FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Wednesday, December 18, 2024

NEW REPORT ON AMAZON WAREHOUSE INJURIES PROMPTS SENS. LOONEY & KUSHNER TO RE-INTRODUCE WAREHOUSE WORKER SAFETY BILL IN 2025

HARTFORD – On the heels of a new report commissioned by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont which shows that Amazon warehouses recorded over 30 percent more injuries than the warehousing industry average in 2023, Senate President Martin M. Looney (D-New Haven) and Senator Julie Kushner (D-Danbury) announced today that they will submit a bill in the coming 2025 legislative session to improve warehouse worker safety in Connecticut.

Earlier this year, Sen. Looney co-sponsored Senate Bill 412, “AN ACT CONCERNING THE PROTECTION OF WAREHOUSE WORKERS IN THE STATE.” The bill was raised and passed in April out of the Labor Committee – which Sen. Kushner co-chairs – on a purely partisan basis, with every Republican voting against the measure.

The bill – which ultimately did not receive a Senate vote – limits the extent to which certain warehouse distribution centers can require employees to meet production quotas, sets recordkeeping requirements for employers, and allows an employee to bring a civil action in Superior Court.

Amazon has 16 warehouse facilities in Connecticut and is planning to build another 650,000-square-foot distribution warehouse on 183 acres at the Waterbury/Naugatuck Industrial Park. The corporation employs about 17,000 people in Connecticut. The most common Amazon employee injuries are sprains, strains or muscle tears – injuries that would sideline a professional athlete for weeks or months.

“This new report by Senator Sanders shines a light on the insidious nature of modern fulfillment centers, including Amazon, where employee safety continually takes a back seat to corporate bottom lines,” Sen. Looney said. “It’s as if we’re living in some new Gilded Age, where a corporate giant refuses to recognize employee safety while its founder is the second-wealthiest person on the planet. That’s why there are bills sitting in Congress right now to protect warehouse workers. However, with the incoming Trump administration, I have no illusions that Republicans will do anything to help working people. Therefore, Connecticut must act on its own.”

“Amazon and other such online retailers have one simple rule: maximize speed and profits at any cost, including worker health and safety. At the public hearing on this bill, we heard troubling testimony about Amazon workers in Connecticut having dramatically higher injury rates than other workers, even those in the warehousing industry. And it’s caused by their production quotas and injurious, repetitive movements,” said Sen. Kushner. “This is a centuries-old mindset that unfortunately still exists today, and it shouldn’t. We’ll fix that in 2025.”

Sen. Sanders announced Monday that his 18-month investigation into Amazon’s “abysmal workplace safety practices” resulted in a 300-page report which found that in each of the past seven years, Amazon workers were nearly twice as likely to be injured as workers in other warehouses, and that more than two-thirds of Amazon’s warehouses have injury rates that exceed the industry average.

The report concludes that Amazon knows its productivity standards are the reason why workers are frequently injured, and that while Amazon developed proposals to lower worker injuries, they chose not to implement them due to financial considerations.

Nationally, in 2023, the worker injury rate for large warehouses (over 1,000 employees) was 5.4 injuries per 100 workers.  Amazon operates about two-thirds of all the large warehouses in America and employs about 80 percent of all workers at such facilities. Amazon’s injury rate has been higher than the average injury rate for large warehouses in each of the past several years.

“Amazon forces workers to operate in a system that demands impossible rates and treats them as disposable when they are injured,” Sen. Sanders said. “It accepts worker injuries and their long-term pain and disabilities as the cost of doing business. That cannot continue. Amazon is a $2.3 trillion corporation. It made over $36 billion in profits last year alone. Its founder, Jeff Bezos, is the second-wealthiest person on the planet worth over $240 billion. Its CEO, Andy Jassey, made over $300 million in total compensation since 2021. Amazon should be one of the safest places to work, not one of the most dangerous. Amazon cannot continue to treat its workers as disposable. It must be held accountable.”

Key findings in Sen. Sander’s report include:

-Amazon manipulates its workplace injury data to make its warehouses seem safer than they actually are.

-Contrary to its public claims, Amazon imposes speed and productivity requirements on workers, commonly called “rates.”

-Amazon forces workers to move in unsafe ways and to repeat the same movements hundreds and thousands of times each shift, resulting in extremely high rates of musculoskeletal disorders.

-Amazon has studied the connection between speed requirements and worker injuries for years but refuses to implement injury-reducing changes because of concerns those changes might reduce productivity.

-Amazon actively discourages injured workers from receiving outside medical care, putting injured workers further at risk.