Amazon workers unable to work due to on-the-job injuries have turned to online fundraisers to pay their bills as they fight for compensation and disability benefits.
Three current employees who were injured while working in the tech giant’s warehouses described a “bureaucratic, horrible process” as they sought financial support. One became homeless.
During interviews with the Guardian, they claimed the company ignored workers’ concerns about warehouse workloads, denied claims for compensation or post-injury benefits, and prioritized productivity.
In response, Amazon acknowledged that it had found “a few” problems, but claimed that workers provided “a lot of inaccurate information.” The company did not specify which parts of the accounting it considers inaccurate.
Amazon – one of the world’s largest employers with 1.5 million employees worldwide – has long faced criticism for working and safety conditions in its warehouses. She repeatedly refused, saying 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, many workers have come forward with disturbing stories about injuries they suffered on the job; being sent back to work by Amazon’s medical care arm, Amcare; and the long struggles and delays in trying to get workers’ compensation, medical care, housing, and disability benefits in the months and years that followed.
“This is why we’re homeless”
In August 2023, Keith Williams was single-handedly loading containers from a trailer on a shipping dock at Amazon’s SWF1 warehouse in Rock Tavern, New York. A computer desk fell on him and hit him in the back of the head.
Feeling nauseous and dizzy after the hit, Williams went to Amcare where he was given aspirin and ice. He went to the emergency room because they said Amcare didn’t know what to do for him.
The following day, Williams returned to work and said he was given light duty, but was still harassed by managers asking what he was doing while sitting, despite accommodations for his injury. “They just put you in uncomfortable places and you’re exposed like a human zoo in the middle of a warehouse,” he recalled.
“That’s all they care about: how much you can make them, how much they can squeeze out of you, how little they can give you and how much they can get out of you.”
Just five months later, in February, Williams was injured again on the job after being tasked with repeatedly lifting heavy packages without being reassigned to less intensive wards. As he tried to pick up the package, he suddenly felt a shooting pain in his wrist and elbow and couldn’t lift it.
He went to Amcare and after waiting at Amcare for an hour he went to urgent care on his own.
Out of work and injured, Williams still receives disability benefits. “I’m fighting the workers’ compensation insurance company, they’re giving me a lot,” he said. “Because I wasn’t there for a whole year when I got injured in February I couldn’t get my full benefits and that’s why we’re homeless – because we can’t afford housing.”
In April, Williams and his family were evicted from their home after a dispute with their landlord. Unable to raise funds for a new lease, they were forced to move into a motel.
As Williams recovers from his repetitive motion injury, a GoFundMe campaign has been started on behalf of his family as they deal with the financial impact of his workplace injury.
“I have no grip strength,” he said. “I can’t carry things for very long. Even a gallon of milk is tiring… My daily life has been hit so hard that everything now has an extra level of difficulty.
“We don’t think or care about the stress that’s put on the body, even though we talk about it all the time.”
“I went through my savings, 401k and credit cards”
Two years after starting work as a picker and stacker 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 in her job. She had two operations, in October and December, and returned to full duty a few days after the second operation.
“During a 12-hour shift, I do three 12-hour shifts,” Manno said. “I could lift thousands of pounds in a shift and my hands were still visibly swollen, so they started to deteriorate.
In May 2022, when she reached for a tall box, she felt pain in her back, both arms, and down her legs.
After her initial application for disability benefits was met with opposition, Manno retained an attorney. In the end, her case was approved.
In January 2023, eight months after the injury, she saw a spine surgeon. “He agreed that these injuries occurred during my employment,” Manno said. “Until then I had no type of treatment. They wouldn’t allow anything.”
While working through the injury, Manno was able to work with limitations. She started physical therapy, but said it didn’t help ease her pain.
During this time, while driving a tower truck in an Amazon warehouse that does not require lifting, Manno became dizzy and light-headed, stopped and informed his supervisor. She says she was told to sit down, but after 20 minutes ordered to return to the truck and finish the job.
Amazon informed her in July 2023 that they would no longer accommodate her restrictions, she says, despite a doctor’s recommendation for permanent restrictions. According to Mann, the doctor’s request for a referral to a pain management specialist, but Amazon declined that as well.
Since her short-term disability benefits have been exhausted, she has recently been trying to convince the company to give her long-term benefits.
After being financially strapped due to health issues and being unable to work, she started a GoFundMe while she waited for 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 allow treatment through health. insurance,” Manno said. “I went through my savings, 401k and credit cards.
“I have several accounts collectors that call me 20 or 30 times a day. It’s been hell and all the stress is directly affecting my neck injury and I have severe sciatica and I have very limited use of my hands, I lose feeling and end up dropping things. My hands don’t work like they should.”
“Safety is an afterthought”
Back at SWF1 at Rock Tavern last August stower Nik Moran broke his finger. He went to the emergency room himself, where he received stitches for the injury.
“I went right back to work,” because Amazon’s workers’ compensation department “won’t pay you the first week,” he said. “It’s just a bureaucratic, horrible process.
Shortly after the injury, he retained a workers’ compensation attorney because he was aware of the problems his co-workers were having trying to get medical coverage and compensation for work injuries, noting that Amazon disputed his medical coverage for the injury. .
“Amazon plays a big game on security, but their top priority is productivity,” Moran said. “Security is an afterthought.”
When contacted by the Guardian about the accounts of the three workers, Amazon spokeswoman Maureen Lynch Vogel said: “The safety and health of our employees is our highest priority. While we don’t usually comment on individual employee situations, unfortunately these individuals chose to share a lot of inaccurate information.
“Each of these claims was thoroughly investigated and – in the few cases where we found issues – our team worked to address their concerns and accommodate their needs.
Amazon did not respond to a request for clarification on which information it believed to be inaccurate and what issues had been found and resolved.
“The Safest Place to Work on Earth”
Amazon, which three years ago pledged to become the “safest place to work on Earth,” also said it was taking steps to halve its workplace injury rate by 2025. But labor and worker safety groups say the injury rate remains dangerously high.
The Strategic Organizing Center, a coalition of unions, has released annual reports on Amazon’s injury rates over the past four years. Its latest 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 the injury rate in half, SOC says it was 6.6 per 100 workers.
Amazon’s injury rate remains “very high,” argued David Rosenblatt, deputy director of strategic research and campaigns at the Strategic Organization Center. “They’ve barely dropped at all, just a few percent over the last year.”
In a separate report released last month, the National Employment Law Project claimed that Amazon’s injury rate at warehouse facilities was “more than 1.5 times” that of TJX Companies, owner of TJ Maxx and TK Maxx, and nearly three times that of Walmart.
Amazon denied the allegations in the reports. “These documents are full of misleading and false information and are created by groups that refuse to admit that we’ve made real progress because that would undermine their agenda,” said Vogel, the spokesman, who said his overall U.S. injury rate had dropped 28%.
Williams, a SWF1 worker in New York, had good news recently. After his online campaign raised thousands of dollars, his family accepted the lease request. They hope to move into a new apartment next month.
“There were a lot of tears,” he told the Guardian. “It was a bit of sunshine in a dark time.
He’s still fighting for Amazon’s disability benefits. “The gap between how much this company makes and how much it gives to its employees is too, too wide,” Williams said.