Federal health and safety regulators on Thursday announced a corporate-wide settlement with Amazon, bringing an end to cases involving accusations of safety violations at 10 warehouses in several states.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration had cited Amazon for exposing workers to elevated risks of joint and soft-tissue injuries. The agency had said the injury risks were tied to the pace at which workers lifted items, the body movements required to lift the items and the weight of the items.
Under the settlement, OSHA agreed to withdraw citations at nine of the 10 warehouses. At the 10th warehouse, which handles bulky products like televisions and furniture in Illinois, Amazon agreed to pay a fine of $145,000, up from the $15,625 the agency initially proposed.
The agency said the settlement committed Amazon to regularly assessing the injury risk faced by employees nationwide, and to putting in place pilot programs to address these risks as needed.
“This settlement requires Amazon to take action at the corporate level to ensure corporate-wide ergonomic requirements are effectively implemented at its warehouses,” said Seema Nanda, the Labor Department’s solicitor.
Amazon said that the settlement, in effect, directs the company to continue relying on its existing safety programs and to ensure that the programs are implemented across the entire company.
It said the only specific changes mandated by the settlement were at the warehouse that handles bulky items, where Amazon will have to designate an official to oversee safety issues stemming from how workers move on the job. The settlement does not appear to mandate any specific physical changes to warehouse equipment or layout.
“We appreciate OSHA’s willingness to consider all the facts and reach today’s agreement with us, and we look forward to continuing to work with them going forward,” Amazon said in a statement.
The company said it had made considerable progress in reducing injury rates since 2019, partly as a result of more than $1 billion it had spent on worker safety during that time. Amazon has said that its injury rates last year were below the industry average reflected in the most recent federal data.
Unions and other advocates for workers have long accused Amazon of setting production targets that require employees to work at speeds that create a high risk of injury, and of using methods for benchmarking injury rates that are misleading.
A report released this week by the majority staff of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee found that the company’s injury rates have been roughly double those of the rest of the industry for the last seven years. That report compared Amazon’s injury rates to those of all other warehouses, rather than to an industry average that includes Amazon’s data in the overall set and only includes large warehouses.
The committee staff report also unearthed two internal Amazon studies concluding that the speed at which employees lifted and moved items, typically in response to production quotas, likely led to higher injury rates.
Amazon executives rejected the internal studies’ recommendations that the company take steps to ease the pace of work at its warehouses, according to documents obtained by the Senate staff. The committee staff also found that Amazon executives worried that taking such steps could hurt productivity. The company later generated evidence that some of the proposed changes wouldn’t reduce injury rates.
Amazon has long denied that it has strict production quotas and said the Senate committee report was based on “out-of-date documents and unverifiable anecdotes.”
Thursday’s settlement does not affect an ongoing investigation by the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, which is examining whether Amazon engaged in a “fraudulent scheme designed to hide the true number of injuries to Amazon workers,” and whether the company misreported injury rates while trying to obtain loans.
Maureen Lynch Vogel, an Amazon spokeswoman, said, “We believe DOJ’s legal theory lacks merit and we’re cooperating fully with their investigation.”
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