Nuked Hey everyone! Nuked here. I’m here to talk about a recent citation issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) against Amazon for safety violations in three of their warehouses.
The citation comes with proposed penalties of $60,269, which may seem like a drop in the bucket for a company that recorded over $127 billion in sales during the third quarter of 2022. However, this is relatively high compared to many of the fines Amazon has faced from OSHA before.
According to OSHA, Amazon exposed workers to ergonomic hazards which put them at a high risk for lower back injuries and other musculoskeletal disorders. Doug Parker, assistant secretary for Occupational Safety and Health, blames the pace that Amazon sets for its warehouse employees, saying that “each of these inspections found work processes that were designed for speed but not safety.”
Amazon has faced this criticism for years from OSHA and other advocacy groups such as The Strategic Organizing Center. A 2019 report from Buzzfeed and ProPublica accused the company of trading safety for speed in its delivery network. Daniel Olayiwola, an Amazon warehouse worker in San Antonio said that “OSHA’s findings are a reflection of the experience of Amazon workers like me in warehouses all over the country.”
Amazon disagrees with OSHA’s allegations and issued a statement saying that “we take the safety and health of our employees very seriously” and that they intend to appeal. They also cite an improvement in injury rates between 2019 and 2021 as evidence that they are making strides towards worker safety.
In addition to the current citation, OSHA also cited Amazon last year for 14 record-keeping violations with proposed fines of around $29,008. This was part of the same investigation as the current citation. The regulator is also conducting investigations at three other Amazon warehouses in Aurora, Colorado, Nampa, Idaho, and Castleton, New York.
