Amazon Rebuts Senate Report on Workers' Injuries

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on Monday accused e-commerce giant Amazon of manipulating data on worker injuries and ignoring safety concerns.

"Amazon's warehouse workers have raised the alarm for years about unsafe working conditions and a corporate culture that prioritizes speed and profit over worker health and safety," the report, which featured Sen. Bernie Sanders' name on the cover, states. "Many of these workers live with severe injuries and permanent disabilities because of the company's insistence on enforcing grueling productivity quotas and its refusal to adequately care for injured workers."

The committee conducted an "exhaustive inquiry into Amazon's operations" over the past 18 months and solicited information from current and former Amazon workers about their experiences in Amazon's warehouses.

Amazon itself provided "extremely limited information to the committee," it said.

"Through its investigation, the Committee found extensive evidence of a corporate culture obsessed with speed and productivity," the committee said in a release.

"This culture, driven by relentless productivity demands, has resulted in systemic safety failures and high rates of injury. Amazon expects workers to move at unsafe rates and in unsafe conditions that cause workers to be injured far more frequently than they are at other warehouses.

"Workers told the Committee about Amazon regularly ignoring safety concerns, ordering workers to stay in roles that were causing them pain, denying workers needed medical care or pressuring them to return to work too soon, and refusing accommodations for work-related injuries as well as disabilities."

Amazon, it added, "is aware of the safety risks causes by the speed it demands of its workers."

Amazon pushed back on the findings.

"While we respect Sen. Sanders and his work chairing the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), the senator has issued another report that's wrong on the facts and features selective, outdated information that lacks context and isn't grounded in reality," it said in a release.

"Our voluntary, good-faith cooperation with this investigation was premised on the reasonable expectation that any report would be even-handed and truthful, even if that truth was inconvenient for people who want to claim that our workplace is anything other than safe."