It’s the ultimate day for Amazon’s 48-hour Prime Day sale, during which the multinational e-commerce company affords a variety of reductions to its limitless catalog of merchandise, from $24 Hydro Flask tumblers to $80 Beats earbuds. It’s a barrage of offers that few can refuse, made even sweeter by Amazon’s same-day, one-day, or two-day supply service.
Unsurprisingly, it’s an extremely worthwhile day for Amazon. Final Prime Day, the corporate noticed $12.7 billion in gross sales and over 375 million objects bought, the biggest numbers it’s seen since Prime Day launched practically 10 years in the past in 2015. Adobe Analytics, a company that research e-commerce knowledge, predicted that this 12 months’s sale might be one other record-breaker, with a forecast of $14 billion {dollars} in gross sales.
However Amazon’s self-proclaimed buyer celebration comes at a price. Whereas Prime members should buy items with the benefit of some clicks year-round, getting these hundreds of thousands of merchandise to reach at their doorsteps in only a day or two is way extra intensive — and even harmful, as analysis and investigations into the corporate present — for the warehouse staff and supply drivers that Amazon employs and depends on. The pace and scale is worse on Prime Day, when much more customers are shopping for issues.
Employees have lengthy been vocal concerning the dangers they face on the job to maintain up with client calls for. On July 15, the eve of Prime Day, a bunch of former and present Amazon staff confirmed as much as the company’s New York Metropolis workplace to ship tales from staff about accidents and deaths on the job and to request a gathering with the vp of Amazon’s International Office Well being and Security, Sarah Rhoads.
Audio system shared their experiences of getting harm, being overworked, and being denied staff’ compensation. One of many banners held up by staff learn, “Identical-day supply, lifetime of harm.”
It shouldn’t shock anybody that working in a warehouse for lengthy hours could be grueling, tiresome work. However the frequency at which Amazon staff are harm on the job — with accidents starting from musculoskeletal problems developed from repetitive, uncomfortable actions and heavy lifting to damaged bones — shouldn’t be the trade customary.
Prime Day’s strain on staff
Kat Cole, a employee at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York, and an organizer with the Democratic Reform Caucus of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), says that no matter what time of 12 months it’s, working a shift at one among Amazon’s warehouses is tough. However through the week of the Prime Day gross sales, the strain is up.
“You might have individuals respiration down your neck,” Cole informed Vox. That elevated quantity of labor places stress on staff and results in extra accidents, she added. She’s no stranger to accidents herself, even exterior of Prime Day and different large gross sales weeks. “I’m going house with at the least one enormous black and blue bruise on my legs, at the least as soon as every week.”
She says her coworkers have suffered from quite a lot of accidents and sicknesses whereas on the job: concussions, slipped discs, a sprained wrist, a damaged ankle.
Luke Cianciotto, an Amazon supply driver within the northern Chicago space, says the elevated workload doesn’t simply embrace extra deliveries. To accommodate for the inflow of labor on Prime Day, he says extra drivers are employed main as much as it, and extra veteran drivers are tasked with coaching them.
“What finally ends up occurring is you place these drivers on the street, setting them up for failure,” Cianciotto informed Vox. “They do a nasty job. And so they don’t deserve that.”
Whereas Cianciotto and his fellow supply drivers have been on strike for the final three weeks, his expertise with Prime Day up to now contains drivers working late into the evening, delivering tons of upon tons of of packages that fill their vans “wall to wall, flooring to ceiling.”
On a median week for full-time Amazon warehouse workers, shifts could be wherever between 10 to 12 hours. Cole mentioned that in weeks with elevated client demand from occasions like Prime Day, it’s widespread for Amazon to schedule “necessary additional time” — further hours or days added on to staff’ shifts to help with these surges, on prime of this already demanding schedule.
With Prime Day being in the course of July, some Amazon workers aren’t simply working beneath additional strain — they’re working by means of extreme warmth, too, with temperatures rising as excessive as 85 to 90 levels Fahrenheit within the warehouse. On the JFK8 facility, Cole and her fellow union organizers have taken it upon themselves at hand out Gatorade and ice pops to her coworkers earlier than they begin their shifts. Cole says Amazon will put up indicators reminding folks that the corporate cares and to take breaks. Amazon can even attempt to “lighten the temper,” Cole says, with novelties like DJs or providing lemonade. However she says that’s not what staff want.
“They want the warehouse to be cooler, they want safer working situations, they should know that they’ll take these breaks after they want them with out penalty or retaliation,” Cole mentioned. “That’s what we’d like.”
Delivery could also be free, however the labor behind it comes at a value
In at present’s market, corporations are competing with Amazon by providing their personal model of Prime Day gross sales and speedy supply dates. However even with rising competitors from the likes of Goal and Walmart, Amazon remains to be one of many leaders within the pack of e-commerce giants — and that features main in office accidents.
In April 2021, the corporate printed a letter from then-CEO Jeff Bezos about its dedication to being “Earth’s Most secure Place to Work.” Only a month later, the corporate introduced its well being and security program known as WorkingWell, with a purpose to chop its recordable incident price (RIR) — or how usually accidents or sickness happen within the office per 100 full-time workers — in half by 2025.
When the announcement was made, the RIR was 7.6 per 100 full-time workers, in response to Amazon’s most up-to-date annual security report. Amazon would want to cut back its incident price by at the least 10 % every year so as to slash the RIR by half. In 2022, the RIR was 6.7, a discount of 11.8 % from the earlier 12 months, showing to be on observe.
However one report launched this previous Might from the Strategic Organizing Middle (SOC), a coalition of labor unions, challenges Amazon’s self-report. In its evaluation of information from the Occupational Security and Well being Administration (OSHA), the middle discovered that in 2022, there have been 6.9 accidents for each 100 full-time workers, in comparison with 7.9 accidents in 2021. That’s an harm discount of 12.7 % in Amazon services, which incorporates warehouses, logistics, and supply services. Whereas these numbers are barely completely different from those present in Amazon’s security report, that’s nonetheless a notable lower. However in 2023, SOC present in its report that these numbers solely fell to six.5 accidents per 100 full-time workers — a discount of 5.8 %, just a bit over half of what it must common every year.
SOC researchers additionally famous that whereas these numbers fell from 2021 to 2023, accidents that required staff to be reassigned to lighter duties elevated, whereas accidents that necessitated shedding time at work decreased. There are two methods to interpret this: one being that Amazon has taken steps to meaningfully cut back extreme accidents that will require an absence from work. The opposite chance is that Amazon has shifted staff into lighter duties to maintain them working when they need to be resting and recovering from their accidents, which is deceptive and places staff liable to injuring themselves once more.
The latter is what SOC has claimed Amazon is doing. Amazon’s personal reasoning shouldn’t be too removed from this assertion: In its 2022 annual security report, the corporate mentioned that one of many predominant drivers of lowering the variety of accidents that required time away from work was its “Return to Work” program, permitting staff to “proceed to work whereas recovering from work-related accidents or sicknesses.”
Cole — who was born with just one hand and makes use of a prosthetic arm — has skilled the push again to work quickly after an harm. As soon as throughout a shift, she injured her hand and went to AmCare, Amazon’s in-house first assist clinic. “I used to be in lots of ache,” Cole mentioned. After wrapping her hand up, administration informed her to return again to work. “I mentioned, ‘Hear, I’ve one hand. I reside with this hand. And it’s injured proper now. I’m not going again on the ground to injure it additional.’”
The SOC report additionally discovered that there have been greater than 38,300 recordable accidents at Amazon services in 2023 alone, with 94 % of the accidents recognized by SOC as severe — that means workers had been both positioned on lighter work duties or pressured to overlook work totally. It additionally discovered that Amazon’s severe harm price was greater than twice as excessive as non-Amazon warehouses.
Accidents develop into far more widespread throughout occasions like Prime Day and different large gross sales, too. The week of Prime Day 2023, there have been 1,066 recorded circumstances of great accidents at Amazon services, in response to the SOC report — the best variety of accidents recorded all 12 months, and much above the typical of 691 accidents per week. These circumstances represented a 48 % enhance in accidents from the earlier week, and had been adopted intently by circumstances recorded on Cyber Monday (1,015 severe accidents) and Prime Large Offers Day (898 severe accidents).
In an electronic mail to Vox, Amazon spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel known as the SOC report “deceptive,” emphasizing that the switch-up between charges and uncooked numbers builds a “false narrative” and that the report ought to begin at 2019, which might point out a discount to accidents by 28 %. “The actual fact is, there are much more individuals working within the buildings throughout these occasions and extra whole hours labored by these workers,” she wrote.
Moreover, the Senate Well being, Training, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee launched a yearlong investigation into Amazon’s labor practices. In response to the Washington Publish, an interim report, led by committee chair Senator Bernie Sanders, discovered that almost 45 out of 100 workers had been injured through the week of Prime Day in 2019, and accidents peaked once more throughout different vacation gross sales.
Amazon, which had cooperated with the investigation, pushed again on Senator Sanders’s preliminary report through an electronic mail to Vox, saying it “ignores our progress and paints a one-sided, false narrative utilizing solely a fraction of the data we’ve supplied.”
The HELP Committee shouldn’t be the one federal investigation that’s discovered Amazon to have troubling issues of safety. From January 2023 to August 2023, a number of investigations from OSHA discovered that Amazon uncovered staff to well-known ergonomic hazards, like lifting packages up and down always, dealing with heavy objects, and bending and twisting in awkward positions, all for hours at a time. “Amazon’s working strategies are creating hazardous work situations and processes, resulting in severe employee accidents,” mentioned assistant secretary for occupational security and well being Doug Parker in a February 2023 press launch.
OSHA additionally discovered that when Amazon staff had been injured, the corporate failed to offer therapy. In a single information launch from OSHA, the company wrote that “at the least six workers with head accidents and 4 with again accidents didn’t obtain well timed, needed medical care.” Amazon disagreed with OSHA’s characterizations and appealed them.
The Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which has gained just one election with the employees of Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York, has made secure working situations one among its main objectives in a primary contract. Nonetheless, Amazon nonetheless refuses to acknowledge the union and, in flip, has made no motion on its facet to bargaining a collective settlement. There’s additionally been battle throughout the union on the best way to finest carry Amazon to the bargaining desk and manage different warehouses.
However in June, the ALU voted to affiliate with the Worldwide Brotherhood of Teamsters — a robust union with sources that would assist change the tides for the employees of JFK8 and different Amazon services. That very same month, the New York State Meeting handed the Warehouse Employee Damage Discount Act, which now sits on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk.
Amazon has repeatedly rejected claims that it’s not meaningfully working to enhance office security. However even when we take it at its phrase, the information reveals that it nonetheless has a protracted method to go earlier than it could possibly name itself “Earth’s Most secure Place to Work.”
Replace, July 17, 6 pm ET: This story, printed July 17, has been up to date to incorporate statements from Amazon. It additionally clarifies that the interim report was from Sanders alone, not the HELP committee at giant.
