It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Not Christmas, but Amazon Prime Day season. That’s at least if you’re a consumer cashing in on deals offered by the e-commerce giant, which ranks No. 2 on the Fortune 500. And it’s particularly lucrative for Amazon, which in 2023 recorded $12.7 billion in sales for 375 million products over the course of just two days.
But Prime Day is doomsday for Amazon warehouse workers who suffer injuries at an “outrageous level,” during the high-traffic week, according to a report released Tuesday by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
During Prime Day week in 2019, almost half of all warehouse workers at Amazon suffered injuries on the job, according to the report, which cites “internal Amazon documents.” Sanders blames the “incredibly dangerous working conditions at Amazon” on “the type of corporate greed that the American people are sick and tired of,” he said in a statement. The report also says there were nearly 45 injuries per 100 workers during the week of Prime Day in 2019.
Amazon denies these findings.
“Unfortunately, this report—which was not shared with us before publishing—ignores our progress and paints a one-sided, false narrative using only a fraction of the information we’ve provided,” Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, tells Fortune. “It draws sweeping and inaccurate conclusions based on unverified anecdotes, and it misrepresents documents that are several years old and contained factual errors and faulty analysis.”
The report released by Sanders’ office includes injuries the company is not required to disclose to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Still, Amazon’s rate of “recordable” injuries, or injuries the company is required to disclose to OSHA, was still more than double the industry average, with more than 10 injuries per 100 workers during that same time period, according to the report. The most recent data provided by Amazon was from 2019, a spokesperson for Sanders tells Fortune.
“Amazon, the second-largest private employer in America, is worth over $2 trillion. It is owned by Jeff Bezos, the second wealthiest man in America, worth over $2 billion,” Anna Bahr, director of communications for Sanders, tells Fortune. “Amazon should be the safest place to work in America, not one of the most dangerous.”
Amazon also denies the claims in the report that it systematically underreports injuries, and the allegations that its actual injury rates are higher than publicly reported are false. The company is required to report every injury “that needs more than basic first aid,” Nantel says.
“While any company might make an occasional clerical error, after a nearly six-month investigation that gave OSHA access to all of our internal injury and incident report notes, and closed-door interviews with our associates, OSHA found no intentional, willful, or systemic errors in our reporting,” Nantel says. Instead, since 2019 Amazon has made “significant progress” in reducing its recordable incident rate by 28%.
What the report shows
The full report also includes findings from interviews with more than 100 Amazon workers, which included sentiments about the pressure they face to meet demand during Prime Day and the holiday season. It “demonstrates the company’s blatant disregard for the safety of its workers,” according to the report.
Despite knowing the risks and dangers associated with peak seasons like Prime Day and the holidays, Amazon consistently fails to adequately staff its warehouses, according to the report. Indeed, an October 2020 report used for this study showed the company’s operating headcount is less than 80%, which indicates Amazon regularly operates with a high number of open positions. Nantel, however, says these claims are not true.
“We carefully plan and staff up for major events, ensure that we have excess capacity across our network, and design our network so that orders are automatically routed to sites that can handle unexpected spikes in volume,” Nantel says.
Being overworked during Prime, holiday season
Amazon receives significantly more orders than it does during other periods, according to the report. One worker told the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP), which released the report, their delivery station had to process twice as many packages each day during Prime Day and the holidays.
“Peak hits, they blew out the warehouse,” the worker told the HELP committee. “We got 120,000 packages when we normally handle 60,000.” In response, Amazon requires employees to work faster and work longer shifts, according to the report.
This can be particularly strenuous during the summer, when warehouse temperatures skyrocket. In 2022, Amazon warehouse worker Rafael Reynaldo Mota Frias, 42, died during a Prime sales rush. Fellow workers told The Daily Beast they believed he was being overworked and was overheated. Amazon told Fortune the incident was due to an underlying medical condition and noted that OSHA found Frias died of “myocardial fibrosis unrelated to work.”
While the findings of the report put a target on Amazon’s back, it’s not just the e-commerce giant that has similar workplace issues.
“The recent injuries reported by Amazon workers highlight the urgent issue that workplace safety is not always guaranteed, especially in the manufacturing industry,” Cristian Grossmann, a former frontline worker and author of The Rise of the Frontline Worker, tells Fortune.
Grossman also serves as CEO of Beekeeper, a software company for frontline workers. A 2024 study by Beekeeper, in which 2,000 manufacturing workers worldwide were surveyed, found safety concerns were among the top stressors for frontline teams.
“For decades, unsafe working conditions have been a persistent concern for frontline workers and managers with inadequate measures taken to prioritize and protect these frontline employees,” Grossmann says.
Still, Amazon insists it’s made progress in improving its safety standards and working conditions for warehouse employees.
“If someone wants to truly understand the facts about our safety record and our progress toward being the safest company in the industries in which we operate, we encourage them to review our annual safety report or come visit one of our fulfillment sites to see for themselves,” Nantel says.
