Not a Surprise

Amazon has announced that it is making major efforts to reduce workplace injuries. The net result is a 15% increase in injury rates in its factories.

As grim as it is, it's even worse in its more automated warehouses, so Amazon is literally innovating by injuring and killing its employees:

In the year since Amazon pledged to become "Earth's Safest Place to Work," the serious injury rate at the company's American warehouses rose 15%, according to a new report from the union coalition Strategic Organizing Center.

The report, which was published Tuesday and relies on federal injury data, shows that the average Amazon worker was more likely to get hurt in 2021 than they were in 2020. This comes as the company said it spent $300 million on worker safety and instituted a slate of new programs it claims are designed to reduce injuries.

Despite these initiatives, Amazon employees tend to suffer nearly double the injury rates as those at non-Amazon warehouses, according to the federal data. They also account for an outsized number of worker injuries across the US. In 2021, Amazon was responsible for a full half of the US warehouse industry's reported injuries while making up only a third of its workers, according to the report.

Serious injury rates were also nearly 30% higher at Amazon's newer automated warehouses, where workers keep pace with robots that rarely slow down or stop, than at its facilities without robots, the report found. Amazon expects workers in robotic facilities to perform as many as four times the number of repetitive motions per hour as their counterparts in non-robotic facilities, The New York Times previously reported.

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Labor activists in the United States have made Amazon's high injury rate a cornerstone of union organizing campaigns at the company, often pointing to the speed of work at its warehouses. The Amazon Labor Union, which earlier this month won the first union election at an Amazon warehouse in the retail giant's 27-year history, has said Amazon needs to allow injured workers more time off to recover. 

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Washington state's workplace safety agency has said there is a "direct connection" between Amazon's "very high pace of work" and high rates of repetitive stress injuries like strains, sprains, and hernias among the company's warehouse workers. When safety inspectors tried to calculate the risk of injury at one Washington state warehouse, they found workers were moving so quickly that "it broke the model," Insider previously reported.

Seriously, authorities need to start arresting executives at companies that behave so cavalierly about employee safety.

It's the only things that would stop those psychopaths.