Amazon workers made up almost half of all warehouse injuries last year

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

According to a report by the Strategic Organizing Center, 49 percent of the injuries for the entire warehouse industry were suffered by Amazon workers. According to the union coalition, Amazon workers are twice as likely to be seriously injured as people who work in warehouses for other companies.

The report considers serious injuries to be ones where workers have to take time off to recover or have their workload reduced. The authors of the report note that Amazon workers take longer to recover from injuries than employees at other companies: around 62 days on average.

Graph: Strategic Organizing Center

The work itself is not dangerous, but the pace of the automated systems is. The lower injury rates that year are a result of Amazon having workers go slower in 2020. The report states that the injuries increased by 20 percent between 2020 and 2021 as the company resumed its usual pace, though the injury rates for 2021 were still lower than they were in 2019.

Even with that slowed pace of work in 2020, Amazon has been criticized for how it treated workers in its response to COVID-19, especially in New York, where organizers were motivated to start working toward unionizing at the company. New York Attorney General Letitia James has filed a suit against Amazon, claiming that it failed to protect workers and retaliated against them after they spoke out.

The results tell the same story we have been hearing for a long time. Amazon workers were hurt more often than other warehouse workers even though their injury rates were reduced in 2020. According to Tuesday's report, Amazon's human workers are more at risk for injuries when working at warehouses that have been automated. According to CNBC, Amazon may need to change its entire system in order to become the safest place to work.

The report was not immediately responded to by Amazon.