Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers are injured far more often on the job than employees of competitors like Walmart and UPS, according to a new study.
In 2020, 5.9 out of every 100 Amazon warehouse workers were victims of “serious injuries” that required them to either miss work or be placed on light duty. By comparison, that figure was 2.6 for Amazon competitor Walmart and 4.0 for warehouse workers overall, according to the report by the Strategic Organizing Center.
In total, workers at the Jeff Bezos-run company logged more than 27,000 injuries last year, according to the report, which used OSHA data.
“Amazon’s obsession with speed has come at a huge cost to its workers,” wrote the Strategic Organizing Center, which is a coalition of large labor unions including the Service Employees International Union and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. “It’s time to hold Amazon accountable for the dangerous working conditions it has created and continues to ignore.”
Amazon workers have spoken up about workplace injury rates for years. In 2019, over a hundred Staten Island Amazon warehouse workers protested the company’s workplace conditions, accusing Amazon of treating workplace safety as a “secondary concern.” Injury rates were also a
