Amazon workers say minor aches suddenly became debilitating as they raced to meet speed targets
Alonso Guzmán Barone for Insider
A quiet crisis is spreading through Amazon warehouses.
Data collected in workplace inspections indicates that Amazon's pace of work wildly increases the risk of injury for its more than 750,000 US warehouse workers. The risk of debilitating muscle and joint injuries is off the charts, workplace regulators have said.
Because these injuries build up over time, Amazon workers may not know they're at risk for months or years — but they can be left with a lifetime of pain.
Washington state has gone furthest in analyzing Amazon's injury crisis, thanks to the state workers' compensation system collecting some of the most detailed data on work-related muscle and joint injuries in the US.
Four Washington state inspections conducted from 2020 to 2022 found a "direct connection" between Amazon's pace of work and its high injury rates. The state's initial inspection was sparked by internal data published in 2020 by Reveal at the Center for Investigative Reporting, which indicated that nationwide, Amazon warehouse workers were twice as likely to get seriously hurt as workers in other warehouses. (Serious injuries are ones that keep workers from doing their usual jobs.)
The company's injury epidemic has also led to a federal workplace-safety investigation. Federal prosecutors this summer referred worker-safety complaints to the Department of Labor, which has inspected Amazon warehouses in five states.
Amazon has previously called the federal investigation "unfounded." The company has also taken issue with Washington state regulators' conclusions. Amazon's own analysis of data collected by the state's inspectors found substantially lower injury risks, an Amazon representative said in a statement.
Insider used the Washington regulators' data to identify four exceptionally hazardous jobs at Amazon warehouses and talked to four current and former Amazon employees from the Pacific Northwest who were injured doing that work.
This is the human cost of Amazon's push for speed.
'The military was hard, but it was nothing compared to Amazon'
Jovelle Tamayo for Insider
When Mark Takakura, 32, started working at Amazon in September 2020, he knew he was in for hard work.
That was fine with him. Before working at Amazon, he'd been a US Army medic for four years.
What he didn't know was that he'd signed up for one of the most hazardous jobs at one of Amazon's most dangerous US facilities, according to data collected during workplace-safety inspections. That job was pulling pallets and carts loaded with hundreds of pounds of merchandise to different stations around the warehouse.
Two years later, the job has left him with what he and his doctor expect to be a lifetime of pain.
Takakura works at Amazon's fulfillment center in DuPont, Washington, about an hour's drive south of Seattle — one of the most dangerous Amazon fulfillment centers in the country, according to federal workplace-safety data. He enjoyed the camaraderie he found at the facility, which employs many veterans. And he tried hard to keep up with what he described as a grueling pace of work, moving quickly to keep other workers well-stocked with items to process.
Six months after Takakura started at DuPont, his back started to ache.
"It took months for that ache, for that sore, to become a stiffness," he said. He started having trouble twisting when he woke up in the morning. Then, last autumn, he was at work, reaching down to lift a 30-pound bag of dog food off the warehouse floor, he said, when he felt "a jolt, a slip," and a sudden, needling pain.
X-rays show degeneration in Takakura's mid-spine, most likely exacerbated by pulling packages around the warehouse at least 40 hours a week, and sometimes up to 60 hours during peak season, Takakura's doctor confirmed to Insider.
Amazon said the individual injuries described in this article don't "represent the experience of our more than 750,000 front-line employees."
"We take the health and safety of our team seriously and the allegations raised are being investigated," an Amazon representative, Lisa Levandowski, said in a statement. "While we aren't perfect, this reporting is extremely selective."
After his injury, Takakura began struggling to keep up with Amazon's productivity expectations. He received a verbal warning from his manager that his performance was subpar.
"They've told us numerous times, if you need to slow down to be safe, then do it," Takakura said. "But that's not the case." If he were to slow down to protect his back, he said, managers "come up to us and mention: 'You guys need to start picking up. What can we do to improve productivity?'"
"It's no secret that there are a lot of double standards," he said.
Even after nearly a year of chiropractic visits and physical and massage therapy, Takakura's back pain hasn't totally subsided. At this point, he's resigned himself to a lifetime of managing the injury, he said.
"Me and my veteran buddies always say, the military was hard, but it was nothing compared to Amazon," Takakura said.
Takakura's injury is the most common kind of workplace injury at Amazon warehouses. Called a musculoskeletal disorder, it encompasses many kinds of muscle and joint damage caused by repetitive motion and overuse. Tendonitis, back pain, carpal tunnel syndrome, and hernias are all types of musculoskeletal disorders.
Amazon has said such injuries account for roughly 40% of workplace injuries at its facilities.
Musculoskeletal injuries are a major driver of Amazon's above-industry-average injury rates: While Amazon workers are twice as likely as non-Amazon warehouse workers to get hurt, per the federal data, they're four times as likely to incur a musculoskeletal disorder, Washington state data indicates.
These are serious injuries. At the DuPont warehouse, Amazon workers with such injuries took an average of 103 days to heal, Washington state found. Workers' compensation payouts to Amazon workers with musculoskeletal disorders are often in the tens of thousands of dollars — some exceed $100,000, data from Washington state shows.
But because musculoskeletal disorders take months to develop and aren't as visible as other, more catastrophic injuries, even some Amazon workers write them off.
'They tell you that pain is going to be normal'
Tania Troit, 48, who also works in the DuPont warehouse, started noticing pain in her hip in March 2021.
Troit works largely on the ship dock, where workers move packages into and out of semitrailers. In one Amazon warehouse inspected by Washington state regulators, workers on the ship docks were expected to move so quickly that their injury risk exceeded a federal government safety model's ability to calculate it.
Troit, though, said Amazon's culture of working through discomfort convinced her to ignore the pain.
Amazon will "tell you that pain is going to be normal, just take ibuprofen, the pain will go away, you'll get used to it," Troit said. "I kept pushing, I'm competitive, I'm trying to get these numbers they're telling us about. By the end of the shift, I'm limping, I can barely walk, they're like, just take ibuprofen. So I did, thinking, this is normal, right?"
She didn't report her pain to her manager for six months.
"I kept doing it until I came to work one day and said, 'I need to find something else to do — otherwise I'm going to break myself,'" she said.
By that time, she could barely walk. Doctors told her the pain was inflammation from repetitive use, she said.
Workers say that Amazon's expectations that they meet productivity expectations — in Amazon parlance, "make rate" — or be fired can be so stressful that it makes injuries worse.
'They literally won't allow me to work at a safe speed'
Giorgio Litt for Insider
Pennelloppe Allee, 53, said working to unbox merchandise at an Amazon warehouse near Portland, Oregon, made her hands go numb and tingle. She'd experienced similar pain while working as a barista nearly two decades ago, she said, but had been pain-free for years, until starting at Amazon.
Washington state regulators have singled out Allee's role, which Amazon calls "decant," as an especially hazardous occupation in Amazon's warehouses.
Allee tries to move more slowly to keep the pain under control, she said, but she's been written up twice for failing to make rate.
Washington state regulators found a "direct connection" between Amazon's expectation that warehouse employees "maintain a very high pace of work" — or else face discipline — and the epidemic of joint and muscle injuries at Amazon warehouses. The state slapped Amazon with four workplace-safety violations, ordering the company to better protect workers from musculoskeletal disorders. To do so, Amazon could allow workers to move slower and give them longer breaks, the state suggested.
In a statement, an Amazon representative said Washington regulators' conclusions were based on insufficient evidence. The person said that in some cases, the state extrapolated from small numbers of workers or a few minutes of observation. Amazon also said the regulators didn't factor in lulls during shifts.
In a statement, Washington regulators defended how they conducted their inspections.
A Washington State Department of Labor and Industries representative, Matt Ross, said the state's conclusions were "driven by the priority of keeping workers safe on the job and based on conditions on the ground when we visited these warehouse sites."
Amazon has also disputed the relationship between its productivity goals and injuries.
"It's a misconception that Amazon has quotas," Heather MacDougall, then Amazon's worker-safety chief, told the nonprofit National Safety Council in June. "We do not. But we are committed to ensuring that performance expectations and safety operations can coexist."
But a document written by Amazon attorneys in 2022 during a legal dispute with a Florida warehouse worker lays out how Amazon calculates its rates in detail.
Amazon sets rates at the 25th percentile of productivity across a five-week rolling average of workers who perform a specific role, the document said.
That means Amazon's policy is to increase warehouse productivity targets if the vast majority of facility employees are meeting them. And it means that Amazon expects 25% of its employees to fail to meet their productivity targets.
The purpose of setting a target is "to ensure efficient picking rates and overall productivity," the document said. "Efficient picking rates are essential to Amazon's business model and success, as it is a company modeled on the ability to get customers their purchased items quickly."
According to the document and a recent Amazon lawsuit against Washington state, the company also aims to discipline 3% to 5% of workers with the lowest productivity scores. Employees can be fired if they receive three written warnings over a six-month period.
In a statement, an Amazon representative said that comparing workers' productivity against their peers' was a fair way of charting employee performance. Amazon also uses productivity targets to recognize employees who are excelling, the person added.
"We assess performance based on safe and achievable expectations, accounting for tenure, peer performance, and adherence to safe work practices," the company wrote in a safety report published this year. Amazon fired less than 0.4% of its workers for failing to meet productivity goals last year, that report noted.
A review of hundreds of written warnings included in a wrongful-termination lawsuit between Amazon and a New York employee shows Amazon has often disciplined workers who're close to meeting Amazon's goals. The warnings, which encompass a period from 2018 to 2020, show workers received written disciplinary notices even if they were working at 80% to 90% of Amazon's productivity expectations.
"The stress of trying to make rate makes the pain worse," Allee said. "They literally won't allow me to work at a safe speed. I am getting in trouble, and my job is being threatened now, because they won't allow me to work at a speed that is safe for my body."
'That period was not a good time in my life'
Jovelle Tamayo for Insider
Tekeshia Williams, 41, started working the night shift at Amazon during one of the hardest times in her life. Her teenage daughter had just been found to have brain cancer. Williams was spending her days shuttling her daughter to doctor's appointments, leaving no one to watch her then-4-year-old twins.
She needed extra money to pay for childcare, she said, and she'd heard good things about Amazon's flexible work schedule.
She'd also heard about Amazon's hard-driving, fast-paced culture. But the Army reservist figured she could handle it: She was strong from training to pass military fitness tests.
She started working at Amazon's DuPont warehouse in the autumn of 2020, largely in a role that required her to remove merchandise from conveyor belts and place it on tall, robot-propelled shelves, a job Amazon calls "stow."
Six months later, her shoulders were in so much pain that she couldn't hug her children or get dressed without her husband's assistance. Some days, she could barely hold the steering wheel to drive.
Her discomfort was "a 10," Williams said, so sharp and enduring that it was comparable to the pain of giving birth. "That period was not a good time in my life," she said.
Williams was out of work for more than 150 days because of her shoulder injury, internal Amazon injury logs show.
Now, her daughter's cancer is in remission, and Williams quit Amazon earlier this year. She'd exceeded her unpaid-time-off allowance, and she was worried Amazon would fire her. "I'd rather quit than be fired," she said. "I've never been fired from a job before."
Her pain has subsided but hasn't vanished after two rounds of physical therapy. "My worry is that this may be an ongoing issue for an indefinite amount of time," she said.
Amazon employees say Amazon is weaponizing its injury-prevention program against them
Amazon has said it's working to address its injury crisis, and it has set a goal of reducing musculoskeletal disorders at its facilities by 40% in the next three years. The company needs to become "Earth's Safest Place to Work," Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, said in his final letter to shareholders last year.
But so far Amazon has refused to allow workers to slow down — despite more than a decade of increasingly loud alarms from regulators and media outlets.
"We don't set unreasonable performance goals," Bezos said in last year's shareholder letter.
Last year, Amazon donated $12 million to the National Safety Council to "invent new ways to prevent" musculoskeletal disorders. The company has rolled out workplace-safety initiatives at its warehouses, including a job-rotation program, daily stretches, and training on how to properly lift and grip.
But three University of California at San Francisco ergonomists wrote this year that Amazon's safety interventions "will not reduce risk." The ergonomists were opposing Amazon's request that it not be required to address pace-of-work hazards while the company's appeal of Washington's violations was ongoing.
The company can't expect coaching to prevent injury when Amazon workers are "performing jobs that are inherently hazardous by design," Carisa Harris Adamson, Robert Harrison, and David Rempel wrote.
"The physical demands of the work processes" at Amazon warehouses "are so high" that only equipment changes, shorter workdays, or a slower pace of work will lower the risk of injury, the professors concluded.
Amazon's appeal of Washington's workplace-safety violations is likely to take years. This month, Amazon took the additional step of suing the state, challenging how the appeals board had handled its case. Attorneys for Amazon wrote that regulators' conclusions about Amazon's workplace safety were based on "faulty and incomplete data and unreasoned risk calculations."
'Dear Mr. Clark …'
All four Amazon workers who spoke with Insider on the record said they felt compelled to try to convince the company to change its practices and protect workers, even at the risk that Amazon could retaliate against them.
Allee and Troit still work for Amazon, though Allee said she suspected she might be fired soon for failing to make rate. (Amazon said it's looking into the experiences of Allee and Troit.)
Takakura was fired from Amazon in mid-September for exceeding his allowance of unpaid time off. He had taken time off to wait for the results of a COVID-19 test in July — under a previous Amazon policy, those hours wouldn't have counted toward his time-off allowance, but Amazon changed its policy earlier this year. Takakura said he had been unaware.
An Amazon representative said Takakura received warnings about his negative time-off balance before being fired. Takakura said he had spoken with his manager about the negative balance and believed the company was working to resolve the issue, so he ignored the automated warnings he received.
"I gave two years to this company, got injured at this company, and for them to fire me like that? It's insulting," he said. He doesn't know where he'll work next.
Williams is working toward her MBA. For an English-composition class last term, Williams wrote several papers about Amazon's high injury rates. One was a letter to Amazon's warehouse CEO at the time, Dave Clark.
"Dear Mr. Clark," the letter began. "I would first like to say that I enjoyed working for your company. I had never had a job that afforded me so much flexibility when I needed last-minute time off."
It continued: "The one downside to working for the Amazon Warehouse in DuPont, Washington (BFI3) is the amount of injuries that I have sustained while I was employed there."
Williams says she knows how Amazon could reduce its injury rate: "Stop making people rush."
"But then, you know, I love my Prime," she said. "I love my one-day shipping. To get stuff out like that, people have to be moving really fast."
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