Syed Imran Haider 
The Senate has been conducting an investigation into the working conditions of Amazon’s warehouse.
Its preliminary results have revealed that Amazon’s Prime Day event is one of the ‘major’ causes of injuries of the workers. It is a discount blitz that kicked off on Tuesday and would last for 48 hours.
The Results
The interim results were released by the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee on Tuesday.
The investigation has been happening for the last year. The working conditions of Amazon’s warehouse have been the focus, just as the company is holding its annual Prime Day deals event.
Amazon shared internal data with the committee related to Prime Day 2019. The data highlighted its total injury rate.
This included the ones that the company does not have to disclose to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
The report said that according to Amazon, there were 45 injuries for every 100 workers. This is almost half of the warehouse workers of the company.
Senator Bernie Sanders is chair of the HELP committee. He said that Amazon considered its workers disposable objects.
He added that the company did not care about their wellbeing and safety. He went on to say that this could not continue.
The Data
The report highlighted that Amazon’s internal data showed that its warehouses are short on staff during the holiday shopping seasons and Prime Day.
According to the report, the fact that the warehouses are understaffed endangers other workers. The ones who manage to increase the volume without additional support are at risk.
There was an internal document that Amazon shared, which was titled ‘2021 Prime Day Lessons Learned’.
The report revealed that this document showed Amazon had only managed to achieve 71.2% of its hiring target.
This was between May and June of the year and had ended in the same week as the Prime Day event that year.
Kelly Nantel, a spokesperson for Amazon, said that the report did not highlight the progress the company had made.
The Response
Nantel said that the report had drawn inaccurate and sweeping conclusions that were based on unverified anecdotes.
She added that the documents cited in the report were several years old and included faulty analysis and factual errors.
She said that the statement that they did not have adequate staff during busy shopping periods was false.
Nantel revealed that there had been a 28% reduction in the incident rate since 2019 for anything that needs more than basic first aid.
There was also a 75% reduction in the lost time incident rate. This refers to when employees have to miss more than a day of work due to serious injuries.
In recent years, there has been a lot of scrutiny directed towards Amazon because of its workplace injury record. Critics have also lambasted the company for its treatment of delivery and warehouse.
Federal regulators have also cited the company for safety violations. The US Department of Justice is also probing whether the company reports workers’ injuries accurately or not.
The US Attorney’s Office and OSHA are also probing conditions at different warehouses of the company.
