Senate report links Amazon quotas to high injuries

A Senate committee led by Senator Bernie Sanders claims Amazon’s strict production quotas contribute to high warehouse injury rates.

Internal company documents show Amazon’s health and safety staff advised easing quotas to reduce injuries, but executives rejected these recommendations, fearing negative impacts on company performance.

The report suggests that the online retail giant is fudging numbers, claiming that the committee found Amazon’s injury rates are almost twice the industry average. It further adds that the workers often exceed recommended limits, such as picking more than 266 items per hour, which increases injury risks.

The report also states that Amazon claims its injury rates are roughly average for large warehouses, but Sanders’s team states placing the e-commerce giant in the overall data set changes the calculation, driving up the average and making its injury rate look better. (Larger warehouses have a higher rate of injury.)

Amazon disputes these findings, claiming the analysis is fundamentally “flawed.”