Amazon’s safety team knew there was a problem at its fulfillment center in Thornton.
Internal reports sent to Amazon safety managers across the country in early 2019 repeatedly flagged the warehouse for having especially high injury rates. One item in the FAQ section asked why that warehouse and six others had a rate of lost-time injuries “more than twice” the internal goal for January.
The issues with the 2-year-old Amazon warehouse in Thornton and other facilities around the country are highlighted in a new report by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.
A cache of company records obtained by Reveal — including internal safety reports and weekly injury numbers from its
nationwide network of fulfillment centers — shows that company officials have misled the public and lawmakers about its record on worker safety. They demonstrate a mounting injury crisis at Amazon warehouses, one that is especially acute at robotic facilities like Thornton and during Prime week and holiday peak.
Overall, Amazon’s injury rates have gone up each of the past four years, the internal data shows. In 2019, Amazon fulfillment centers recorded 14,000 serious injuries — those requiring days off or job restrictions. The rate of 7.7 serious injuries per 100 employees was 33% higher than in 2016 and nearly double the most recent industry standard.
The data backs up the accounts of Amazon warehouse workers and former safety professionals who say the company has used the robots to ratchet up production quotas to the point that humans can’t keep up without hurting themselves. For each of the past four years, injury rates have been significantly higher at Amazon’s robotic warehouses than at
its traditional sites.
Both Colorado fulfillment centers, in Thornton and Aurora, had serious injury rates that declined in 2019 compared to 2018 but were still more than twice the industry average and higher than Amazon’s overall rate.
But in Thornton, Amazon managers didn’t attribute the injury rate to unsafe working conditions, Reveal found. Instead, the report cited an increase in work restrictions ordered by medical providers. Workers typically get first aid at AmCare, Amazon’s on-site health centers, and may be referred to outside medical clinics — usually on contract with Amazon — if they need further medical attention. What happens at those clinics has a decisive impact on the company’s official injury records.
Employers must log for OSHA work-related injuries that require medical care beyond first aid, time off work to heal or a change to the workers’ job. These “recordable” injuries make up a company’s injury rate. Keeping injuries off that log has benefits for a company. High recorded injury rates can make a company more of a target for OSHA inspectors. Keeping workers from getting medical care can also lower a company’s workers’ compensation insurance. Plus, too many injuries can lead to bad press.
The report said Thornton safety staff were meeting with the facility’s most frequently used medical clinic to “discuss the impact” of the care it was giving workers.
When things didn’t improve, the next month’s report, in March 2019, documented a more drastic solution: “To address the flat recordable rate, the site has … terminated the use of an occupational clinic with poor performance.”
The warehouse, the report said, also would ensure “strong” use of the on-site AmCare first aid and “reduce the probability of associates transitioning to external clinic care.” The next month, in April 2019, Amazon contracted with a new clinic for its injured Colorado workers: Advanced Urgent Care & Occupational Medicine, a local operation that promoted itself online as “OSHA-Sensitive.”
According to the Advanced website, Julie Parsons, then its occupational medicine medical director, believed in “treating injuries such that they are not OSHA recordable, if possible.”
Three medical providers who worked for Advanced told Reveal that clinic directors instructed them to avoid giving any treatment to Amazon workers that would make their injuries recordable. Normally, these providers could prescribe medications, days of rest, physical therapy or workplace restrictions, such as guidance to avoid climbing stairs or lift anything above a certain weight. But clinic directors pressured medical staff to send injured Amazon employees back to work without any of those remedies, said the providers, who asked that their names not be used for fear of harming their careers.
A nurse practitioner who worked at the clinic said she dreaded seeing Amazon patients because she didn’t think she would be able to treat them appropriately. She said she remembers an Amazon worker who came to the clinic in a lot of pain from a wrist injury, crying and asking, “Can’t you do something?”
“I’m really sorry,” the nurse practitioner recalled telling her. “There’s really not a whole lot I can offer you right now.”
In a July 2019 email, Parsons instructed medical staff to contact her or the clinic owner before they “think about giving restrictions or making it recordable” for Amazon patients.
When they did contact the directors to recommend restrictions, the providers said they were usually told to not make them recordable.
“That was made very clear – that there was pressure from Amazon and it seemed like it was very explicit that you should try to avoid recordables at all costs,” said an Advanced provider who left last year. “When I felt like our policies were impacting my ability to make proper medical decisions, that made me very uncomfortable.”
Parsons did not respond to requests for comment. Tony Euser, who owns Advanced Urgent Care, said in an interview that his clinic tries to balance the needs of employers and patients and looks for “common-sense alternatives” to treatment that would make an injury recordable. Many employers seek to limit recordable injuries and lean on workers’ compensation doctors to help them out, he said.
“I wouldn’t put Amazon at the far end of it,” he said, “but I wouldn’t put them on the soft end of it, either.”
Early on in the contract, he said, Amazon representatives would call his clinic out of concern about how certain cases were handled. “Now they don’t call us as much,” he said, “whether they trust us more or whether they just determined that we are trying to do the best we can.”
Euser denied personally pressuring his providers to avoid giving Amazon workers treatment that would make their injuries recordable. He also said he had decided to stop providing occupational medical care for companies, including Amazon, at the end of this year. He said it was too much to balance the needs of employers and their employees.
“It’s not worth it,” Euser said. “We’ve made the decision that we don’t want to be dealing with this anymore. And we don’t want to have to play these games. And I say games, and not – they’re not games. But it’s this back-and-forth, constant thing.”
In Amazon’s statement to Reveal, Amazon spokeswoman Rachael Lighty reiterated the company’s talking point that while workplace injuries are underreported in general, Amazon is different.
“At Amazon, we are focused on improving the safety of our workplace and seek to accurately report across all sites and all incident types, which means recording all injuries or illnesses that meet or likely meet the OSHA criteria for recordkeeping, and ensuring that we learn from these incidents and improve each day,” she said.
Amazon did not respond to questions about why it changed medical clinics for the Thornton warehouse and how medical professionals say they were pressured to keep injuries off the books.
This is an abridged version of an article produced by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. Sign up to read more stories from Reveal.
Citations
Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting is a nonprofit news organization that engages and empowers the public through investigative reporting.
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