A coalition of U.S. labor unions has condemned Amazon.com Inc. saying the company's need for speed at warehouses leads to workers being injured.
Workers at Amazon warehouses are injured more often and more severely than those at retail companies like Walmart Inc., according to the Strategic Organizing Center in a report based on data provided to the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.
"The company's obsession with speed has come at a huge cost for Amazon's workforce," the center formed by labor unions said.
Amazon makes a priority of getting orders to customers in just one or two days. Meanwhile, online shopping has soared during the pandemic.
Amazon has invested heavily in workplace health and safety, implementing new technologies, processes and precautions to reduce risk of injuries, representative Kelly Nantel told Agence France-Presse Wednesday.
"While any incident is one too many, we are continuously learning and seeing improvements through ergonomics programs, guided exercises at employees' workstations, mechanical assistance equipment, workstation setup and design, and forklift telematics and guardrails - to name a few," Nantel said.
Amazon's warehouse workers and delivery drivers at the company experience "serious injuries" twice as often as those working elsewhere, according to the study.
The center said about 5.9 out of every 100 Amazon workers are victims of serious injuries that result in them missing work or being placed on light duty. This is roughly twice that of the 2.6 workers for Walmart and significantly higher than the 4.0 national average.
Based on administration data, more than 27,000 injuries were reported at the Jeff Bezos-run company each year.
"Amazon's obsession with speed has come at a huge cost to its workers. It's time to hold Amazon accountable for the dangerous working conditions it has created and continues to ignore," the report said.
Over the past few years, protests against Amazon's poor workplace safety practices have increased. In 2019, over a hundred Staten Island Amazon warehouse workers marched outside one of the company's facilities, protesting its workplace conditions.
Unions have accused the company of treating workplace safety as a "secondary concern" to profit. The company has also been accused of placing extremely tight deadlines and quotas, which have forced some workers to forego bathroom breaks - with some taking to urinating in water bottles.
The report says workers outside of Amazon's warehouses are also being injured abnormally frequently. According to the report, about 9.7 out of every 100 delivery drivers at the company were seriously injured on the job last year. The figure is significantly higher when compared to other logistics companies such as UPS, which had reported about 6.5 injuries out of every 100 workers over the same period.
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