Senate report accuses Amazon of manipulating warehouse injury data

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is accused of manipulating workplace injury data to hide safety issues, according to the findings of an 18-month investigation by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee.

Led by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the “Injury-Productivity Trade-off” study reviewed seven years of workplace injury reports at the ecommerce giant. The report concluded that Amazon (AMZN) warehouses had “significantly higher” injury rates than at non-Amazon warehouses, and higher than the industry average. Amazon (AMZN) employees are also twice as likely to be injured as employees at non-Amazon warehouses, and in 2023, Amazon recorded 36% more injuries than the industry average.

The study blames Amazon’s (AMZN) need for speed and “grueling productivity quotas,” forcing employees to work at an “extremely fast and often dangerous pace.”

In response, the company claims the main purpose of the report is “fundamentally flawed” and “wrong on the facts, weav[ing] together out-of-date documents and unverifiable anecdotes to create a pre-conceived narrative that [Sanders’] allies have been pushing for the past 18 months.”

Separately, a lack of office space is delaying Amazon’s (AMZN) order for employees to return to the office, according to Business Insider.

To improve collaboration among teams, Amazon (AMZN) told employees they must work in the office five days a week beginning January 2, even as competitors have more relaxed rules on working from home and is even more stringent than Amazon’s (AMZN) work policies prior to the pandemic.

But without adequate workspaces, the company is now delaying RTO mandates for some employees in Atlanta, Houston, Nashville, and New York to as far as May, according to an internal memo viewed by Business Insider.

“For the vast majority of employees, assigned workspaces will be available by January 2, 2025. If your assigned workspace isn’t ready by January 2, we still expect everyone to begin fully working from the office by that date,” the memo said.

The RTO policy has been increasingly unpopular with Amazon (AMZN) employees ever since CEO Andy Jassy sent a company-wide memo in September announcing the change to its work culture.

According to the job review site Blind, more than 90% of the 2.5K employees polled were unhappy with the mandate, while nearly three-quarters of the respondents are thinking of looking for a new job. And there is even chatter that the RTO policy is Amazon’s (AMZN) disguised efforts to trim its workforce without announcing expensive and disruptive lay-offs.