In Blistering Senate Report, Bernie Sanders Says Amazon Ignored Warnings Over Worker Safety

This week, a Senate committee helmed by noted populist firebrand Bernie Sanders published a study accusing e-commerce elephantine Amazon of having fostered a moving situation that is unsafe to its workers’ health. Worse, the study claims that the institution has been alert that its interior policies are harming its workers but that it has repeatedly chosen to disregard those harms for the involvement of firm profit. Amazon has roundly rejected the report’s conclusions.

The report, which was produced by the Senate Committee connected Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, reveals that Amazon has conducted a fig of interior studies designed to measure risks to idiosyncratic wellness and safety. Those reports, variously dubbed “Project Elderwand” and “Project Soteria,” yet recovered that the company’s quota strategy (in which workers are required to conscionable definite productivity thresholds) and its absorption connected velocity (workers are pressured to implicit tasks quickly, the study claims) was driving workers to injure themselves. The reports suggested that Amazon unbend its quota requirements truthful arsenic to refrain from harming its workers. However, the New York Times writes that the company’s apical executives yet “rejected the recommendations” from its internally commissioned reports.

Indeed, the committee said that it had recovered that “Amazon is not lone alert of the transportation betwixt velocity and injuries, but besides that the institution specifically rejected imaginable information improvements, accepting injuries to its workers arsenic the outgo of doing business.” The study further notes, “Incredibly, portion the institution refuses to adopt” its ain “recommended information improvements, it besides presents a misleading communicative astir its wounded rates and claims its warehouses are acold safer than they genuinely are.”

The injuries successful question look to stem from workers having to replicate repetitive carnal movements passim the workday, the study states. “Amazon forces workers to determination successful unsafe ways and to repetition the aforesaid movements hundreds and thousands of times each shift, resulting successful highly precocious rates of musculoskeletal disorders,” the study states, noting that portion the institution is “aware that these repetitive movements—made implicit 10- to 12-hour shifts—cause musculoskeletal disorders, the institution refuses to instrumentality enactment to support workers.”

“Amazon’s refusal to support workers is peculiarly egregious fixed its unthinkable fiscal resources,” the study notes, reminding readers that Amazon is the “sixth largest institution successful the satellite and the second-largest backstage leader successful the United States” and that Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder, is the 3rd richest antheral successful the world.

When reached for remark by Gizmodo, an Amazon spokesperson claimed that the study was based connected outdated accusation that Amazon had since discredited. “Senator Sanders’s study is incorrect connected the facts and weaves unneurotic out-of-date documents and unverifiable anecdotes to make a preconceived narrative,” a connection provided by Amazon spokesperson Steve Kelly reads. “The facts are, our expectations for our employees are harmless and reasonable.”

“Despite that, and the information that Sen. Sanders approached this process with a pre-conceived narrative, we’ve cooperated with Sen. Sanders and his unit passim this investigation, providing thousands of pages of documents and different information,” the connection continues. “We’ve besides repeatedly asked Sen. Sanders to sojourn 1 of our facilities truthful helium tin spot our moving conditions firsthand. Unfortunately, these invitations person gone unanswered.”

Despite the company’s rebuttal to the report’s findings, the Times notes that the “findings successful the Senate study are accordant with investigations conducted by authorities and national regulators successful caller years.”