Amazon.com Inc. leaders rejected internal recommendations that the company relax warehouse worker productivity rates to curb injuries, according to a report from a congressional committee.
The company, the second largest private US employer behind Walmart Inc., contends that it has made worker safety a priority.published early Monday rejects the report’s contentions and accuses the committee’s chair, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, of misleading the American public.says Amazon’s policies, including productivity targets, risk worker injury owing to exhaustion and repetitive stress.
The study found a connection between worker speed and injuries, echoing a similar finding made by Washington state workplace regulators, and recommended pausing speed-related discipline and adding more downtime to workers’ schedules. “There is a clear through line in the evidence: Even when Amazon was presented with an analysis generated by its own internal teams concluding that higher speed can increase the risk of injuries, it chose to ignore that analysis and instead to search for alternative explanations that were more convenient and that favoured the company’s bottom line,” the report said.
The company contributed 285 documents, according to the report, which accuses Amazon of only limited cooperation. The report describes a second initiative, called Project Elderwand, which began around 2021 and sought to understand how workers’ repeated movements over 10- or 12-hour shifts might effect their risk of developing soft-tissue musculoskeletal disorders.