Sarah Jacobs
An Amazon warehouse in Robbinsville, New Jersey.
- A new report claims that seven Amazon workers have died on or near the job since 2013.
- The report was compiled by National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, a private nonprofit worker advocacy group, which named it as one of their "dirty dozen" companies.
- "We are proud of safety record and thousands of Amazonians work hard every day innovating ways to make it even better," an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.
Amazon has been singled out in a new report for workplace safety.
The company was one of the "dirty dozen'" on a list composed by the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, a private nonprofit worker advocacy group.
"This year, we'll identify several companies who received specific warnings about safety hazards and failed to correct them. Workers paid the ultimate price for these failures," Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, co-executive director of National COSH, said in a statement.
The report was compiled by worker safety activists and took information from publicly available sources.
"Criteria for inclusion included severity of injuries to workers; exposure to unnecessary and preventable risk; repeat citations by relevant state and federal authorities; and activity by workers to improve their health and
safety conditions," the report reads.
Amazon landed on the list for "a disturbing pattern of preventable deaths," the report says, including seven deaths since 2013. Eleven other companies landed on the list, including Tesla.
"Amazon workers suffer injuries - and sometimes lose their lives - in a work environment with a relentless demand to fill orders and close monitoring of employee actions," the report reads.
The seven workers at Amazon who lost their lives were involved in several different kinds of accidents and crashes. According to the report, two were crushed by forklifts in the warehouses, one was run over by a truck, one was killed by an SUV driver, one suffered a fatal heart-related event during an overnight shift, one was dragged and crushed by a conveyor belt, and one was killed and crushed by a pallet loader.
Amazon, in a statement to Business Insider, defended its workplace safety record, noting the training all employees have to go through, and its commitment to improving safety throughout its warehouse network in conjunction with its high standards.
Amazon also said that it takes "any serious incident" seriously, and is working to improve.
"While any serious incident is one too many, we learn and improve our programs working to prevent future incidents," the statement reads. "We are proud of safety record and thousands of Amazonians work hard every day innovating ways to make it even better."
Read Amazon's full statement below.
Amazon has created over 130,000 jobs in the last year alone and now employees over 560,000 people around the world. Ensuring the safety of these associates is our number one priority. Operational meetings, new hire orientation, process training and new process development begin with safety and have safety metrics and audits integrated within each program. We expect our leadership to continually improve the safety results of their operations by reducing physical risk through the design of processes, equipment and work areas, applying high standards of safety performance each day, improving capabilities through training and coaching using rigorous management reporting systems to track and audit their progress.
We have also launched the Safety Leadership Index across our US operations where every associate is surveyed through our Connections Program answering a series of questions each month to measure the perception of safety in their facility. Each of these safety programs and measures apply to everyone working in our facilities - full time, part time, seasonal, and temporary. While any serious incident is one too many, we learn and improve our programs working to prevent future incidents. We are proud of safety record and thousands of Amazonians work hard every day innovating ways to make it even better. We encourage anyone to come see for themselves by taking a tour at one of our fulfillment center
