Senate Panel Accuses Amazon Of Ignoring Warnings On Speed Quotas Linked To Worker Injuries

 A Senate committee investigation found Amazon manipulated its warehouses’ injury data to make them appear safer than they are and ignored internal reports linking worker injuries to speed and productivity quotas—which the online retail giant has insisted it does not enforce.

A report published by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., found Amazon’s claims about its warehouses being nearly as safe as the industry average was the result of “cherry-picking data.”

The report said an analysis of the company’s data showed that Amazon’s warehouses recorded 30% more injuries than the industry average in 2023 and workers at Amazon’s warehouses were “nearly twice as likely to be injured” than other warehouse workers.

According to the report, Amazon worker safety issues stem from “speed and productivity requirements” it imposes on workers—something Amazon has denied imposing—and those who fail to keep up face disciplinary procedures triggered by automated systems that track their movements through each shift.

The investigation found the productivity quota forced workers to “move in unsafe ways and to repeat the same movements hundreds and thousands of times each shift” leading to “musculoskeletal disorders.”

The report notes that while Amazon has safety procedures in place, its speed requirements make them “nearly impossible to follow.”

The Senate committee also found that Amazon “actively discourages” injured workers from seeking outside medical care and has “multiple” procedures in place to “delay workers from receiving needed medical care and force workers who need medical care to return to work too soon.”

The committee found Amazon conducted an internal study under the moniker “Project Soteria,” in 2020 to identify potential injury risk factors at its warehouses. The study found pausing disciplinary measures against workers who failed to meet speed requirements and giving workers more time off lowered injury risks. However, the e-commerce giant denied the Soteria team’s request to fully implement these measures—after they had been trialed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Project Soteria team was then asked to focus on ways to “maximize productivity” without increasing injuries. The report also cites a separate internal program from 2021, Project Elderwand, focused on setting a maximum number of times a warehouse worker should do a particular physical task before the risk of injury increases. But the findings were shelved after testing how the recommendations would affect the “customer experience.” In response, Amazon described the Project Soteria document as “analytically unsound…outdated [and]

inaccurate.” The company also said it informed the committee staff it never used the findings of Project Soteria as “expert economists” at the company “determined that the project was flawed and inaccurate.” Amazon said Elderwand showed how it regularly examines its safety processes. The company said it used the program “to understand whether forced breaks reduced pace of work and affected the rate of musculoskeletal disorders,” but learned that “the intervention was ineffective.”

Amazon said the main premise of the report that links worker injuries to its pursuit for increased productivity was “fundamentally flawed.” The company argued its data showed the company has increased delivery speeds while decreasing injury rates across its network. “Because speedy delivery doesn’t come from pushing people harder – it comes from getting products closer to customers and reducing the number of steps involved in going from a supplier to a customer,” the company said. Amazon also pushed back on the finding that its warehouses' work conditions were more dangerous than average, saying in 2023 its recordable incident rate per 100 full-time workers was 6.3—lower than the industry average of 9.7. Amazon also denied preventing injured workers from seeking outside medical help, saying its onsite wellness centers are only present to provide first aid and “there’s no truth to the allegations that we use them to diagnose medical conditions that require more than first aid, to delay outside treatment, or to hide recordable injuries.”

Before the report was published on Sunday, Sanders called out Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos on X—whose net worth stands at $241.2 billion—saying: “Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has more money than could be spent in a million lifetimes. Why then does his company force workers to meet impossible quotas and treat them as disposable when they are injured? To Amazon, long-term pain and disability is just the cost of doing business.”

In its statement, Amazon accused Sanders of misleading the public and said: “We’re disappointed that Sen. Sanders’s has published a pre-conceived and one-sided narrative instead of a factual report…But, the false information in this report doesn’t change reality: Our safety progress is well documented, and we’re proud of it.”