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Amazon warehouse injuries '80% higher' than competitors, report claims
- offtop5 5y ago>union-backed study In other words an overtly bias source.
- wayoutthere 5y agoUh, this is exactly why unions exist. Because you sure as hell can’t trust the company to give a shit about worker safety. It’s a cost center to them.
- offtop5 5y agoI wouldn't trust a study like this unless it comes out of a university, or a government agency like OSHA. The unions just lost a major fight to try and get into Amazon's warehouses, they have every interest in disparaging Amazon.
- hezag 5y ago"Our findings are based on data that Amazon and other employers provided to OSHA annually from 2017 to 2020 within the General Warehouse and Storage industry (NAICS: 493110) and the last mile delivery industries (NAICS 492110 & 492210). ... All employers are legally required to submit annual injury and illness reports to OSHA for any warehouse, delivery, grocery, or wholesale trade facility with 20 or more employees annually, so these records should include every significantly-sized facility in Amazon’s US logistics network." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27371759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27371759
- _red 5y agoYou can't have allow millions of "undocumented" workers stream across the border and expect to have high wages & strong worker rights... Amazon knows this, which is why they direct their newspaper to report on the issue as it does. Its just sad the young and gullible don't see it for what it is...
- ceejayoz 5y agoThat's shoving a square peg into a round hole. Amazon's competitors have the same labor pool for their warehouses, so it can hardly explain an 80% difference in injuries.
- _red 5y agoThe solution is simple then: Amazon should allow Walmart employees to vote on Union issues...
- munk-a 5y agoIf Amazon and Walmart warehouse workers want to form a joint union there is absolutely nothing stopping them and it'd probably be a pretty good move for worker's rights. But, while Amazon is clearly anti-union, Walmart hates them vehemently.
- WalterBright 5y agoSure, the company has selfish incentives like that. But the union has selfish incentives, too. Unions are not disinterested, unbiased parties.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tyingq 5y agoIt seems to be based on injury rate data submitted to OSHA in three categories ("Lost Time", "Light Duty", "Other"). That's fairly simplistic, so I'm not seeing where the union had opportunities to present the data in an unfair way. The comparison to WalMart, for example, seems straightforward. I do agree that some of the charts based on surveying workers might be biased, but that's the least interesting numbers in the report.
- jodrellblank 5y agoThis pattern of comment includes accusing someone of “being bias” (instead of “biased”) and implies that noticing bias is somehow a debate winning move. Bias is a thing, having bias means you are biased towards one position or away from another. You should be biased in many ways - e.g. preferring human survival to human extinction would be a reasonable bias. Preferring the word of your friend to the word of a stranger, another.
- offtop5 5y agoOkay, if I send you a study from buygold.net predicting the imminent collapse of the US dollar, wouldn't you be a little skeptical ?
- jodrellblank 5y agoI wouldn’t say “they are bias” as if that was a dismissal all by itself. Or an interesting comment by itself. Everyone is biasED. People who believe in covid and medicine have a bias towards promoting vaccines, do you think that makes them wrong?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- readflaggedcomm 5y agoThe BBC used the term "study" as if to imply that, but the SOC did not. It's a standard analysis or report, like you'd find in a trade or policy publication.
- c0v1dr3al 5y agoDirect link to FOIA Fauci emails: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20793561/leopold-nih-foia-anthony-fauci-emails.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20793561/leopold-... Arrest Fauci!
- logicslave 5y agoI work for Amazon as an SDE, in alot of cases working here is fine, but there are teams with absolutely barbaric management practices.
- murph-almighty 5y agoAre you working in a warehouse? If not you've missed the point of the piece.
- munk-a 5y agoIf you've got good stories please do share them - this article is about warehouse workers specifically but SDEs at amazon are generally assumed to have exceedingly cushy jobs - please do shatter that conception if you can.
- dominotw 5y ago> If you've got good stories please do share them 60% of stories on teamblind these days seems to be about how amazon sucks for engineering.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoIs this to signal the company culture? Have you been to the warehouses or talked to workers there?
- omosubi 5y agoAnyone have a link to the study? i don't see it in the article. It's a shame that what could be a long term viable job for many people has turned into temp-gig where the only path to success is being an "industrial athlete." If only Amazon actually cared about improving the down and out towns and cities it entered.
- malwarebytess 5y agohttps://thesoc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/PrimedForPain.pdf https://thesoc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/PrimedForPain.... Also related: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/01/amazon-osha-injury-rate/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/01/amazon-...
- dheera 5y agoCan some billionaire please buy a ton of AMZN stock and redistribute the gains to injured and mistreated Amazon workers?
- munk-a 5y agoHrm - what if the US Government were to be that billionaire - each year it'd collect a portion of Amazon's earnings (maybe as direct cash instead of stock) and redistribute that to workers. This might even be considered some kind of action to support the well being of the society at large. /s I think the OP was being pretty sarcastic but I absolutely dislike solution propositions that rely on billionaires being charitable. If it's a thing that should happen don't rely on good-will - tax people and fund it.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoExactly. It goes to my advice to beggars and solicitors in-front of wealthy retailers: the rich are stingier than most, on average; if they want to collect more money, they need to go to the poor part of town. Billionaires will almost never be charitable except to rehab their image and legacy. Furthermore, relying on a patchwork of charities for social welfare isn't comprehensive enough to meet the needs of the less well-off. Governments also have more capital and individual govt workers aren't necessarily personally-invested in commercial interests (unless they're strategic / MIC). If the people could/would/and should gain control of the government, it might be possible to hostilely-takeover some key businesses with poor labor and abysmal pay records in order to turn them into mostly co-ops to raise workers' up to livable wages.
- WalterBright 5y agoOn the other hand, people with money become the target of every charity, every entrepreneur, every solicitor with a sob story, and every scam artist attempting to carve off a piece of that. In addition they get assaulted by waves of paparazzi, star-struck groupies, and people wanting to be their special friend. Naturally, purely out of self-defense, they try to shield themselves from this and are highly skeptical of any unsolicited charity pitches. That does not mean they don't have the same charitable impulses as anyone else. They just go about it differently, like going to charity $$$ per plate dinners, etc.
- jefftk 5y agoLooks like the report (not linked in the article) is https://thesoc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/PrimedForPain.pdf https://thesoc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/PrimedForPain.... "Our findings are based on data that Amazon and other employers provided to OSHA annually from 2017 to 2020 within the General Warehouse and Storage industry (NAICS: 493110) and the last mile delivery industries (NAICS 492110 & 492210). ... All employers are legally required to submit annual injury and illness reports to OSHA for any warehouse, delivery, grocery, or wholesale trade facility with 20 or more employees annually, so these records should include every significantly-sized facility in Amazon’s US logistics network."
- slownews45 5y agoI can tell you one thing. At least at smaller warehouses under-reporting of injuries is common. So whatever statistics are being used I'd be careful with. One trick I heard about. If you can get the employee count up, you can get your reported injury rates down. Ie, two warehouses, both doing 1 injury per 10,000 packages shipped. If one has double the employee count it can make some of the reported injury rates go lower. If you ever see 5 guys watching one guy dig a hole - that employer is going to have great injury rate reporting even if the guy actually digging a hole gets injured just as often as anyone else digging a hole. Not sure if they figured out ways of mixing in management / white color jobs into the warehouse numbers. But I'm surprised no one discusses underreporting at smaller warehouses. And comparing to retail workers at walmart also seems a bit weird?
- makomk 5y agoThe trouble is that there's a really obvious media bias - a report showing that Amazon warehouse injuries were 80% lower definitely wouldn't get this kind of credulous media treatment, if anyone bothered publishing it in the first place, and this has obvious effects on everyone's perceptions.
- WalterBright 5y agoWe see that in another clickbait article today on "brutal" Amazon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27370589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27370589 I'm getting more and more skeptical of the news I read.
- dariusj18 5y agoGood, remain skeptical, it's important.
- jdlshore 5y agoRelated: Studies of aviation and construction have found that as incident rates decline, fatalities increase: "The underreporting that results from the implementation of such safety programs really means that you are shooting yourself in the foot. Your organization does not have a great safety culture because it has low numbers of incidents. In fact, the opposite is true. This has been shown in various industries already. A study of Finnish construction and manufacturing from 1977 to 1991, for example, showed a strong correlation between incident rate and fatalities, but reversed (r = –.82, p<0.001). In other words, the fewer incidents a construction site reported, the higher its fatality rate was (see Figure 7.1)." —The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error', chapter 7
- slownews45 5y agoI took a look at the study. Am I reading this right. they went to 416K FTE's from 242K FTE's and lost time cases and lost time days went down? Case rate from 0.049 to 0.026? Lost time days 2.6 to 1.2? These are pretty striking improvements % wise for a big operation. Just interesting to see the headlines that get written! You could also write a headline, Amazon cuts lost time cases and lost time days rates in half in one year.
- bryan_w 5y agoReally shows you how you can't really trust most tech reporting these days.
- j_walter 5y agoThis doesn't necessarily mean that it's really 80% higher, just that the reports show it's 80% higher. When a company has a really strong safety attitude it leads to more reporting of minor issues which can look worse, but actually tend to make the place safer.
- Retric 5y agoIn theory perhaps, but in practice Amazon simply has horrible safety practices. The push older workers to meet objectives their not fit enough to maintain which directly results in a lot of significant back and other injuries. Combined with an unsafe environment and it’s simply an injury factory.
- WalterBright 5y agoBack injury statistics tend to be highly unreliable, as there is no objective test as to whether back pain is real or not. Hence a back injury is the go-to malady for malingering. Yes, I've injured my back many times, I'm recovering right now from one. A significant part of my exercise program is trying to inure myself against further incidents. I'm not denying the existence of back injury and pain. I was in a car accident years ago. I was coached in how to fake a neck injury to get a big settlement by several people who came to help, including a lawyer. The term they used was "jackpot". I didn't ask for the coaching, and didn't do it.
- j_walter 5y agoDo you have anything to back up these claims? Easy to claim that they have "horrible safety practices" and "are an injury factory". Also, you can't really say they push order workers...they simply push all workers to be similarly productive. You can claim that's unfair, but to make a different productivity goal for older works would be discrimination and illegal. I know at my company we had a huge push for safety improvements and it came from asking people to report anything...even the slightest twinge of pain was reported and we hired a physical therapist to be onsite to treat anyone that might have early warning signs before they become a major problem.
- logicalmonster 5y ago
- legitster 5y agoThe study is based on self-reported data to OSHA. Obviously that could make the data suspect. But more broadly I don't think we want to be punishing companies for reporting their data accurately and incentivize industry to hide injuries more.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoUhhh... what competitors at that scale? Walmart? Wayfair? Ingram-Micro? Maybe Target?
- bluedino 5y agoAt every factory or warehouse I've worked in, the cause of almost every injury/accident was an employee not following the rules when it came to safety.
- paxys 5y agoIn most of these warehouses I bet the employee also had a quota which couldn't be physically met without flouting some safety rules.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoIn the blue collar jobs I've worked, there was always a lot of pressure from management to do everything faster. They won't outright tell you to violate policy, of course, but if you don't meet their expectations they'll find someone who will.
- Broken_Hippo 5y agoIn most places I've worked in, you've both been told the safety rules and then encouraged to do things in ways that aren't safe. The most common way of doing this is to not give employees enough time to actually do the safety stuff. If you get caught, well... OF course you got hurt, you weren't following the safety rules. Were you on drugs?
- me_me_me 5y agoWe at least they have cry booths, so you can have some privacy when you are injured.