Dec. 16 (UPI) — A Senate committee investigation into Amazon worker safety accused the e-commerce giant of placing speed and productivity over worker safety, resulting in mounting injuries to its employees.
The report, released Sunday, said the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pension report, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I, Vt., charged that Amazon’s corporate culture is “obsessed” with packages out the door so much that it jeopardizes workers’ health on a routine basis.
“This culture, driven by relentless productivity demands, has resulted in systemic safety failures and high rates of injury far more frequently than at other warehouses,” the report said.
“Workers told the committee about Amazon regularly ignoring safety concerns, ordering workers to stay in roles that caused them pain, denying workers needed medical care or pressuring them to return to work too soon, and refusing accommodations for work-related injuries as well as disabilities.”
The 160-page report said it appeared Amazon executives rejected recommendations from internal reports probing worker’s safety for fear it would lower productivity and hurt the “customer experience.”
One of the rejected internal recommendations was to end fines for employees who didn’t reach productivity goals and require additional breaks for some workers to limit the number of repeat motions while picking items from robotic shelves.
Amazon in a statement, called the investigation “wrong on the facts” while highlighting “selective, outdated information that lacks context” and did not reflect the reality of Amazon warehouses.
“Our voluntary, good-faith cooperation with this investigation was premised on the reasonable expectation that any report would be even-handed and truthful and even if that truth was inconvenient for the people who want to claim that our workplaces are anything other than safe,” it said.
Amazon pointed to a ruling by a judge in Washington state who dismissed charges that it ignores its safety rules for the sake of employees, noting that the court rejected similar claims made in the Senate report.
