Amazon’s warehouse injury rates have been secret for years despite mounting public concerns over labor practices and lack of worker safety. With access to a trove of new internal records, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting is now able to show injury rates across more than 150 Amazon fulfillment centers from 2016 through 2019.
We’ve calculated the annual injury rate and serious injury rate for every warehouse with more than 200,000 hours worked each year. A low number of hours worked in a year can result in very high injury rates when there are only a few injuries recorded, so we’ve excluded data for some warehouses. Serious injuries are those that require time off work or job restrictions.
To find the warehouse that handled your Amazon package, look for a four-character code on the bottom-left corner of your shipping label. We’ve circled it in yellow.
Notes: Data for warehouses in which fewer than 200,000 hours were worked for a year were excluded from annual rates. We use the general warehousing and storage industry averages from 2018, the most recent data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the table legend. In 2016, the industry injury rate was 5.0, and its serious injury rate was 3.7. In 2017, the rates were 5.2 and 3.9, respectively.
Sources: Injury rates come from a Reveal analysis of internal Amazon data; warehouse locations from MWPVL International and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; average rates for the general warehousing and storage industry from the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Mohamed Al Elew can be reached at malelew@revealnews.org, and Soo Oh can be reached at soh@revealnews.org.
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