Amazon is one of the companies that has captured the most headlines due to the working conditions in which its collaborators work. Faced with this situation, many union institutions have sought to inform and investigate the company.
The Strategic Organizing Center, a union organization, revealed in a report that beyond the fact that employees have to urinate in bottles or feel frustration at having to reach a production goal, the company’s employees suffer more incidents within the centers than those of other companies in the industry.
The organization indicates that the main reason why they suffer these accidents is because of the speed at which employees must work.
“The company’s obsession with speed has come at a huge cost to Amazon’s workforce. For more than a decade, Amazon has made headlines for dangerous health and safety conditions at its facilities. In 2019, several groups of researchers and journalists analyzed standardized worker injury records kept at Amazon facilities. They found that Amazon’s injury rates were more than double the injury rate in the general, notoriously dangerous, warehousing industry, ”the organization says in a searchable publication.
According to the report, there were 6.5 injuries per 100 full-time employees in Amazon warehouses, while injuries recorded by non-Amazon warehouses are on average 4 per 100 employees.
Amazon’s injury rate was also more than double that of Walmart, its biggest retail competitor, in the United States. The report states that Amazon workers are not only injured more frequently than in other parts of the warehouse sector, but they are also injured more seriously.
Last year there were 5.9 serious injuries per 100 workers in Amazon warehouses that resulted in them losing their jobs completely, almost 80% more than the warehouse industry as a whole.
Although the statistics were collected inside warehouses in the United States, in Mexico, Amazon has been in the sights of the media for the testimony of 15 workers, who told Reuters that inside these warehouses they experience abuse and unjustified dismissals.
At the time, Amazon Mexico said that its employees work under a strict internal policy, where they are assured of fair treatment, so the reasons why the news agency denounced them lacked justification.
“Interviews with workers, copies of pay stubs and WhatsApp messages from Amazon HR reveal that many had to work overtime beyond legal limits, while others were fired without compensation, forced to resign or fired. after falling ill with COVID-19 ”, reads in the one of Reuters.
