In a scathing July 2024 interim report of its investigation into Amazon, Senator Bernie Sanders focused on big corporate greed, asserting that a lack of spending on employee wages and safety initiatives balanced against corporate profits politicize an issue that is more granular, and shifts the focus from where it belongs – THE INJURED WORKER.
The safety and well-being of the workforce should be the focus and priority of ALL employers.
The report, “PEAK SEASONS, PEAK INJURIES: Amazon Warehouses are Especially Dangerous During Prime Day and the Holiday Season – and the Company Knows It,” calls on employers to do more for the injured worker and highlighted critical points about workplace safety that apply to all employers, not only Amazon.
The impact of overexertion
Recent OSHA data show that transportation and material moving is the industry with the highest workplace days away, restricted, or transfer from work (the DART rate), with the majority of incidents occurring from overexertion and bodily reaction.
When looking at this type of injury exposure and cause, most of these injuries will be musculoskeletal sprain and strain type injuries from either repetitive work or improper lifting, pushing, or pulling.
Here’s what employers can do to prevent these types of injuries:
Eliminate the risk. It was reported earlier this year that Amazon has grown to over 750,000 robots and replaced over 100,000 humans. Reducing the interactions of humans in the production environment is the ultimate way to prevent injuries, but there are others such as, providing equipment to assist in lifting and moving materials and redesigning production lines.
Mitigate the risk by ensuring employees are properly trained to safely perform the functions of their job. This means not just training them on the job task, but rather the safe way to perform it. Also, ensuring there is adequate staff to manage the volume of the work and increasing that staff during busier times.
Insure the risk – every job contains a level of risk, and it is the duty of every employer to eliminate or mitigate those risks when appropriate, but as a last resort, all employers must have workers’ compensation insurance to cover any injuries when they do occur.
Why should employers strive to eliminate and mitigate risk?
The most important reason is to protect their most valuable assets, their employees. It is the right thing to do. A workplace injury can be devasting to the employee and their family. There is also a ripple effect across the workplace after an injury occurs.
What are the repercussions to an employer that does not protect its workers? Are there legal ramifications?
In the 70’s, Ford underwent a cost benefit analysis and decided that it was cheaper to pay the lawsuits resulting from the exploding rear gas tanks in the Ford Pinto rather than pay the $5 to $8 per vehicle to fix the issues. While a company the size of Amazon can perform a cost benefit analysis of safety vs. workers’ comp costs, a small or midsized business can suffer crippling financial consequences for not investing in safety.
The cost of insurance is directly proportional to the cost of injuries sustained by an employer’s workforce. Additionally, there are the fines and penalties that can be assessed by OSHA when an employer violates a safety standard set by OSHA, or other state regulatory bodies.
If an employer fails to protect its employees, OSHA can investigate and levy penalties for violations which continue to increase year over year and currently amount to $16,131 per violation or into the hundreds of thousands of dollars for employers who are found to have willful or repeated violations.
For small to mid-size business owners who are the backbone of America and employ the majority of workers in our country, the cost of insurance and possibility of fines and penalties are ample incentives to implement safety and protections for their employees.
Businesses that need direction or help on how to begin to make their work environment a safer place can get assistance from OSHA, their current workers’ compensation insurance carrier, their insurance broker, or their PEO partner, all of whom have resources and capacity to help their employer partners improve their workplace safety.