In a new investigation, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found that Amazon’s relentless push for speedy delivery is seriously injuring workers at many of its facilities at a significantly higher rate than the industry standard. With help from warehouse workers, Reveal obtained never-before-public injury logs from more than 20 Amazon facilities across the country. 

But we need your help to finish the work. We don’t have the records for lots of warehouses. 

If you work or have worked at one of these warehouses, you can obtain records.

Here’s what you can do.

Email your warehouse’s HR department

Send an email to [your fulfillment center code]-hr@amazon.com, saying you’re a current or former employee and you’d like to request “all current and stored OSHA 300 logs and 300A reports.”

Example:

To: slc1-hr@amazon.com

Subject line: OSHA 300 logs and 300A reports

Hi,

I’m a [current or former] employee and would like to request all current and stored OSHA 300 logs and 300A reports.

By law, you are required to provide these to me by the end of the next business day.

Thank you,

[Your name]

By law, Amazon is supposed to give them to you by the end of the next business day. If officials don’t respond within this timeframe, it’s a good idea to follow up with them to remind them of your request.

Share the records with us 

According to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, there are no restrictions on sharing the records, so once you get them, you can share them with us by emailing us at injured@revealnews.org.

Amazon might send the forms back with a disclaimer that calls them confidential and asks you not to share them. 

But Amazon is not allowed to require you to keep them secret. 

The government language says: 

“OSHA has determined that employees, former employees and authorized employee representatives have a need for the information that justifies their access to records, including employee names, for all except privacy concern cases. While the possibility exists that employees and their representatives with access to the records could disclose the information to the general public, OSHA does not believe that this risk is sufficient to justify restrictions on the use of the records by persons granted access under sections 1904.40 and 1904.35. Strong policy and legal considerations militate against placing restrictions on employees’ and employee representatives’ use of the injury and illness information.

While there may be instances where employees share the data with third parties who normally would not be allowed to access the data directly, the final rule contains no enforceable restrictions on use by employees or their representatives. Employees and their representatives might reasonably fear that they could be found personally liable for violations of such restrictions. This would have a chilling effect on employees’ willingness to use the records for safety and health purposes, since few employees would voluntarily risk such liability. Moreover, despite the concerns of commenters about abuse problems, OSHA has not noted any significant problems of this type in the past. This suggests that, if such problems exist, they are infrequent. In addition, as noted in the privacy discussion above, a prohibition on the use of the data by employees or their representatives is beyond the scope of OSHA’s enforcement authority. For these reasons, the employer may not require an employee, former employee or designated employee representative to agree to limit the use of the records as a condition for viewing or obtaining copies of records.”

Questions? We’re here to help. Email us at injured@revealnews.org.


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Will Evans is a senior reporter and producer for Reveal, covering labor and tech. His reporting has prompted government investigations, legislation, reforms and prosecutions. A series on working conditions at Amazon warehouses was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and won a Gerald Loeb Award. His work has also won multiple Investigative Reporters and Editors Awards, including for a series on safety problems at Tesla. Other investigations have exposed secret spying at Uber, illegal discrimination in the temp industry and rampant fraud in California's drug rehab system for the poor. Prior to joining The Center for Investigative Reporting in 2005, Evans was a reporter at The Sacramento Bee. He is based in Reveal's Emeryville, California, office.

Hannah Young is the former the Director of Audience at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, leading Reveal’s digital and social efforts. Using human-centered design, she and her team work to find new ways to expand the reach of Reveal’s journalism and engage more meaningfully with audiences across platforms.

Previously, Hannah was a Butler Koshland Fellow at Reveal focusing on creative engagement approaches in public journalism. Before that, Hannah worked at Code for America, where she led the Brigade program and grew it to a network of more than 50,000 civic tech volunteers in more than 80 cities across the U.S. During her time there, Brigade was responsible for nearly two thirds of total growth in the civic tech community in the country.

Byard Duncan is a reporter and producer for  engagement and collaborations for Reveal. He manages Reveal’s Reporting Networks, which provide more than 1,000 local journalists across the U.S. with resources and training to continue Reveal investigations in their communities. He also helps lead audience engagement initiatives around Reveal’s stories and assists local reporters in elevating their work to a national platform. In addition to Reveal, Duncan’s work has appeared in GQ, Esquire, The California Sunday Magazine and Columbia Journalism Review, among other outlets. He was part of Reveal’s Behind the Smiles project team, which was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2019. He is the recipient of two Edward R. Murrow Awards, a National Headliner Award, an Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award, and two first-place awards for feature storytelling from the Society of Professional Journalists and Best of the West. Duncan is based in Reveal's Emeryville, California, office.