The New Republic - Amazon Warehouses Are Relentless, Dangerous Workplaces—but It’s Hard to Punish Them for It, Thanks to Bill Clinton
Chief economist Brian Callaci draws points on the real reason’s that Amazon can put forth such monumental product output: the exploitation of workers beyond limitation.
Working at Amazon warehouses is notoriously punishing on the body. Jobs often require workers to lift, carry, twist, bend, and perform repetitive motions, and the company enforces a breakneck pace by digitally monitoring workers’ rate of production and the amount of time they’re not working (beyond their legally required lunch break). Workers who fail to hit their targets face discipline and eventually termination. No wonder so many are injured on the job: While the warehousing industry has injury rates 2.6 times the average for all private industries, Amazon’s rate is double the warehouse industry average. And yet Amazon has received a light touch from government safety regulators for repetitive-motion and pace-of-work violations—until now.
Washington state’s Department of Labor and Industries on Monday fined Amazon $60,000 for willful violations of the state’s occupational safety and health laws, after an inspection of the company’s fulfillment center in Kent found myriad examples of tasks that “create a serious hazard” for back, shoulder, wrist, and knee injuries. “Workers are required to perform these tasks at such a fast pace that it increases the risk of injury,” the agency said in a press release, noting that it has already cited Amazon for “similar violations” at three locations in the state. “The company is aware of these hazards. Therefore, the most recent violation is classified as a willful violation and comes with a significantly higher penalty than those issued as a result of earlier inspections.” Amazon has 60 days to submit a written plan “to abate the safety issues.” The state’s safety inspectors told Business Insider that “if the pace of work doesn’t change, what they’re working on isn’t going to be the complete solution.”
Amazon has 15 working days to appeal. Should the company do so—which seems likely, given that it’s appealing the previous citations—the Department of Labor and Industries will have to prove that Amazon violated a federal regulation stating that employers have a “general duty” to provide a workplace free of “recognized” safety hazards. The agency cannot accuse Amazon of violating a specific safety standard for musculoskeletal injuries because no such standard exists in Washington state or at the federal level—even though ergonomic injuries, as they’re more commonly known, are the leading cause of work-related injury and disability and have helped fuel the opioid epidemic. In fact, the federal government is effectively barred from issuing an ergonomics rule, and the blame for that falls partly on the Clinton administration.
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