- Jassy's first letter to shareholders cited misleading statistics to claim Amazon's injury rate is "sometimes misunderstood".
- Jassy said he looked for a "silver bullet" that could quickly lower injury rates at Amazon's warehouses, but "didn't find that."
- Amazon has refused to follow regulators' guidance that it reduce the pace of work at its facilities to lower injury rates.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy pushed back against critics of Amazon's workplace safety in his first letter to shareholders as regulators, legislators and labor activists push Amazon to address the company's high injury rates. Amazon warehouse workers are twice as likely to get hurt on the job as non-Amazon warehouse employees, federal workplace safety data shows.
Amazon's high injury rate is "sometimes misunderstood," Jassy wrote, adding that lowering injury rates is a complicated and incremental process.
"When I first started in my new role, I spent significant time in our fulfillment centers and with our safety team, and hoped there might be a silver bullet that could change the numbers quickly," Jassy wrote. "I didn't find that."
Jassy relied on misleading statistics to claim that Amazon's injury rate is "about average" relative to its industry peers. Jassy wrote that according to the "last U.S. public numbers," Amazon workers got hurt at a rate of 6.4 injuries per 100 full-time employees, compared to a rate of 5.5 injuries per 100 full-time employees for the warehouse industry at large.
The injury rate he cited, though, is actually from 2020 – obscuring an increase in Amazon's injury rates between 2020 and 2021. And Jassy's comparison of Amazon's injury rate to the overall warehouse industry average neglects the fact that Amazon is included in the warehouse industry average, driving that figure up. Amazon employs nearly one-third of U.S. warehouse workers and accounts for nearly one-half of the industry's injuries.
Comparing Amazon's injury rates to all non-Amazon warehouses in the U.S. shows that Amazon workers are actually twice as likely on average to get hurt on the job as any other warehouse worker in the country.
Amazon's injury rate rose 20% last year from 2020 to 7.9 serious injuries per 100 employees, according to a report this week from the union coalition The Strategic Organizing Center that relied on federal workplace safety data. (Serious injuries are defined as those that cause a worker to take time off work or be transferred to light duty.) Amazon has had access to 2021 data since at least the beginning of March when companies are required to report it to the Department of Labor. An Amazon spokesperson did not respond to a question about why Jassy did not use the latest injury data in his letter.
One seeming bright spot in the injury data cited by Jassy is that Amazon appears to be doing better on safety than its peers in the delivery industry, such as UPS and FedEx. Amazon's 2020 injury rates for its "courier and delivery" operations, which include its Amazon Air hubs and delivery stations close to cities, was 7.6 per 100 full-time employees, compared to an industry average of 9.1.
But the thousands of Amazon delivery drivers responsible for bringing packages from delivery stations to customers' doorsteps are left out of Amazon's accounting of those injuries. Amazon has contracted out that "last mile" of delivery to a network of small companies it calls "delivery service partners," whose drivers are not Amazon employees – and are not included in Amazon's injury tally for its delivery operations. A 2020 report from the Strategic Organizing Center on injury rates at 129 Amazon delivery contractors found that workers there were nearly 50% more likely to get hurt on the job than UPS drivers were.
An Amazon spokesperson did not respond to questions about the injury data in Jassy's shareholder letter. The company has previously said that Amazon's rising injury rate between 2020 and 2021 was similar to industry-wide trends, and was partially due to a large influx of new employees hired to meet pandemic-fueled demand for online shopping.
In his letter, Jassy said that Amazon is committed to "learning, inventing, and iterating until we have more transformational results" on worker safety. "We won't be satisfied until we do," he wrote.
Workplace safety regulators have said that to lower injury rates, Amazon needs to reduce the pace of work in its facilities. Amazon has refused to take that step. Instead, the company is rolling out mandatory safety training, stretching programs, a job rotation system, and new technologies to help workers move packages through its warehouses.
Regulators have said that's not enough. "If the pace of work doesn't change, what they're working on isn't going to be the complete solution," ergonomist Richard Goggins, who inspects Amazon warehouses for Washington state's workplace safety agency, previously told Insider.
In his letter to shareholders, Jassy extolled the company's stepped-up pace of work as the result of decades of innovation. "In the early 2000s, it took us an average of 18 hours to get an item through our fulfillment centers and on the right truck for shipment. Now, it takes us two," he wrote.
Work at Amazon? Got a tip? Contact reporter Katherine Long on the encrypted messaging app Signal (+1-206-375-9280) or email ([email protected]).