Amazon Is Still a Health and Safety Nightmare for Workers
Amazon claims it has markedly improved workplace safety at its notoriously dangerous warehouses in recent years. A closer look at the data for the corporation’s workplaces in the US and Canada shows Amazon still boasts abysmal injury rates.
At Amazon warehouses, production rates and injury rates are intimately linked. (Nathan Stirk / Getty Images)
“We are going to be Earth’s best employer and Earth’s safest place to work.” — Jeff Bezos, April 2021
At the end of March 2021, a unionization drive in Bessemer, Alabama, by the Retail Workers (RWDSU) — one of the earliest attempts to organize an Amazon fulfillment center — failed to get the requisite numbers for certification. The campaign nevertheless highlighted workers’ frustrations over health and safety and created anxieties among Amazon executives over future unionization drives.
That apprehension was manifested a few weeks later. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, was stepping down as formal head of Amazon (though remaining as executive chairman) and felt compelled, in his “farewell” letter to shareholders, to react to the growing criticisms of Amazon’s treatment of its workers. Then the world’s richest person, Bezos asserted that Amazon “cared deeply for our hourly employees, and we’re proud of the work environment we’ve created.”
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