Source: The Atlantic
When Candice Dixon showed up for her first day of work at an Amazon warehouse in Eastvale, California, she stepped into a wonder of automation, efficiency, and speed. Inside the sprawling four-story building in Southern Californiaās Inland Empire, hundreds of squat orange robots whizzed across the floor, carrying tall yellow racks.
As a stower, her job was to stand in a spot on the floor, like hundreds of others in that million-square-foot warehouse, and fill an unending parade of merchandise racks. Another worker, known as a āwater spider,ā would bring her boxes upon boxes of goodsājars of protein powder, inflatable unicorn pool floats, laptops, makeup, Himalayan sea salt, vibrators, plastic toy cars. Sheād grab each item out of a box, scan it, lift it onto the rack, and scan its new location. Sheād use a stepladder to put things on the top of the rack. For heavy itemsāshe remembers the cases of pet food in particularāsheād have to squat down to hoist them in, then pop back up to grab the next item. As soon as sheād filled a rack, sheād press a button, and one robot would zip it away while another robot would bring a new one to fill.
The moment an Amazon customer clicked āplace your order,ā a robot would haul one of those racks to a picker, who would grab the right item for the order and send it on a series of long conveyors to a packer, who would stuff it in one of those familiar, smiling cardboard boxes.
The clock was always ticking on Amazonās promised delivery time. Dixon had to scan a new item every 11 seconds to hit her quota, she said, and Amazon always knew when she didnāt.
Dixonās scan rateāmore than 300 items an hour, thousands of individual products a dayāwas being tracked constantly, the data flowing to managers in real time, then crunched by a proprietary software system called ADAPT. She knew, like the thousands of other workers there, that if she didnāt hit her target speed, she would be written up, and if she didnāt improve, she eventually would be fired.
Amazonās cutting-edge technology, unrelenting surveillance, and constant disciplinary write-ups pushed the Eastvale workers so hard that in the last holiday season, they hit a coveted target: They got a million packages out the door in 24 hours. Amazon handed out T-shirts celebrating their induction into the āMillion Unit Club.ā
Amazonās famous speed and technological innovation have driven the companyās massive global expansion and a valuation well over $800 billion. Itās also helped make Amazon the nationās second-largest private employer behind Walmart, and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, one of the richest humans on Earth. Now an investigation by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting has found that the companyās obsession with speed has turned its warehouses into injury mills.
Reveal amassed internal injury records from 23 of the companyās 110 fulfillment centers nationwide. Taken together, the rate of serious injuries for those facilities was more than double the national average for the warehousing industry: 9.6 serious injuries per 100 full-time workers in 2018, compared with an industry average that year of 4.
While a handful of centers were at or below the industry average, Reveal found that some centers, such as the Eastvale warehouse, were especially dangerous. Dixonās was one of 422 injuries recorded there last year. Its rate of serious injuriesāthose requiring job restrictions or days off workāwas more than four times the industry average.
āWe know that by making a conservative choice to not place an injured associate back into a job, we are elevating restricted and lost time rates as a company, but with the intent to benefit the associate,ā Robinson wrote.
Many workers said that was not their experience. They spoke with outrage about having been cast aside as damaged goods or sent back to jobs that injured them further. Dixon said she had doctor orders not to pull or lift heavy objects and to alternate between sitting and standing, but she wasnāt given a chair and heavy boxes kept coming her way.
Then, if they got hurt, they would lose their jobs anyway. Even some workers who loved the pace, camaraderie, and compensation at Amazonās fulfillment centers told Reveal that they were quickly replaced as soon as their bodies broke down.
The problems Reveal uncovered go far beyond common sprains, strains, and repetitive stress injuries. When a gas leak inundated the Eastvale warehouse where Dixon used to work, managers wouldnāt slow down, several workers said, even though they were dizzy and vomiting. They were told that theyād have to use personal time off if they wanted to leave.
And when disaster struck at one Indiana warehouse, Amazonās economic might may have helped the company evade accountability. When a maintenance worker was crushed to death by a forklift there, state officials in Indiana, which then was jockeying for Amazonās second headquarters, sided with the company over their own investigator. āWhen you order something from Amazon and youāve worked inside Amazon, you wonder, āHey, is ordering my package going to be the demise of somebody?āā said one former safety manager, who had worked at multiple Amazon facilities.
The root of Amazonās success appears to be the root of its injury problem, too: the blistering pace of delivering packages to its customers.
Amazonās busiest season, which the company calls āpeak,ā begins with the run-up to Black Friday. Amazon said it shipped Prime members more than a billion items last holiday season. This year, Amazon has a new promise: free one-day delivery for Prime members.
Itās also crunch time for the human body. Employees face the exhaustion of mandatory 12-hour shifts, and warehouses are crammed with seasonal workers unaccustomed to the grind. The companyās 2018 logs show that weekly injury counts spiked at two distinct moments when Amazon offered special deals: Cyber Monday and Prime Day.
āIt incentivizes you to be a heartless son of a bitch,ā said a former senior operations manager who had leadership roles at multiple facilities.
The Amazon tenure of Parker Knight, a disabled veteran who worked at the Troutdale, Oregon, warehouse this year, shows the ruthless precision of Amazonās system. Knight had been allowed to work shorter shifts after he sustained back and ankle injuries at the warehouse, but ADAPT didnāt spare him. Knight was written up three times in May for missing his quota.
The expectations were precise. He had to pick 385 small items or 350 medium items each hour. One week, he was hitting 98.45 percent of his expected rate, but that wasnāt good enough. That 1.55 percent speed shortfall earned him his final written warningāthe last one before termination.
āYou are expected to meet 100 percent of the productivity performance expectation,ā the warning reads. Days later, the company informed him he was being fired because of an earlier confrontation over workersā-compensation paperwork.
Robinson said Amazon has performance expectations ālike most companies.ā
āWe measure actual performance against those expectations,ā she said. āAssociate performance is measured and evaluated over a long period of timeāat least six weeksāas we know a variety of things could impact the ability to meet expectations in any given day or hour.ā
The companyās aggressive production demands have overwhelmed its safety teamsā efforts to protect workers, according to five former Amazon safety managers, who oversaw safety at fulfillment centers around the country and spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation.
One of them, a former senior safety manager, said itās well known internally that the injury rates are too high, but thereās no way Amazon will slow down. āItās not a conversation that can be had,ā the former manager said. āWeāre never going to fix safety at Amazon, because weāre never going to fix what the real issue is.ā
Amazon is fond of showing off its industry-changing innovation: The fleets of robots, it claims, not only speed up production; they also make employeesā jobs easier and safer. Instead of having to walk miles of warehouse floor every day, pickers stand in one spot as robots come to them.
But injury records and interviews with three of the former Amazon safety managers suggest the introduction of the robots led to even more injuries. Of the records Reveal obtained, most of the warehouses with the highest rates of injury deployed robots. One robotic facility in Kent, Washingtonāwhich a senior operations manager boasted was āthe flagship of fulfillment,ā as one of the few centers in 2016 to ship a million packages in a dayālogged 292 serious injuries last year, for a rate of about 13 serious injuries per 100 workers.
The Oregon facility where Knight worked opened with robotics in August 2018 and had the highest serious-injury rate Reveal found: nearly 26 per 100 employees, more than six times the industry average.
New warehouses sometimes are rushed to open before theyāre ready, said two of the former safety managers, leading management to skimp on training and start operations without full safety teams in place.
Robinson declined to comment on the elevated injury rates at robotic warehouses. But she said Amazon doesnāt launch new buildings until they are āready and safe for employees.ā
Injury records are supposed to be one way of holding companies accountable for their safety culture. The U.S. Department of Labor under the Obama administration proposed posting them online, but under President Donald Trump, the agency has reversed course and also fought public–records requests. And Amazon has resisted making its own safety records public.
Reveal filed multiple requests to OSHA for injury records from Amazon facilities in more than a dozen states, many of which were released with critical information redacted; Reveal has filed suit to challenge those redactions.
In at least a dozen cases, Amazon either ignored these employee requests or provided only partial records, in apparent violation of federal regulations. Amazon told some workers that they were entitled only to the records for the time period they worked there; an OSHA spokesperson, Kimberly Darby, said thatās incorrect. And when Amazon did provide records, warehouse managers used identical language to call them confidential and request they be kept secret. Yet OSHA guidance says, and Darby confirmed, that employers are not allowed to restrict workers from sharing the records. Some workers said they felt intimidated by the notice, fearing they might get sued by Amazon for sharing the records with a news organization.
Several years ago, according to three of the former safety managers, Amazon had a policy for systematically hiding injuries. A former safety specialist in a warehouse confirmed their account. He said higher-ups instructed him to come up with justifications for not recording injuries that should have been counted by law.
āAmazon took the decision to shift to a fully transparent reporting model as we would rather over-report and lead in this space for our associatesā safety than optimize for optics,ā she said.
The former senior safety manager said some warehouse managers still found ways to avoid directing workers to the on-site health clinicāsuch as sending them to the break room insteadāso their injuries wouldnāt get recorded. A few workers said supervisors would get upset if they reported injuries or sought medical treatment.
The logs Reveal obtained are scattered with lacerations and concussions and fractures, but most of the injuries are labeled as sprains and strains. The pain from these injuries can be debilitating. About a third of the injured workers had to take off more than a month to recover.
A handful of the injuries were far worse.
In September 2017, Amazon announced a search for a second headquarters, saying it would invest more than $5 billion and bring as many as 50,000 jobs to whichever city won the sweepstakes.
Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb got the news while on a trip to Japan. He returned home on a Friday night and spent the weekend in deliberations. On Monday, he announced his state would join the bidding war. He put the Indiana Economic Development Corporation in charge of putting together a package of local and state incentives.
āWe are doing what Amazon has asked us to do: coordinating efforts with all interested regions of the state to put our best bid forward,ā he said in the statement.
He had tough competition. Arlington, Virginia, offered $550 million in cash and a helipad. Atlanta dreamed up an exclusive airport lounge with free parking for Amazon executives. Marylandās Montgomery County dangled $6.5 billion in tax incentives.
The efforts of Indiana state officials to vie for Amazonās interest were about to intersect with the life of one local Amazon employee, 59-year-old Phillip Lee Terry.
Terry had been at Amazon for about two years. He started as a picker in a Plainfield fulfillment center, then moved to the maintenance department. He had a background in an unrelated fieldāmarketingābut quickly took on the task of handling complicated industrial equipment.
Terry made a surprisingly strong impact on his co-workers, even at a big, busy warehouse. Heād chat them up and make them laugh whenever he could, said Jennie Miller, who worked picking orders with Terry.
His body lay there for nearly two hours before a co-worker noticed the pool of blood.
The next day, a safety inspector with Indiana OSHA headed to Amazon to investigate.
Safety was the family business for John Stallone. His father had worked his way up to become director of enforcement for the Alaska state branch of OSHA. Years ago, when Stallone joined the U.S. Air Force and served in Afghanistan, his father told him that wherever his career took him, to always get involved in safety work. And so he did, volunteering on safety committees in the military, then working in industrial safety in oil and gas fields. On a shelf near his front door, he keeps a collection of hard hats from his safety work around the globe.
As he surveyed the site of the accident, Stallone quickly figured out the problem: A tall pole, lying just feet away, should have been used to prop up the forklift during maintenance. In a recording he made of his inspection, Stallone asked an Amazon manager whether there was any written documentation of Terry being trained on that.
āNo, sir,ā the supervisor says on the recording. He told Stallone that Terry had been informally trained by a co-worker.
Stallone interviewed a co-worker of Terryās, who put the blame on Amazonās safety culture coming in second to production demands.
āThe safety issues Iāve brought up have been dismissed and not dealt with,ā the worker said in a signed statement. āI want to see the safety culture in Amazon change and ensure the maintenance workers have the appropriate amount of training. Thereās no training, thereās no safety, itās āGet āer done.ā ā
During the call, Alexander told the Amazon officials what sheād need from them in order to shift the blame from the company to āemployee misconduct,ā according to the recording.
After hanging up with Amazon, Alexander said: āTheyāre wanting to probably take this offer and go back and look and say, āHey, weāre partnering with Indiana. Weāre going to be the leader.āā
She told Stallone, āI hope you donāt take it personally if we have to manipulate your citations.ā
Amazon had said it would appeal the citations and had further information that it would share in confidential settlement negotiations. Alexander wondered what it could be. Then she speculated out loud that the information might be about Terry himself, saying, āIām guessing the guy was probably on drugs or something.ā
By this point, a coroner had found nothing in his blood except nicotine and caffeine.
Stallone said he was disgusted. But the pressure to placate Amazon didnāt stop there.
Some days after the conference call with Amazon officials, Stallone said Indiana Labor Commissioner Rick Ruble pulled him into his office. The governor was there, too, standing by the commissionerās desk, according to Stallone.
He recalled that Holcomb told him how much it would mean to Indiana if the state won the Amazon headquarters deal. Then, Stallone said, the commissioner told him to back off on the Amazon caseāor resign.
The same day Stallone sent his whistle-blower email, Amazonās corporate offices in Seattle gave a $1,000 campaign contribution to Indianaās governor. It was years before Holcomb would next face reelection, and Amazon hasnāt donated to him before or since.
A year after Terryās death, Indiana officials quietly signed an agreement with Amazon to delete all the safety citations and fines. The agreement said Amazon had met the requirements of an āunpreventable employee misconduct defense.ā The official record now essentially blames Terry for his own death.
At that point, Indianapolis was one of 20 finalists for the Amazon headquarters deal. Three and a half weeks after the citations were deleted, Amazon held a small-business roundtable event in Indianapolis. Holcomb was there, sitting next to a company representative.
āOur tax and regulatory climates are veryānot just attractive, but enticing,ā he told a local TV reporter at the event. āAnd we want to grow together.ā
In a later statement, the department said it couldnāt prove Amazon should have known Terry wouldnāt properly prop up the forklift. A Labor Department spokesperson, Stephanie McFarland, said Amazon produced proof that Terry was properly trained, including a video of Terry handling the equipment the right way another time. But the agency did not provide any documentation of Amazonās evidence or any records that would corroborate the departmentās account.
Two of the former Amazon safety managers who were aware of Terryās death at the time faulted Amazon for failing to use formally trained maintenance professionals. One of them, the former senior safety manager, said Amazon had a systemic problem, vividly recalling a report from another warehouse in which a maintenance worker also had failed to properly brace a forklift while working on it, months after Terryās death.
āIf there was any misconduct there, itās putting a person that has little to no experience [to work] on this piece of equipment,ā said the other former safety manager, who has worked at multiple facilities. āWhoever allowed that to happenāthatās the misconduct.ā
Ashley Robinson, the Amazon spokesperson, would not comment on the circumstances surrounding Terryās death, citing privacy concerns.
Stallone was so troubled by the incident that he attended Terryās funeral.
āI have a lot of anger built up because of everything thatās happened,ā he said. āHe wasnāt an accident. He was the patriarch of our family.ā
Candice Dixon remembers her excitement when the Amazon warehouse opened in Eastvale in March 2018. The new fulfillment center would help make Amazon the Inland Empireās largest private employer, offering a decent wage and health benefitsāwith no experience necessary. That fall, an Amazon executive, Dave Clark, chose the Eastvale warehouse to make the announcement that Amazonās new minimum wage would be $15 an hour. The hundreds of workers crowded around him broke into cheers and applause.
A call came in to the local 911 dispatcher just after midnight on January 2, five and a half hours into the night shift.
āThereās a lot of people sick,ā an Amazon worker said.
The person on the line, Christina Van Vorce, a robotics floor monitor, had been smelling gas since the start of her shift. Some workers had been moved to another part of the building, and others were sent briefly to a break room, but the warehouse had not been evacuated, according to accounts by Van Vorce and four others at work that night. After seeing pickers throwing up into trash cans, Van Vorce clocked out to dial 911. She told the dispatcher she didnāt want Amazon to know she had called.
āWhere I was at on my floor, pretty much everyone on that side felt sick,ā she can be heard saying in the recording. āTwo associates that I know for sure that were vomiting. One girl almost completely passed out. She had to be taken by a wheelchair. And then everyone else has got, like, headaches and the burning in the chest and the nose.ā
The dispatcher said everyone should evacuate the building. Robinson told Reveal that Amazon shut down the site for about an hour and a half while a maintenance team repaired the leak. But Van Vorce told the dispatcher that management wouldnāt stop operations.
One current Eastvale worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation, said a friend drove her to a hospital in Upland, where she spent several hours on oxygen, an account the friend confirmed. The friend said she herself ended up out of work for weeks with dizziness and headaches. Amazonās injury logs did record one workerās ārespiratory irritationā that day.
Robinson said that before firefighters arrived, gas was shut off to the building and its safety team āassessed we had fresh air entering the building and there was no riskā to workers. She insisted that no one was hospitalized.
Van Vorce and other workers said Amazon docked their personal time off for leaving work during the leak, though Robinson told Reveal that was against company policy. She confirmed that anyone docked time off got it reversed if they complained.
āIt was all about numbers,ā Van Vorce said in an interview. āThey didnāt want to stop production.ā
If Amazonās Eastvale leadership wouldnāt pause production for a gas leak, they certainly didnāt pause for something as mundane as a trip to the bathroom.
Bathroom visits are tracked carefully at Amazon fulfillment centers, according to multiple current and former workers and managers, with each gap in scanning labeled as ātime off task.ā Too much time off task can trigger a write-up, and workers describe being caught between wanting to stay hydrated and trying to avoid long treks across a giant warehouse to the bathroom.
Robinson said Amazon ensures every worker has access to a restroom a āshort walkā away āwhenever needed.ā But she did not address whether workers are docked for such trips as time off task. It was that threat that sparked some workers to devise workarounds.
Adam Kester, who worked as a picker at a fulfillment center in Phoenix until last year, said he and other workers would bring customersā orders into the bathroom with them to scan midway through. āIt sounds disgusting,ā he acknowledged.
Kristi Shrum, who worked as a stower until 2018 at another Amazon warehouse in Southern California, said she sometimes would have friends scan items for her while she went to the bathroom to make it look as though she were working. Still, she said she got multiple urinary tract infections.
āYou have to hold your pee or not make your rate. Which one you want to do?ā Shrum said. āI had to make my rate.ā
Faith Gerdon of Anaheim said she developed urinary tract infections while working as a stower at the Eastvale warehouse last year. At one point, she got so upset that she told her supervisor, āIām happy to bring puppy pads and pee here on the floor.ā
As Eastvaleāa member of last yearās Million Unit Clubāagain gears up for the frantic holiday season, Gerdon wonāt have a chance to earn all that overtime.
Last December, injuries to both of her thumbs and wrists put her off work, according to Amazonās logs. She hasnāt worked since.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, meanwhile, is focused relentlessly on his customers.
āWe are ramping up to make our 25th holiday season the best ever for Prime customersāwith millions of products available for free one-day delivery,ā he said in an October 24 press release about Amazonās most recent earnings report. āCustomers love the transition of Prime from two days to one dayātheyāve already ordered billions of items with free one-day delivery this year.ā
Rachel de Leon, Byard Duncan, Melissa Lewis, Katharine Mieszkowski, and Hannah Young contributed reporting.
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