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  • Senate report alleges Amazon rejected warehouse safety recommendations due to productivity concerns

    Senate report alleges Amazon rejected warehouse safety recommendations due to productivity concerns

    At least two internal Amazon studies found a link between how quickly the online retailer’s warehouse workers perform tasks and workplace injuries, but the company rejected many safety recommendations out of concern the proposed changes might reduce productivity, according to a U.S. Senate committee report.

    The 160-page review issued Sunday night was compiled by the Democratic majority staff of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. The report is the final product of a probe into Amazon’s warehouse safety practices that U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders initiated last year.

    The Vermont independent, a frequent critic of Amazon who chairs the panel, released an interim report in July that featured some findings from the investigation. The final report, which was mostly based on interviews with nearly 500 former and current Amazon workers, included more details, such as the two internal studies and the reactions they received inside the company.

    Amazon pushed back on the findings Monday, saying in a blog post that Sanders “continues to mislead the American public” about the company’s safety practices and that the report was “wrong on the facts and features selective, outdated information that lacks context and isn’t grounded in reality.”

    The Senate report said Amazon launched an internal study in 2021 to determine the maximum number of times a warehouse worker could perform the same physical tasks without increased risk of harm and potentially developing musculoskeletal disorders.

    The team conducting the Amazon study, known as Project Elderwand, focused on workers who picked items from robotic shelf units. The study concluded that the “likelihood of back injury increases” along with the number of items picked and identified an upper limit on repetitive movements – 1,940 – per 10-hour shift, the report said.

    The study recommended using software to implement breaks “according to each worker’s rate.” It suggested expanding an existing Amazon program that recommended “microbreaks” and making them mandatory for employees who worked above the maximum pace.

    The team stated that the success of a mini pilot program to test out its idea would be conditional on “any negative impact to the (workers) or customer experience,” according to documents cited in the committee report.

    Ultimately, Amazon did not make changes to reduce repetitive worker movements, the report said. The company told the Senate committee it chose not to do so due to “technical reasons” involving the proposed software program, the report said.

    Amazon also said in its blog post that the Project Elderwand pilot program showed the study team’s suggested intervention was “ineffective.”

    Amazon previously had undertaken another study, known as Project Soteria, in 2020 to identify risk factors for injuries and recommend policy changes that would improve worker safety. The multi-team initiative studied two policies Amazon implemented temporarily during the COVID-19 pandemic – giving workers more time off and pausing disciplinary measures “for workers who failed to meet speed requirements,” the report said.

    The study found that both policies lowered injury risks and asked for their permanent adoption.

    But company leaders denied the request, saying it might “negatively impact” productivity, according to Amazon documents cited in the Senate committee report. Amazon leaders also changed the focus of the Project Soteria study by telling the people conducting the review to provide recommendations on how to improve productivity without worsening worker injuries, the report said.

    Amazon disputed the report’s characterization of the events.

    “Project Soteria is an example of this type of team evaluation, where one team explored whether there’s a causal link between pace of work and injuries and another team evaluated the methodology and findings and determined they weren’t valid,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in a written statement.

    Nantel also said that information about Project Soteria was raised in a Washington state worker safety case in which Amazon was accused of four safety violations. A judge assigned to the case ruled in Amazon’s favor in July. Regulators are appealing the ruling.

    “It’s unfortunate that the senator chose to ignore the facts and all of this context,” Nantel said.

    The Senate committee report also alleged that Amazon manipulates its workplace injury data to portray its warehouses as safer than they are, an allegation the company disputed.

    Amazon said it produced “thousands of pages of information and data” for the committee. The majority staff, however, said the company failed to produce documents on the connection between the pace of work and injuries.

    The author’s of the committee report said they learned about the two internal studies from the Washington worker safety case, not Amazon. Once the committee staff members identified the studies by name, they reached out to the company, which ultimately provided the individual documents.

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  • As Amazon expands use of warehouse robots, what will it mean for workers?

    As Amazon expands use of warehouse robots, what will it mean for workers?

    Amazon has introduced a handful of robots in its warehouses that the e-commerce giant says will improve efficiency and reduce employee injuries.

    Two robotic arms named Robin and Cardinal can lift packages that weigh up to 50 pounds. A third, called Sparrow, picks up items from bins and puts them in other containers.

    Proteus, an autonomous mobile robot that operates on the floor, can move carts around a warehouse. The bipedal, humanoid robot Digit is being tested to help move empty totes with its hands. And there’s also Sequoia, a containerized storage system that can present totes to employees in a way that allows them to avoid stretching or squatting to grab inventory.

    Amazon says Robin is currently being used in dozens of warehouses. The others are in a testing stage or haven’t been rolled out widely. But the company says it’s already seeing benefits, such as reducing the time it takes to fulfill orders and helping employees avoid repetitive tasks. However, automation also carries drawbacks for workers, who would have to be retrained for new positions if the robots made their roles obsolete.

    In October, Amazon held an event at a Nashville, Tennessee, warehouse where the company had integrated some of the robots. The Associated Press spoke with Julie Mitchell, the director of Amazon’s robotic sortation technologies, about where the company hopes to go from here. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

    A: This journey that we’ve been on has taken a couple of years. Luckily for us, we’ve been at this for over a decade. So we have a lot of core technology that we can build on top of. We started these particular robots – Cardinal and Proteus – in this building in November 2022. We came in and began playing around with what it would look like to pack and move a production order. Less than two years later, we are at scale and shipping 70% of the items in this building through that robotics system.

    A: We talk about “build, test and scale” and that’s about a two-year cycle for us right now.

    A: As you can probably imagine, we have so many items, so it’s an exceptional challenge. We rely on data and putting our first prototype in a real building, where we expose it to all the things we need it to do. Then we drive down all the reasons that it fails. We give it a lot of sample sizes in a very short period of time. For example, a couple of years ago, we launched our Robin robotics arm – a package manipulation robot – and we’re at 3 billion picks. So the ability to launch into our network, rapidly collect data, scale and iterate has enabled us to go fast.

    The challenge itself can be boiled down to three simple things: you need to perceive the scene, plan your motion and then execute. Today, those are three different parts of our system. Artificial intelligence is going to help us change all of that, and it’s going to be more outcome-driven, like asking it to pick up a bottle of water. We’re on the verge, so that’s why I’m personally excited to be here at the onset of generative AI and use it to dramatically improve the performance of our robotics.

    A: With the technology we’ve deployed here, we’re creating new roles for individuals that can acquire new skills to fulfill those roles. And these new skills are not something that is too difficult to achieve. You don’t need an engineering degree, Ph.D. or any really technical skills to support our robotics systems. We designed the systems so they’re easy to service and train on the job to be a reliability maintenance engineer.

    We are working backwards from the idea that we want to employ more skilled labor. These opportunities are obviously higher paid than the entry level jobs in our buildings. And partnering with MIT has helped us understand what matters most to our team as we’re deploying these technologies across our network.

    A: Not in the adoption. We’re integrating it. But these are complex systems and this is the real world, so things go wrong. For example, we had bad weather due to the storms in the Southeast. When I look at the robotics systems data, I can tell the weather is bad outside because that dramatically affects how the ship dock works.

    When trucks don’t arrive on time or when they can’t leave, you see bottlenecks in the building in strange ways. Containers build up, we have to put them in different places, and then humans need to recover them. So communication between what our robotics system is doing and what we need employees in the building to do to recover is important. It’s a collaboration of automation and humans to deal with real-world problems. It’s not a matter of having robotics take over but making it one system of humans and robotics working together to accomplish the goal of shipping the product.

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