Next consecutive year in a row, injuries charges in Amazon warehouses dropped, but a coalition of labour unions monitoring the data claimed Amazon isn’t making improvements quickly enough.
leader and then-CEO Jeff Bezos declared in 2020 that the firm was” Earth’s safest place to work.” According to Amazon, injuries had increased in 2019 to 8.7 situations per 100 staff.
The frequency increased in 2020, but it decreased, and it increased once more in 2021. By Amazon’s standards, rates have decreased annually since next. Similar trends were reported by the Strategic Organizing Center, a partnership of labour unions that monitors Google damage information.
The way in which Amazon and SOC compare the information submitted to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is different.
Amazon reports two indicators: its trackable event rate in the United States, which includes work-related injuries that call for more than just simple first-aid care, and its lost-time event charge, which includes work-related injuries that call for extra time off from work. In 2024, Amazon had a recordable occurrence rate of six per 100 workers, compared to a lost-time event rate of 1.2 per 100 workers.
These metrics improved by 31 % and 76.5 %, respectively, over the past five years.
The Stack combined those statistics for its price and in a statement released on Thursday found that the injuries rate among inventory workers was 6 per 100 workers last year, up from about 6 per 100 in 2023.
In its most recent health performance review, which was released in March, Amazon attributed its drop to billions of dollars spent on safety initiatives. Stores were inspected and retrofitted with flexible workstations, according to Amazon, to assist with common injuries like spinal disorder brought on by repeated and disturbed movements.
According to the manufacturer, those injuries and strains account for about 57 % of all accidents.
According to the Device report, Amazon’s attempts aren’t quickly resolving the issue. While the general level of major injuries decreased, 4 out of 10 Amazon employees worked in settings where wounds increased between 2023 and 2024, according to the study.
” Management has largely stopped talking about it and uses misleading comparisons to divert attention and reduce the problem,” said David Rosenblatt, a assistant director proper research and campaigns at SOC.” What we’re seeing is that rather than facing the issue head on, it’s been doing it.” This is a problem that has true human implications for tens of thousands of people every year, not just a files debate.
Rosenblatt pointed out that unlike years earlier, the most recent investor letter from Amazon in 2024 didn’t notice worker safety.
Amazon claimed in its own health record that its data indicates the company is making” stable and significant improvement.” Having said that, we’ve never aspired to be “average,” because there is no such thing as” good enough.”
Additionally, according to the SOC, Amazon’s injury charges don’t compare favorably to those of the rest of the warehouse sector. The SOC reported that while Amazon’s injury rate was 6.0 % in 2024, the rate for non-Amazon warehouses was 3.7 % per 100 workers last year.
Amazon compared the Bureau of Labor Statistics ‘ personal information to that of the industry as a whole. Although the agency’s reported incident rates outperform the industry average, every other parameter performs favorably.
The SOC criticized those evaluations in its statement, claiming that the data was skewed and included Amazon’s personal injury data because it is a key player in storehouse employment. Rosenblatt referred to it as Amazon contrasting itself with itself.
” Our method is to say that you have to remove Amazon from the data in order to accurately evaluate the business to the industry,” he said.
Sam Stephenson, a spokesman for Amazon, claims that the SOC’s statement misleads visitors by using cherry-picking data.
In an emailed statement, Stephenson stated that” the facts are that we’ve improved our Recordable Incident Rate and our Lost Time Incident Rate by 34 % and by 65 % over the past five years.” Nothing is more important than our people ‘ health and safety, and we’re working hard to be the safest firm in our respective companies.
Injuries charges in Amazon’s warehouses  have drawn the attention of both the state and the provincial. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., spearheaded a Senate investigation last year that eventually accused Amazon of disregarding internal study findings that focused on inventory protection and instead pushed for higher efficiency.
The Senate investigation looked into the injuries rates at Amazon warehouses in Washington state.
Amazon refuted the findings, and Sanders ‘ report was described as” an attempt to gather information and twist it to support a false narrative” in a , company blog post .
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