Saturday, December 14, 2019

Report: At Fall River’s Amazon facility, 125 injuries in 2018





Report: At Fall River’s Amazon facility, 125 injuries in 2018







FALL RIVER — A recent report by The Center for Investigative Reporting indicates that the city’s Amazon fulfillment center has a higher rate of injury than similar facilities nationally operated by the company and has a rate of serious injury roughly three times higher than the industry average.
Through the reporting of its Reveal podcast, The Center for Investigative Reporting collected annual summaries of work-related injuries and illness for 27 Amazon facilities across the country filed with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration by current and former Amazon employees. These facilities make up roughly one-third of the fulfillment centers Amazon says it operates in the United States.
According to the podcast’s reporting, Fall River ranked near the middle of the reported facilities in terms of total number of employee injuries and rate of so-called “serious injuries.”
According to OSHA records The Herald News accessed through The Center for Investigative Reporting’s compiled data, Fall River’s Amazon facility reported a total of 125 workplace injuries last year. This number equates to roughly one employee injury being reported every three days in Fall River.
Of the 27 facilities reported on by The Center for Investigative Reporting, Fall River’s Amazon facility had the 15th highest number of total reported injuries in 2018 and the 11th highest rate of what the report refers to as “serious injuries.” The Center for Investigative Reporting also alleges that Fall River’s serious injury rate is approximately three times the national industry average.
A spokeswoman for Amazon challenged the notion that injury levels at facilities such as Fall River’s fulfillment center are high.
“It’s inaccurate to say that Amazon fulfillment centers are unsafe and efforts to paint our workplace as such based solely on the number of injury recordings is misleading given the size of our workforce,” said Rachael Lighty, a regional communications manager for Amazon. “While many companies under-record safety incidents in order to keep their rates low, Amazon does the opposite – we take an aggressive stance on recording injuries no matter how big or small, which results in elevated recordable rates and makes comparisons misleading.”
Amazon reports that it provided employees with an estimated 1 million hours of safety training in 2018, and invested over $55 million in safety improvement projects.
Fall River’s fulfillment center ended 2018 with roughly 950 employees on its payroll. While OSHA records don’t note the number of employees reporting injuries, if each of the 125 injuries reported at Amazon in 2018 represented an individual employee, then roughly 13% of the company’s local workforce reported injuries last year.
OSHA’s data also shows that Fall River’s Amazon employees missed a total of 4,738 days of work due to injuries sustained while on the job.
The Fall River facility’s annual log of injuries filed with OSHA shows the majority of reported injuries, approximately 80, were filed as various sprains, followed by about 20 injuries listed as various forms of bruising. The remaining injuries were a mix of concussions, lacerations, abrasions and other incidents.
Amazon’s Fall River facility officially opened in 2017. The company’s local warehouse makes up roughly a quarter of the total number of people Amazon employs in Massachusetts.





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