Above photo: Protestors supporting Amazon workers in New York in 2021. Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images.
“It Kind of Feels Like Prison.”
More than 40% of Amazon workers get injured on the job, according to a new report. The company says they are “industrial athletes.”
More than four in 10 Amazon workers report being injured on the job, and the number increases to more than half for those who have been working for the company for more than five years, according to a report released Wednesday.
Despite Amazon touting the grit of its “industrial athletes,” these widespread and pervasive injuries have, according to the survey, resulted in almost seven in 10 workers having to take unpaid time off from their jobs in the last month because of their pain or exhaustion from working at the company.
The report offers stark data of how Amazon, as a mammoth presence in the warehousing industry and customer service, can effectively set an unhealthy bar for the pace of production for its workers, and in doing so, also can impact the expectations of production and pace at other companies and warehouses. The unrelenting speed of work and the way warehouse workers are monitored, according to the report, deeply affects employees’ physical and mental health — and in some cases, costs them their lives.
“Your movements are being tracked. And then you have the cameras, a lot of cameras all around you,” says Wendy Taylor, an Amazon warehouse employee in St. Peters, Missouri. “It kind of feels like prison.”
The report, authored by Beth Gutelius and Sanjay Pinto and published by the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Center for Urban Economic Development, interrogated the physical and mental health and working conditions for more than 1,400 frontline Amazon workers in warehouses across the nation.
More than half of workers surveyed told researchers they are burned out from work — and that percentage increases by 10% for workers who have been with Amazon for more than five years.
The report also explained that nearly 80% of Amazon workers surveyed, at some point in their tenure, felt a sense of being watched or monitored at work. Workers also felt that Amazon’s surveillance was at a level higher than previous jobs they’ve worked, and almost half of workers surveyed said the surveillance is “mainly used to control or discipline.”
Amazon monitors its workers through technology that tracks a worker’s “takt time,” which refers to the average time it takes a worker to scan and process an item, and “idle time,” which is the amount of time a worker is not scanning items, according to the report.
“They appear to be setting that pace at the pace of a robot as opposed to the pace of a human,” says Gutelius. “Even as we sort of see Amazon signaling that they care about health and safety, and claiming that these technological advancements are going to improve health and safety, that has not been the pattern thus far.”
Amazon has made headlines across the country for its grueling work conditions and production rates. Lawmakers in some states, such as New York and California for example, have successfully implemented legislation about efforts to address Amazon’s productivity quotas that can lead employees to skip much-needed water or bathroom breaks.
Labor and other reporters such as Alex Press, Luis Feliz Leon and Sarah Lazare have long warned and published about the conditions of workers at Amazon.
The 2022 Jacobin article “Working at Amazon Is Hazardous to Your Health,” that Press wrote, highlighted that “injury rates last year at Amazon warehouses were 20% higher than the already alarmingly high 2020 rate — and more than twice that of non-Amazon warehouses.”
“There is no magic fix for Amazon’s safety issues. No far-fetched AmaZen wellness booths on the shop floor or algorithmic management of workers’ bodies can substitute for slowing down the pace of work,” Press wrote. “The effect Amazon’s quotas have on workers’ health and well-being is not news — the company has known about the issue for years, and whatever it has done to address it has not worked, as evidenced by the 2021 injury numbers.”
Feliz Leon, a staff writer and organizer at Labor Notes, wrote an article for In These Times in 2022 titled “These Are The Workers Who Took on Amazon, and Won” that noted that “Nationwide, workers at Amazon suffered 27,700 injuries in 2020 and 38,300 in 2021. The company accounts for nearly half of all injuries in the warehouse industry — a rate of 6.8 per 100 workers.”