Amazon warehouse injuries '80% higher' than competitors, report claims | Hacker News Reader

Amazon warehouse injuries '80% higher' than competitors, report claims

bbc.com

144 pointsmikesabbagh71 comments

I can tell you one thing. At least at smaller warehouses under-reporting of injuries is common. So whatever statistics are being used I'd be careful with.

One trick I heard about. If you can get the employee count up, you can get your reported injury rates down.

Ie, two warehouses, both doing 1 injury per 10,000 packages shipped. If one has double the employee count it can make some of the reported injury rates go lower. If you ever see 5 guys watching one guy dig a hole - that employer is going to have great injury rate reporting even if the guy actually digging a hole gets injured just as often as anyone else digging a hole. Not sure if they figured out ways of mixing in management / white color jobs into the warehouse numbers.

But I'm surprised no one discusses underreporting at smaller warehouses.

And comparing to retail workers at walmart also seems a bit weird?

The trouble is that there's a really obvious media bias - a report showing that Amazon warehouse injuries were 80% lower definitely wouldn't get this kind of credulous media treatment, if anyone bothered publishing it in the first place, and this has obvious effects on everyone's perceptions.

We see that in another clickbait article today on "brutal" Amazon:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27370589

I'm getting more and more skeptical of the news I read.

Good, remain skeptical, it's important.

Related: Studies of aviation and construction have found that as incident rates decline, fatalities increase:

"The underreporting that results from the implementation of such safety programs really means that you are shooting yourself in the foot. Your organization does not have a great safety culture because it has low numbers of incidents. In fact, the opposite is true. This has been shown in various industries already. A study of Finnish construction and manufacturing from 1977 to 1991, for example, showed a strong correlation between incident rate and fatalities, but reversed (r = –.82, p<0.001). In other words, the fewer incidents a construction site reported, the higher its fatality rate was (see Figure 7.1)."

—The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error', chapter 7

I've got limited exposure to this, but we see this in some other fields. I just worked with a group that said they had no "defects". Actually, what you have is no reported defects and no clue what you are missing.

The folks reporting defects in this space get a lot more hassle, but actually know what is going on in their ops.

is it worth getting the new edition of this book (its like 25$ more for me)

Don’t know, I read it on Safari a few weeks ago. I didn’t compare the two editions.

Thanks

Of course, this is almost certainly true in medicine as well, if you can’t report mistakes you can never learn from them.

My anecdotal experience corroborates your quote: when I was 13-14 I occasionally did truck unloading/stage construction for an entertainment company. When another below-legal-age friend of mine got injured while unloading a truck, the managers begged him to make up some story in the hospital. I stopped taking stage construction gigs after another kid was killed when a ton of sound equipment crushed him.

From what Amazon warehouse workers I know tell me, the safety measures are on a different level to anything I was used to when I did blue collar work.

edit: I looked up one of the events we did[1] to make sure I got the age right and I was 15 when it took place.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjHEMzyakrY

> that as incident rates decline, fatalities increase:

This happens with helmets in combat and seatbelts in cars.

Because small injuries go away, what's left over is the stuff that really kills you (like a gunshot right through the helmet or a crash where a seatbelt couldn't save you because of the speeds involved)

That doesn't explain why fatalities would increase.

Because we feel safer and are able to push the boundaries.

As cars got safer, people are more willing to push the boundaries of speed since they believe the airbags and automated braking systems will keep them safe.

Is this explanation based on a study, or just a guess?

There was a study which showed people have an "acceptable" level of perceived risk.

Your kids not buckled in the back and every time you take a corner hard your toddler rolls onto the floor? You drive more slowly.

Your kid in a child seat, five point harness, bolsters near the head? Fly around those corners!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation#Citations

Except safety improvements actually reduced automobile fatalities dramatically over time.

There are occasional edge cases, but safety equipment and procedures have made a huge difference over time. Just look at say the number of deaths from construction accidents over time. Five people died constructing the Empire State Building for example that wasn’t even a terrible record for the time period. At the extreme 30,609 people died building the Panama Canal.

I'm not sure. Today on work there is so much personal safety gear (glasses, helmets, safety shoes, gloves ...) small accidents maybe just don't hurt a person at all. So you just end up with the really bad accidents.

That also matches terrorist attacks.

As the frequency increases, the scale of them decrease

> Not sure if they figured out ways of mixing in management / white color jobs into the warehouse numbers.

I once worked as an engineer in a pseudo-office that was actually just part of the company’s warehouse that had been sectioned off and given some trendy decorations. The company was running out of warehouse space but rather than let us move into a real office, they kept us in the warehouse and rented more warehouse space next door.

I could never understand why they did it, but your comment had me wondering now.

or maybe warehouse space was cheaper than office space? or that the managers want easy/quick access to the warehouse to micromanage workers?

There can be other factors like tax credits for certain types of spaces / work / areas for adding employees etc that can drive some weird behavior.

This can be really obvious with some govt contracting work which can have additional requirements on labor matters.

And comparing to retail workers at walmart also seems a bit weird?

The comparison is with Walmart warehouse workers, not retail workers. See the actual report posted by others.

>If one has double the employee count it can make some of the reported injury rates go lower. [...] Not sure if they figured out ways of mixing in management / white color jobs into the warehouse numbers.

Or just hire a bunch of part time people? Or do the numbers already adjust for FTEs?

Except in rare edge cases, very few companies are going to burn money in excess labor to water down their injury rates like this. Workers comp insurance is not so expensive that it would make sense to double your labor force to do the same output.

I don't understand. Workplace injuries are not a "shit happens" scenario - it is not good enough to consistently report high numbers and shrug your shoulders. The reporting is merely one half. You must make explicit efforts to avoid the proximal cause of these workplace injuries.

When some worker at Tesla gets hit by a robot arm, nobody goes "duh watch out for the robot". There is an inquiry why it was possible for a worker to be in the work area of the robot in operation and get hit.

>If you ever see 5 guys watching one guy dig a hole

ok first off this does not seem to be the way that any American employer would do things - I did live in the country for 20+ years and worked a lot of menial labor - never have I seen any employer have 5 guys standing around watching one guy dig a hole.

Wouldn't increasing your labor costs by 400% outweigh whatever benefit you gain in reducing reported injury rates?

If we are talking injury rate per holes dug or packages shipped then the number of people working on the task doesn't affect the injury rate.

Looks like the report (not linked in the article) is https://thesoc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/PrimedForPain....

"Our findings are based on data that Amazon and other employers provided to OSHA annually from 2017 to 2020 within the General Warehouse and Storage industry (NAICS: 493110) and the last mile delivery industries (NAICS 492110 & 492210). ... All employers are legally required to submit annual injury and illness reports to OSHA for any warehouse, delivery, grocery, or wholesale trade facility with 20 or more employees annually, so these records should include every significantly-sized facility in Amazon’s US logistics network."

The study is based on self-reported data to OSHA.

Obviously that could make the data suspect. But more broadly I don't think we want to be punishing companies for reporting their data accurately and incentivize industry to hide injuries more.

This doesn't necessarily mean that it's really 80% higher, just that the reports show it's 80% higher. When a company has a really strong safety attitude it leads to more reporting of minor issues which can look worse, but actually tend to make the place safer.

In theory perhaps, but in practice Amazon simply has horrible safety practices. The push older workers to meet objectives their not fit enough to maintain which directly results in a lot of significant back and other injuries.

Combined with an unsafe environment and it’s simply an injury factory.

Back injury statistics tend to be highly unreliable, as there is no objective test as to whether back pain is real or not. Hence a back injury is the go-to malady for malingering.

Yes, I've injured my back many times, I'm recovering right now from one. A significant part of my exercise program is trying to inure myself against further incidents. I'm not denying the existence of back injury and pain.

I was in a car accident years ago. I was coached in how to fake a neck injury to get a big settlement by several people who came to help, including a lawyer. The term they used was "jackpot". I didn't ask for the coaching, and didn't do it.

Do you have anything to back up these claims? Easy to claim that they have "horrible safety practices" and "are an injury factory".

Also, you can't really say they push order workers...they simply push all workers to be similarly productive. You can claim that's unfair, but to make a different productivity goal for older works would be discrimination and illegal.

I know at my company we had a huge push for safety improvements and it came from asking people to report anything...even the slightest twinge of pain was reported and we hired a physical therapist to be onsite to treat anyone that might have early warning signs before they become a major problem.

> The push older workers to meet objectives their not fit enough to maintain which directly results in a lot of significant back and other injuries.

1) What you said sounds fairly likely, but is this indicated in the report? I looked for what you suggested and didn't see this data mentioned.

2) I feel bad for saying this, but at some point if old people can't keep up without extreme effort and seriously risking injury, wouldn't they be better off looking for a different job? It's tough, because I understand many people need money, but I'd think any fast paced and more physically demanding than average job wouldn't be the most suitable environment for somebody older who has started slowing down.

I took a look at the study. Am I reading this right. they went to 416K FTE's from 242K FTE's and lost time cases and lost time days went down?

Case rate from 0.049 to 0.026?

Lost time days 2.6 to 1.2?

These are pretty striking improvements % wise for a big operation. Just interesting to see the headlines that get written! You could also write a headline, Amazon cuts lost time cases and lost time days rates in half in one year.

Really shows you how you can't really trust most tech reporting these days.

Anyone have a link to the study? i don't see it in the article.

It's a shame that what could be a long term viable job for many people has turned into temp-gig where the only path to success is being an "industrial athlete." If only Amazon actually cared about improving the down and out towns and cities it entered.

https://thesoc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/PrimedForPain....

At every factory or warehouse I've worked in, the cause of almost every injury/accident was an employee not following the rules when it came to safety.

In most of these warehouses I bet the employee also had a quota which couldn't be physically met without flouting some safety rules.

In the blue collar jobs I've worked, there was always a lot of pressure from management to do everything faster. They won't outright tell you to violate policy, of course, but if you don't meet their expectations they'll find someone who will.

In most places I've worked in, you've both been told the safety rules and then encouraged to do things in ways that aren't safe. The most common way of doing this is to not give employees enough time to actually do the safety stuff. If you get caught, well... OF course you got hurt, you weren't following the safety rules. Were you on drugs?

We at least they have cry booths, so you can have some privacy when you are injured.

Uhhh... what competitors at that scale? Walmart? Wayfair? Ingram-Micro? Maybe Target?

I work for Amazon as an SDE, in alot of cases working here is fine, but there are teams with absolutely barbaric management practices.

Are you working in a warehouse? If not you've missed the point of the piece.

If you've got good stories please do share them - this article is about warehouse workers specifically but SDEs at amazon are generally assumed to have exceedingly cushy jobs - please do shatter that conception if you can.

> If you've got good stories please do share them

60% of stories on teamblind these days seems to be about how amazon sucks for engineering.

Is this to signal the company culture?

Have you been to the warehouses or talked to workers there?

Can some billionaire please buy a ton of AMZN stock and redistribute the gains to injured and mistreated Amazon workers?

Hrm - what if the US Government were to be that billionaire - each year it'd collect a portion of Amazon's earnings (maybe as direct cash instead of stock) and redistribute that to workers. This might even be considered some kind of action to support the well being of the society at large. /s

I think the OP was being pretty sarcastic but I absolutely dislike solution propositions that rely on billionaires being charitable. If it's a thing that should happen don't rely on good-will - tax people and fund it.

Exactly. It goes to my advice to beggars and solicitors in-front of wealthy retailers: the rich are stingier than most, on average; if they want to collect more money, they need to go to the poor part of town. Billionaires will almost never be charitable except to rehab their image and legacy. Furthermore, relying on a patchwork of charities for social welfare isn't comprehensive enough to meet the needs of the less well-off.

Governments also have more capital and individual govt workers aren't necessarily personally-invested in commercial interests (unless they're strategic / MIC).

If the people could/would/and should gain control of the government, it might be possible to hostilely-takeover some key businesses with poor labor and abysmal pay records in order to turn them into mostly co-ops to raise workers' up to livable wages.

On the other hand, people with money become the target of every charity, every entrepreneur, every solicitor with a sob story, and every scam artist attempting to carve off a piece of that. In addition they get assaulted by waves of paparazzi, star-struck groupies, and people wanting to be their special friend.

Naturally, purely out of self-defense, they try to shield themselves from this and are highly skeptical of any unsolicited charity pitches. That does not mean they don't have the same charitable impulses as anyone else. They just go about it differently, like going to charity $$$ per plate dinners, etc.

Absolutely. The insouciance shield of wealth, celebrity, power, or beauty. Like them, I, or anyone else we just want real friends and people acting straightforwardly.

I was inadvertently staying at a hotel in Century City that coincidentally hosted the Latin Grammys. There were gawkers and groupies galore acting like headless-chicken spazes. Meanwhile, I'm chilling, nursing a vodka gimlet, and trying to understand what's going on and why certain people are lionized.

This is in contrast to homeless people asking for a few dollars rather than wantrepreneurs asking for a million bucks for a 5% convertible pre-prototype.

What you describe is essentially a hostile takeover transforming the business into a partial co-op. I don't think anyone has the capital to do that.

It's better to start an economically-sustainable co-op (REI) than attempt to turn a commercial megaplatform into a still for-profit partial co-op.

Those who could do it would have their material interests harmed. No one becomes a billionaire without exploiting the labour of many others.

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