complexity” of the ergonomic situation. L&I shot back that Amazon’s claims were “absurd.” “The people who are making these rules ... you guys aren’t doing the job. You do not know what toll it’s taking on our bodies at all,” she said. “What they make us do is outrageous and it does hurt.”
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