AMAZON’S INTERNAL INJURY RECORDS EXPOSE THE TRUE TOLL OF ITS RELENTLESS DRIVE FOR SPEED
When Candice Dixon showed up for her first day of work at an Amazon warehouse in Eastvale, California, she stepped into a wonder of automation, efficiency and speed. Inside the sprawling four-story building in Southern California’s Inland Empire, hundreds of squat orange robots whizzed across the floor, carrying tall yellow racks.
As a stower, her job was to stand in a spot on the floor, like hundreds of others in that million-square-foot warehouse, and fill an unending parade of merchandise racks. Another worker, known as a “water spider,” would bring her boxes upon boxes of goods – jars of protein powder, inflatable unicorn pool floats, laptops, makeup, Himalayan sea salt, vibrators and plastic toy cars. She’d grab each item out of a box, scan it, lift it onto the rack and scan its new location. She’d use a stepladder to put things on the top of the rack. For heavy items – she remembers the cases of pet food in particular – she’d have to squat down to hoist them in, then pop back up to grab the next item. As soon as she’d filled a rack, she’d press a button and one robot would zip it away while another robot would bring a new one to fill.
The moment an Amazon customer clicked “place your order,” a robot would haul one of those racks to a picker, who would grab the right item for the order and send it on a series of long conveyors to a packer, who would stuff it in one of those familiar, smiling cardboard boxes.
The clock was always ticking on Amazon’s promised delivery time. Dixon had to scan a new item every 11 seconds to hit her quota, she said, and Amazon always knew when she didn’t.
Dixon’s scan rate – more than 300 items an hour, thousands of individual products a day – was being tracked constantly, the data flowing to managers in real time, then crunched by a proprietary software system called ADAPT. She knew, like the thousands of other workers there, that if she didn’t hit her target speed, she would be written up and, if she didn’t improve, she eventually would be fired.
Amazon’s cutting-edge technology, unrelenting surveillance and constant disciplinary write-ups pushed the Eastvale workers so hard that in the last holiday season, they hit a coveted target: They got a million packages out the door in 24 hours. Amazon handed out T-shirts celebrating their induction into the “Million Unit Club.”
But Dixon, 54, wasn’t around for that. She started the job in April 2018, and within two months, or nearly 100,000 items, the lifting had destroyed her back. An Amazon-approved doctor said she had bulging discs and diagnosed her with a back sprain, joint inflammation and chronic pain, determining that her injuries were 100% due to her job. She could no longer work at Amazon. Today, she can barely climb stairs. Walking her dog, doing the dishes, getting out of her chair – everything is painful. According to her medical records, her condition is unlikely to improve.
So this holiday shopping season, as Amazon’s ferocious speed is on full display, Dixon is at a standstill. Shetold Reveal in mid-October thather workers’ compensation settlement was about to run out. She was struggling to land a new job and worried she’d lose her home.
“I’m still too young to feel like I’m 90 years old,” Dixon said, sitting in the living room of her Corona, California, home, which was decorated with inspirational sayings (“You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have”). “I don’t even know how I’m going to make it in a couple of months.”
Amazon’s famous speed and technological innovation have driven the company’s massive global expansion and a valuation well over $800 billion. It’s also helped make Amazon the nation’s second-largest private employer behind Walmart and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, one of the richest humans on Earth. Now, an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found that the company’s obsession with speed has turned its warehouses into injury mills.
Reveal amassed internal injury records from 23 of the company’s 110 fulfillment centers nationwide. Taken together, the rate of serious injuries for those facilities was more than double the national average for the warehousing industry: 9.6 serious injuries per 100 full-time workers in 2018, compared with an industry average that year of 4.
While a handful of centers were at or below the industry average, Reveal found that some centers, such as the Eastvale warehouse, were especially dangerous. Dixon’s was one of 422 injuries recorded there last year. Its rate of serious injuries – those requiring job restrictions or days off work – was more than four times the industry average.
“According to Amazon’s own records, the risk of work injuries at fulfillment centers is alarmingly, unacceptably high,” said David Michaels, former head of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, now a professor at George Washington University’s public health school. “Amazon needs to take a hard look at the facilities where so many workers are being hurt and either redesign the work processes, replace the top managers or both, because serious injury rates this high should not be acceptable to any employer.”
Amazon officials declined repeated interview requests. Instead, company spokesperson Ashley Robinson provided a written response to some of Reveal’s questions. Robinson said Amazon’s 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. Read more…
Source: Revealnews.org
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