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Amazon workers unable to work due to on-the-job injuries have turned to online fundraising campaigns to pay their bills as they fight for compensation and disability benefits.
Three current employees, injured while working in the tech giant’s warehouses, described a “bureaucratic and terrible process” as they sought financial support. One was left homeless.
During interviews with The Guardian, They alleged the company ignored workers’ concerns about the stresses of warehouse work, denied requests for compensation or benefits after injuries, and put productivity above all else..
In response, Amazon acknowledged that it had encountered “some” problems, but claimed that workers had provided “a lot of inaccurate information.” The company did not specify which parts of the accounts it considered inaccurate.
Amazon – one of the world’s largest employers, with 1.5 million employees worldwide – has long faced criticism over working conditions and safety inside its warehouses. He has repeatedly responded, stating that the company was “working to be best in class” in safety as part of its stated intention to create “the safest place to work on Earth.”
However, over the years, numerous workers have come forward with disturbing stories of injuries sustained on the job; being sent back to work by Amazon’s on-site healthcare unit, Amcare; and long fights and delays in trying to obtain workers’ compensation, medical care, accommodations, and disability benefits in the months and years that followed.
“That’s why we are homeless”
In August 2023, Keith Williams was loading containers by himself from a trailer on the shipping dock of Amazon’s SWF1 warehouse in Rock Tavern, New York. A computer desk fell on him and hit the back of his head.
Feeling nauseous and dizzy after the blow, Williams went to Amcare, where he was given aspirin and ice. He went to the emergency room because he said they didn’t know what to do for him at Amcare.
Upon returning to work the next day, Williams said he was assigned to light duties, but managers constantly pestered him by asking what he was doing sitting down despite accommodations due to his injury. “They just sit you in uncomfortable places and display you like a human zoo in the middle of the warehouse,” he recalled.
“That’s all they care about: how much you can earn from them, how much they can take from you, how little they can give you, and how much they can take from you.”
Just five months later, in February, Williams was injured again on the job after being tasked with lifting heavy packages repeatedly, without being rotated to less intense departments. When he tried to lift a package, he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his wrist and elbow, and could not lift it.
She went to Amcare, before heading to urgent care of her own volition after waiting an hour at Amcare.
Out of work and injured, Williams has not yet received disability benefits. “I’m fighting with the workers’ compensation insurance company, they give me a lot of thought,” she said. “Because I hadn’t been there for a full year when I got hurt in February, I couldn’t receive all of my benefits, which is why we were homeless, because we can’t afford housing.”
In April, Williams and her family were evicted from their home after a dispute with their landlord. Unable to raise the funds for a new rental, they were forced to move into a motel.
As Williams recovers from his repetitive motion injury, a GoFundMe campaign was initiated on behalf of his family as they dealt with the financial impact of his work injury.
“I have no grip strength,” he said. “I can’t carry things for long. Even a gallon of milk is exhausting… My daily life has been so disrupted that everything now has an extra measure of difficulty.
“You just don’t think about, or care about, what kind of stress is being put on the body, even though we constantly say something about it.”
‘I’ve reviewed my savings, 401k and credit cards’
Two years after starting work as a picker and stevedorer at Amazon’s STL8 warehouse outside St Louis, Missouri, in August 2021, Christine Manno began experiencing severe carpal tunnel symptoms due to the repetitive motions inherent to her job. . She had two surgeries, the following October and December, and returned to full function a few days after her second surgery.
“Over the course of a 12-hour shift, I do three 12-hour shifts,” Manno said. “I could lift thousands of pounds over the course of the shift and my hands were still visibly swollen, so they started to get worse.”
In May 2022, when reaching a high box, he felt pain in his back, both arms and even his legs.
After his initial claim for disability benefits faced resistance, Manno hired an attorney. Finally, his case was approved.
In January 2023, eight months after the injury, he saw a spine surgeon. “He agreed that it was during the performance of my job that these injuries occurred,” Manno said. “Until that moment I had not had any type of treatment. “They wouldn’t allow anything.”
While working while injured, Manno was able to work with restrictions. He started physical therapy, but said it didn’t help relieve her pain.
During that time, while driving a turret truck in the Amazon warehouse, which does not require lifting, Manno became dizzy and lightheaded, so he stopped and informed his supervisor. She says they told her to sit down, but 20 minutes later they ordered her to get back in the truck and finish the job.
Amazon informed him in July 2023 that they would no longer accept his restrictions, he says, even though a doctor recommended permanent restrictions. According to Manno, the doctor requested a referral to a pain management specialist, but Amazon also denied this.
With his short-term disability benefits running out, he has more recently had difficulty persuading his company to grant him long-term benefits.
After her medical problems and inability to work left her in financial difficulties, she began a GoFundMe while awaiting a decision on benefits.
“They keep telling me they need more documentation, but workers’ compensation won’t let me see a doctor to get more documentation, but I can’t get treatment because when they know it’s a work injury, they won’t authorize treatment through the health agency. for sure,” Manno said. “I’ve gone through my savings, 401k and credit cards.
“I have several collectors who call 20 or 30 times a day. It’s been hell, and all the stress directly affects my neck injury and I have severe sciatica and very limited use of my hands, I lose sensation and end up dropping things. “My hands don’t work like they should.”
“Security is an afterthought”
Back at SWF1 at Rock Tavern, longshoreman Nik Moran broke his finger last August. He drove himself to the emergency room, where he received stitches to heal the injury.
“I went back to work right away,” because Amazon’s workers’ compensation unit “doesn’t pay you the first week,” he said. “It’s just a bureaucratic and terrible process.”
Shortly after the injury, he obtained a workers’ compensation attorney because he was aware of the problems his co-workers had experienced in trying to obtain medical coverage and compensation for injuries on the job, and noted that Amazon has questioned coverage for his care. medical for the injury. .
“Amazon talks a lot about security, but their top priority is productivity,” Moran said. “Security is an afterthought.”
Amazon spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel, contacted by The Guardian about the three workers’ accounts, said: “The safety and health of our employees is our top priority. While we do not normally comment on employees’ individual circumstances, unfortunately these people have chosen to share a lot of inaccurate information.
“Each of these claims has been thoroughly investigated, and in the few cases where we have found issues, our team has worked to address your concerns and meet your needs as appropriate.”
Amazon did not respond to a request for clarification about what information it considered inaccurate and what issues were found and resolved.
‘The safest place on the planet to work’
Amazon, which fiance three years ago to become “the safest place to work on Earth,” it also said it was taking steps to cut its workplace injury rate in half by 2025. But labor and safety advocacy groups of workers say their injury rates remain dangerously high.
The Center for Strategic Organizing, a coalition of unions, annually publishes reports on Amazon’s injury rates for the past four years. his last report found that Amazon’s injury rate for 2023 was 6.5 injuries per 100 workers. In 2020, the year before the company first announced plans to cut its injury rate in half, the SOC says it was 6.6 per 100 workers.
Injury rates at Amazon remain “very high,” argued David Rosenblatt, deputy director of strategic research and campaigns at the Center for Strategic Organizing. “They’ve barely gone down, a couple of percent over the last year.”
In a separate report released last month, the National Employment Law Project said Amazon’s injury rate at warehouse facilities was “more than 1.5 times” that of TJX Companies, the owner of TJ Maxx and TK Maxx, and almost triple that of Walmart.
Amazon denied the reports’ allegations. “These documents are full of misleading and false information, and are created by groups that refuse to accept that we have made real progress because doing so would undermine their agenda,” said Vogel, the spokesman, who stated his overall injury rate in the United States had decreased by 28%.
Williams, the SWF1 worker in New York, recently had some good news. After his online campaign raised thousands of dollars, his family accepted a rental application. They hope to move into a new apartment next month.
“There were a lot of tears,” he told The Guardian. “It was a little bit of sunshine in a dark time.”
He’s still fighting for Amazon disability benefits. “The gap between what this company earns and what it gives to its workers is too high,” Williams said.
