A new report has indicated that Amazon executives rejected recommendations made internally that the company relax warehouse worker productivity rates to curb injuries.

The report from a US congressional committee released this week by the majority staff for the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, says that the e-commerce giant instead accepted “injuries to its workers as the cost of doing business,” reported Bloomberg.

Amazon came out with a strongly worded blog post refuting the allegation. Titled “Senator Bernie Sanders continues to mislead the American public on workplace safety at Amazon” it termed the report as “wrong on the facts and features selective” and one with “outdated information that lacks context” and which is also “isn’t grounded in reality.”

The 159-page Senate report says Amazon’s policies, including productivity targets, risk worker injury owing to exhaustion and repetitive stress.

As part of its investigation, the Senate committee interviewed 135 workers and reviewed 1,400 documents provided by workers. The company contributed 285 documents.

 

The report highlights two internal studies Amazon undertook to examine the causes of warehouse injuries after they surged in 2019.

The first, Project Soteria, began in 2020 and found a connection between worker speed and injuries, and recommended pausing speed-related discipline and adding more downtime to workers’ schedules.

Two years into the company’s investigation, Amazon’s senior safety executive asked another team to review the Soteria team’s work.

The probe took issue with Soteria’s methodology and recommended increasing the frequency of safety meetings.

“Soteria’s methodology and hypotheses were evaluated by expert economists at Amazon, and they determined that the project was flawed and inaccurate. Nonetheless, Sen. Sanders and his staff chose to rely on the debunked Soteria analysis because it fits the false narrative he wanted to build,” said Amazon in its rebuttal to the report.

Amazon also highlighted Washington state Bureau of Industrial Appeals judge’s dismissal earlier this year of workplace safety citations against the company.

“After six weeks of testimony from employees, ergonomists, and other experts, a Washington judge ruled in Amazon’s favour and vacated the citations issued to Amazon by the Washington Department of Labor and Industries (L&I), including one that alleged we “willfully” put employees at risk from ergonomic hazards. In addition to hearing testimony on why Soteria was flawed and invalid, the judge ruled that L&I did not establish that pace of work at Amazon was hazardous. The judge’s decision was also upheld on appeal,” added Amazon.

 

The report describes a second initiative, called Project Elderwand, which began around 2021 and sought to understand how workers’ repeated movements over 10- or 12-hour shifts might affect their risk of developing soft-tissue musculoskeletal disorders. It found that for the workers who grab items from Amazon’s robotic storage units, the likelihood of back injuries increased alongside the number of items picked during a shift.

The Elderwand team proposed enforcing more work breaks, an initiative that was tested in a small pilot program to avoid disruptions to Amazon’s productivity, the report said. The company also rejected those findings.

“That pursuit of continuous improvement led us to pilot Project Elderwand to understand whether forced breaks reduced pace of work and affected the rate of musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). In sum, the pilot showed that the intervention was ineffective,” noted Amazon.