Since 2020, I have worked at an [hotlink ignore=true]Amazon[/hotlink] Warehouse outside St. Louis. This week is my fourth Prime Day. I’m not sure my body can take it. I started at Amazon with a sense of optimism. I was working for a company known around the world for delivering anything, anytime, anywhere. I was proud to be helping folks trapped at home during the pandemic get what they needed for their families.
But that feeling quickly vanished. Just a few months in, I could already feel the toll the job was taking on my muscles and mental state. My legs grew numb, and I was constantly fatigued.
On average, I’m expected to pack around 600 items every hour during my shift, scanning each and making sure it’s moving properly down the belt. Taking a break is nearly impossible. At most, Amazon plays a 10-second safety video a few times a day telling us to stretch. Otherwise, I move as quickly as possible because if I don’t make my rate, I could be written up and fired. And even if I do hit that goal, managers tell me to speed up.
Amazon’s relentless push for speed is mentally draining and physically dangerous. It leads to injuries as we break our bodies down to meet our quotas. Last year, I was rushing to my workstation, tripped over a misplaced pallet, fell on my face, busted my nose and lips and suffered a torn meniscus. I was out of work for almost two months.
Working in an Amazon warehouse is very dangerous every day of the year, but during peak times like Prime Day, which takes place this year on July 16 and 17, our jobs are even more perilous.
New data from Amazon shows just how dangerous Prime is for workers like me. The Strategic Organizing Center, a coalition of labor unions, analyzed the timing of injuries for 2023 and found injury levels at Amazon warehouses spiked during the company’s peak operational periods, including Prime Days and Cyber Monday.
The SOC found that in 2023 Amazon reported its single highest weekly serious injury total, 1,066 cases, during the week of Prime Day in July, representing a 48 percent increase from the previous week.
Working during prime days is grueling. Our quotas go up even higher than usual. We are told to stay hydrated, yet we barely have time to use the bathroom, and Amazon’s 8- to 10-second stretch
breaks typically disappear. I have to work extra hours and extra shifts—resulting in 11.5-hour shifts for five days a week.
During Prime, Amazon freezes vacation—making it difficult to see family—and, aside from weekends, all I have time to do outside of work is eat and sleep. Each year, it seems to get worse, with fewer breaks and more workers suffering injuries. One coworker was moved to a new area that was understaffed during Prime, wasn’t trained and broke her ankle. Working during Prime makes you feel like you walked 50 miles in one day. You go home, get a few hours of sleep and do another 50 miles the next day. You lose feeling in your feet.
In 2021, Amazon committed to cutting its injury rate in half and becoming “Earth’s Safest Place to Work,” but in the three years since that promise, the company’s total injury rate has gone down less than two percent. Amazon leadership barely talks about safety anymore. Instead, they brag about delivering “at the fastest speeds ever” and talk about their plans to cut costs and “invest in speed.”
I want people to know there’s a human cost to all of those Prime Day deals, delivered at the click of a mouse. I’m 58 and would like to stay at Amazon, as long as my body holds up, but something has to change. That’s why I’m organizing for a union alongside Amazon workers nationwide to create a better, fairer place to work, where workers get living wages and a say on the job. A union is the best way for us to make Amazon safe for all warehouse workers, and we will keep building our strength in numbers and speaking out until we win.
This Prime Day will push my body to the limit, but I believe it will also push more workers to join us in our fight to make Amazon a place where we can be proud to work.
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Editor’s note: The following is a condensed and edited response from Amazon
The information we’d need to verify these claims wasn’t provided to us and it’s unreasonable to take a single anecdote to make conclusions about safety at a company with more than a million workers. Employee safety is our top priority. We’ve made measurable progress on safety including improving our recordable incident rate by 28% since 2019, and our rate of injuries that result in lost time by 75%. We’ve consistently used 2019 as our benchmark to gauge progress, and that’s clear in all of our annual safety updates.
Like any business, we have performance expectations for all of our teams, but they aren’t static and they’re based on multiple factors, including the overall performance of the entire team across an individual site.
Employees are free to take breaks whenever they need them to use the restroom, grab water, or speak to a manager or HR. This is in addition to the two breaks they receive each shift, and their lunch break.
There’s no truth to the claim that “working in an Amazon warehouse is very dangerous every day of the year.”
During times of high demand, employees are sometimes asked to work overtime, but they’re never asked to work more than 12 hours per day and no more than 60 hours in a week. There are far more people working in the buildings during peak times and more total hours worked by those employees—facts that the SOC report fails to acknowledge or account for.
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