The hidden cost of your Prime Day purchases

Amazon’s 48-hour Prime Day sale — in which the multinational e-commerce corporation offers a wide range of discounts to its endless catalog of products, from $24 Hydro Flask tumblers to $80 Beats earbuds — is over. It’s a barrage of deals that few can refuse, made even sweeter by Amazon’s same-day, one-day, or two-day delivery service.

Unsurprisingly, it’s an incredibly profitable day for Amazon. Last Prime Day, the company saw $12.7 billion in sales and over 375 million items purchased, the largest numbers it’s seen since Prime Day launched nearly 10 years ago in 2015. Adobe Analytics, an organization that studies e-commerce data, predicted that this year’s sale will be another record-breaker, with a forecast of $14 billion dollars in sales.

But Amazon’s self-proclaimed customer celebration comes at a cost. While Prime members can purchase goods with the ease of a few clicks year-round, getting those millions of products to arrive at their doorsteps in just a day or two is far more intensive — and even dangerous, as research and investigations into the company show — for the warehouse workers and delivery drivers that Amazon employs and relies on. The speed and scale is worse on Prime Day, when even more consumers are buying things.

Workers have long been vocal about the risks they face on the job to keep up with consumer demands. On July 15, the eve of Prime Day, a group of former and current Amazon workers showed up to the corporation’s New York City office to deliver stories from workers about injuries and deaths on the job and to request a meeting with the vice president of Amazon’s Global Workplace Health and Safety, Sarah Rhoads.

Speakers shared their experiences of getting hurt, being overworked, and being denied workers’ compensation. One of the banners held up by workers read, “Same-day delivery, lifetime of injury.”

It shouldn’t shock anyone that working in a warehouse for long hours can be grueling, tiresome work. But the frequency at which Amazon workers are hurt on the job — with injuries ranging from musculoskeletal disorders developed from repetitive, uncomfortable movements and heavy lifting to broken bones — is not the industry standard.

Kat Cole, a worker at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York, and an organizer with the Democratic Reform Caucus of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), says that regardless of what time of year it is, working a shift at one of Amazon’s warehouses is difficult. But during the week of the Prime Day sales, the pressure is up.

“You have people breathing down your neck,” Cole told Vox. That increased volume of work puts stress on workers and leads to more injuries, she added. She’s no stranger to injuries herself, even outside of Prime Day and other big sales weeks. “I go home with at least one huge black and blue bruise on my legs, at least once a week.”

She says her coworkers have suffered from a variety of injuries and illnesses while on the job: concussions, slipped discs, a sprained wrist, a broken ankle.

Luke Cianciotto, an Amazon delivery driver in the northern Chicago area, says the increased workload doesn’t just include more deliveries. To accommodate for the influx of work on Prime Day, he says more drivers are hired leading up to it, and more veteran drivers are tasked with training them.

“What ends up happening is you put these drivers on the road, setting them up for failure,” Cianciotto told Vox. “They do a bad job. And they don’t deserve that.”

While Cianciotto and his fellow delivery drivers have been on strike for the last three weeks, his experience with Prime Day in the past includes drivers working late into the night, delivering hundreds upon hundreds of packages that fill their vans “wall to wall, floor to ceiling.”

On an average week for full-time Amazon warehouse employees, shifts can be anywhere between 10 to 12 hours. Cole said that during weeks with increased consumer demand from events like Prime Day, it’s common for Amazon to schedule “mandatory extra time” — additional hours or days added on to workers’ shifts to assist with these surges, on top of this already demanding schedule.

With Prime Day being in the middle of July, some Amazon employees aren’t just working under extra pressure — they’re working through severe heat, too, with temperatures rising as high as 85 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the warehouse. At the JFK8 facility, Cole and her fellow union organizers have taken it upon themselves to hand out Gatorade and ice pops to her coworkers before they start their shifts. Cole says Amazon will put up signs reminding people that the company cares and to take breaks. Amazon will also try to “lighten the mood,” Cole says, with novelties like DJs or offering lemonade. But she says that’s not what workers need.

“They need the warehouse to be cooler, they need safer working conditions, they need to know that they can take these breaks when they need them without penalty or retaliation,” Cole said. “That’s what we need.”

In a statement to Vox, Amazon said its heat mitigation practices “meets or exceeds state requirements and federal guidance” and included a link to the company’s heat prevention measures. (Note: While the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) provides guidance on heat, there is currently no enforceable federal workplace standard to protect workers from heat specifically, nor is there a workplace heat illness prevention requirement in New York, where the JFK8 warehouse is located.)

In today’s market, companies are competing with Amazon by offering their own version of Prime Day sales and rapid delivery dates. But even with growing competition from the likes of Target and Walmart, Amazon is still one of the leaders in the pack of e-commerce giants — and that includes leading in workplace injuries.

In April 2021, the company published a letter from then-CEO Jeff Bezos about its commitment to being “Earth’s Safest Place to Work.” Just a month later, the company announced its health and safety program called WorkingWell, with a goal to cut its recordable incident rate (RIR) — or how often injuries or illness occur in the workplace per 100 full-time employees — in half by 2025.

When the announcement was made, the RIR was 7.6 per 100 full-time employees, according to Amazon’s most recent annual safety report. Amazon would need to reduce its incident rate by at least 10 percent each year in order to slash the RIR by half. In 2022, the RIR was 6.7, a reduction of 11.8 percent from the previous year, appearing to be on track.

But one report released this past May from the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition of labor unions, challenges Amazon’s self-report. In its analysis of data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the center found that in 2022, there were 6.9 injuries for every 100 full-time employees, compared to 7.9 injuries in 2021. That’s an injury reduction of 12.7 percent in Amazon facilities, which includes warehouses, logistics, and delivery facilities. While these numbers are slightly different from the ones found in Amazon’s safety report, that’s still a notable decrease. But in 2023, SOC found in its report that those numbers only fell to 6.5 injuries per 100 full-time employees — a reduction of 5.8 percent, just a little over half of what it needs to average each year.

SOC researchers also noted that while these numbers fell from 2021 to 2023, injuries that required workers to be reassigned to lighter duties increased, while injuries that necessitated losing time at work decreased. There are two ways to interpret this: one being that Amazon has taken steps to meaningfully reduce severe injuries that would require an absence from work. The other possibility is that Amazon has shifted workers into lighter duties to keep them working when they should be resting and recovering from their injuries, which is misleading and puts workers at risk of injuring themselves again.

The latter is what SOC has claimed Amazon is doing. Amazon’s own reasoning is not too far from this assertion: In its 2022 annual safety report, the company said that one of the main drivers of reducing the number of injuries that required time away from work was its “Return to Work” program, allowing workers to “continue to work while recovering from work-related injuries or illnesses.”

Cole — who was born with only one hand and uses a prosthetic arm — has experienced the push back to work soon after an injury. Once during a shift, she injured her hand and went to AmCare, Amazon’s in-house first aid clinic. “I was in a lot of pain,” Cole said. After wrapping her hand up, management told her to return back to work. “I said, ‘Listen, I have one hand. I live with this hand. And it’s injured right now. I’m not going back on the floor to injure it further.’”

The SOC report also found that there were more than 38,300 recordable injuries at Amazon facilities in 2023 alone, with 94 percent of the injuries identified by SOC as serious — meaning employees were either placed on lighter work duties or forced to miss work entirely. It also found that Amazon’s serious injury rate was more than twice as high as non-Amazon warehouses.

Injuries become much more common during events like Prime Day and other big sales, too. The week of Prime Day 2023, there were 1,066 recorded cases of serious injuries at Amazon facilities, according to the SOC report — the highest number of injuries recorded all year, and far above the average of 691 injuries per week. Those cases represented a 48 percent increase in injuries from the previous week, and were followed closely by cases recorded on Cyber Monday (1,015 serious injuries) and Prime Big Deals Day (898 serious injuries).

In an email to Vox, Amazon spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel called the SOC report “misleading,” emphasizing that the switch-up between rates and raw numbers builds a “false narrative” and that the report should start at 2019, which would indicate a reduction to injuries by 28 percent. “The fact is, there are far more people working in the buildings during these times and more total hours worked by those employees,” she wrote.

Additionally, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee launched a yearlong investigation into Amazon’s labor practices. According to the Washington Post, an interim report, led by committee chair Senator Bernie Sanders, found that nearly 45 out of 100 employees were injured during the week of Prime Day in 2019, and injuries peaked again during other holiday sales.

Amazon, which had cooperated with the investigation, pushed back on Senator Sanders’s preliminary report via an email to Vox, saying it “ignores our progress and paints a one-sided, false narrative using only a fraction of the information we’ve provided.”

The HELP Committee is not the only federal investigation that’s found Amazon to have troubling safety issues. From January 2023 to August 2023, several investigations from OSHA found that Amazon exposed workers to well-known ergonomic hazards, like lifting packages up and down constantly, handling heavy items, and bending and twisting in awkward positions, all for hours at a time. “Amazon’s operating methods are creating hazardous work conditions and processes, leading to serious worker injuries,” said assistant secretary for occupational safety and health Doug Parker in a February 2023 press release.

OSHA also found that when Amazon workers were injured, the company failed to provide treatment. In one news release from OSHA, the agency wrote that “at least six employees with head injuries and four with back injuries did not receive timely, necessary medical care.” Amazon disagreed with OSHA’s characterizations and appealed them.

The Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which has won only one election with the workers of Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York, has made safe working conditions one of its primary goals in a first contract. However, Amazon still refuses to recognize the union and, in turn, has made no movement on its side to bargaining a collective agreement. There’s also been conflict within the union on how to best bring Amazon to the bargaining table and organize other warehouses.

But in June, the ALU voted to affiliate with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters — a powerful union with resources that could help change the tides for the workers of JFK8 and other Amazon facilities. That same month, the New York State Assembly passed the Warehouse Worker Injury Reduction Act, which now sits on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk.

Amazon has repeatedly rejected claims that it’s not meaningfully working to improve workplace safety. But even if we take it at its word, the data shows that it still has a long way to go before it can call itself “Earth’s Safest Place to Work.”

Update, July 18, 2 pm ET: This story, originally published July 17, has been updated twice: once to include statements from Amazon and clarify that the interim report was from Sanders alone, not the HELP committee at large, and again to include an additional statement from Amazon regarding workplace conditions in the heat.