Prime Day Continues to Be Dangerous for Amazon’s Workforce ⇥ theregister.com

Matthew Connatser, the Register:

Authored by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) for the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, the investigative report [PDF] claimed Amazon’s annual Prime Day sale is “a major cause of injuries for the warehouse workers who make it possible.”

[…]

The study said the data showed that Amazon’s overall injury rate was above 30 percent for nearly every single week of 2019. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when this data was compiled, Amazon’s injury rate hovered between 15 and 25 percent, it added.

On Prime Day 2019 and in the first two weeks of December, injury rates climbed to over forty percent. But that was five years ago, and it is strange to me the HELP Committee report is not built around more recent data.

In May, the Strategic Organizing Center published its own report including data from 2023:

Three years after Amazon pledged to make the company “Earth’s Safest Place to Work” by cutting its total injury rate in half by 2025, a new analysis from the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC) shows the retail giant has reduced its overall injury rate by less than two percent. Drawing on newly released data, SOC also finds that injury levels at Amazon warehouses increased by as much as 59 percent during the company’s 2023 peak operational periods, including Prime Day and Cyber Monday.

Like the government report, the SOC says the injury rate at Amazon warehouses is double that of the industry average. It also says the injury rate in 2020 did not contain the Prime Day peak in the summer — as you can also see in the HELP report — because Amazon moved Prime Day to October.