"Ruthless Quotas at Amazon Are Maiming Employees", 25 November 2019

...an investigation by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting has found that...[Amazon's] obsession with speed has turned its warehouses into injury mills...

...the rate of serious injuries...was more than double the national average for the warehousing industry...

... a company spokesperson, Ashley Robinson...said...injury rates are high because it’s aggressive about recording worker injuries and cautious about allowing injured workers to return to work before they’re ready....

...the problems...go far beyond common sprains, strains and repetitive stress injuries. When a gas leak inundated the Eastvale warehouse...managers wouldn’t slow down, several workers said...They were told that they’d have to use personal time off if they wanted to leave...

...When a maintenance worker was crushed to death by a forklift there, state officials in Indiana, which then was jockeying for Amazon’s second headquarters, sided with the company over their own investigator...

...Amazon’s busiest season...begins with the run-up to Black Friday...This year, Amazon has a new promise: free one-day delivery for Prime members...Employees face...mandatory 12-hour shifts, and warehouses are crammed with seasonal workers unaccustomed to the grind...

...The company’s 2018 logs show that weekly injury counts spiked at...Cyber Monday and Prime Day...

Robinson...said total injuries...go up...because the company brings on more workers then. [He said] the rate of injuries historically has stayed steady, or even decreased, at peak times...

...injury records and interviews with...former Amazon safety managers suggest the introduction of the robots led to even more injuries. Of the records Reveal obtained, most of the warehouses with the highest rates of injury deployed robots...

...[Amazon] said Amazon doesn’t launch new buildings until they are “ready and safe for employees.”...

...Reveal filed multiple requests to OSHA for injury records from Amazon facilities in more than a dozen states, many of which were released with critical information redacted...

... Reveal reached out to Amazon warehouse...and explained how to request records for their worksite...In at least a dozen cases, Amazon either ignored these employee requests or provided only partial records, in apparent violation of federal regulations...[Amazon] said that [they] never had a policy for underreporting injuries but that in 2016, it implemented a policy change after recognizing the challenge of ensuring “consistency and accuracy.”...