Worldwide marketplace Amazon is celebrated for its seemingly endless arsenal of available items and lightning fast shipping. It's advancements in AI and robotics have helped push the company toward maximum efficiency. However, a recent report shows that these technologies meant to ease the workloads of human employees have been doing the complete opposite for years.

Amazon is a global shipping marketplace that continues to relentlessly snowball in size and reach. Just this year, its stock is up by more than 50-percent, while founder, and 'richest person in the world,' Jeff Bezos’ personal wealth has already garnered about $60 billion thus far. On a 'Cyber Monday' in 2014, Amazon operations unveiled its new robot filled warehouse in California. The robots were implemented to do the pulling from warehouse shelves, so humans were no longer hustling miles a day down tall aisles gathering orders. According to Amazon's operations at the time, the hour or more it took to process a package had been shaved down to as little as 15 minutes using the robots. However, it turns out that the increased efficiency of the robots put more pressure on employees packaging the orders to keep up. Not only with their artificial counterparts, but with the ever increasing quotas implemented by warehouse supervisors.

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According to a detailed report by Reveal Newsa cache of company records including internal safety reports and weekly injury numbers from Amazon's network of fulfillment centers, shows that company officials have willingly misled the public about its record of worker safety. Weekly data between 2016 to 2019 and from more than 150 Amazon warehouses shows industry-leading numbers in employee injuries, particularly in warehouses equipped with robotic assistance. Additionally, these injuries are most prevalent during Prime week and during holiday peak season like Cyber Monday. Amazon has publicly touted the tens of millions of dollars it has invested to enhance safety practices in its facilities. However, its injury rates have gone up each of the past four years. In 2019 alone, the marketplace mega giant recorded 14,000 serious injuries. According to the data from Reveal, the overall rate of 7.7 serious injuries per 100 employees was 33-percent higher than in 2016 and nearly double the most recent industry standard.

Perhaps The Customer Shouldn't ALWAYS Come First

Jeff Bezos

Several recorded accounts from both Amazon warehouse workers and former safety professionals say the company has used the robots to meet the production quotas aligned with same-day and next-day Prime shipping, to the point that humans can’t keep up without hurting themselves. While the debut of the robots came with the prospect of easing the workload of Amazon employees, injury rates have actually been significantly higher at robotic warehouses than at its traditional sites. While the reports show a committed effort from Amazon to improve processes with technology, they have yet to propose reducing the intense workload for its warehouse employees. Furthermore, monthly bulletins released by Amazon’s environment, health and safety team, show that the analytically focused company has been well aware of its safety issues.

Amazon does set safety goals and monitors progress closely, but internal documents show the company has failed to hit said targets every year. In 2018 for example, Amazon aimed to lower its injury rate by 20-percent, but injury rates went up. The next year, the goal was a 5-percent decrease. Still, the injury rate increased. In May, Jeff Bezos told shareholders that nothing was more important than the health and safety of Amazon's teams, but its track record says otherwise. A spokesperson for the company revealed that Amazon has committed over $1 billion in new investments toward operations safety measures, ranging from technology investments in safety to protection from the spread of COVID-19 in 2020. That being said, the spokesperson failed to explain how the company justifies its claim that these initiatives are working, while injury rates have continued to rise each year. At this point Amazon might be too big to fail, but its extreme focus on getting the customer everything they need quickly is putting its own employees in serious jeopardy.

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Source: Reveal News