Over the last two years, we’ve been investigating the grueling conditions inside Amazon’s warehouses. 

Our team, led by reporter Will Evans, has pierced government and corporate secrecy to show that Amazon workers are being injured at an extremely high rate, thanks to stringent production quotas. And we’ve shown how the company profoundly misled the public, press and members of Congress about its worker safety record. 

As part of that effort, we sued the federal Department of Labor. It kept detailed data on worker injuries at major companies such as Amazon, but claimed it could not release it to the public because it was confidential commercial information. 

We won. Now, OSHA must release those records, and journalists have begun digging into Amazon’s warehouses with help from those records. 

Here’s The Washington Post’s investigation in June: 

Amazon, the second-largest private employer in the United States, is also a leader in another category: how often its warehouse workers are injured. New work-related injury data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration showed those jobs can be more dangerous than at comparable warehouses.

A coalition of unions also used the data we helped make public to do their own report showing Amazon’s high injury rates, which was then cited in stories for multiple news outlets, including CBS News, Fox Business, BBC, CNBC, The Hill, the New York Post and The Verge.

We’ve also been sharing data and internal Amazon records with other reporters to help them do their own investigations. Some examples: 

• The Seattle Times published a story about how Amazon dealt with the lack of diversity in its executive ranks by loosening the definition of “executive.” The story was based on records we obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request and provided to the newspaper as part of our ongoing collaboration.

• The Boston Globe investigated what happens to Amazon warehouse workers after they’re injured, using records we provided as part of the Reveal Reporting Networks.

• Another member of the network, Toronto Star reporter Sara Mojtehedzadeh, won an Amnesty International award for her story on Amazon warehouse working conditions.

There are many reasons we need to be helping reporters dig into Amazon. For one, it’s the second-largest private employer in the United States, with 950,000 employees. For another, when journalists try to report on workers' experiences at the company, they often face strong-arm tactics from the company itself.  

Ali Breland at Mother Jones recently interviewed a dozen journalists who cover Amazon and found that the company “bullies, manipulates and lies” to reporters. 

Breland shares the experience of a reporter at Gizmodo who published a story citing an ABC affiliate’s reporting about the company marketing its Ring surveillance system to law enforcement. A spokesperson for Amazon emailed the Gizmodo reporter saying that the story was incorrect and that the original publisher was issuing a correction. 

That’s similar to our experience, too. As Breland notes in his story for Mother Jones, Amazon declined to answer our specific questions before we published our story into how it misleads. After the fact, Amazon PR reps contacted other journalists, including those with whom we had partnered on the story, and claimed that Reveal is an “advocacy organization” promoting “pro-union activity.” 

Of course, journalists expect corporate PR teams to push back on stories, but three journalists Breland interviewed said they felt the company’s press team outright lied to them. From the story: 

Almost all of the journalists told me they found that Amazon press relations was either the most or among the most clawing and deceptive corporate communications team that they had dealt with in their work. “Amazon is the only company I’ve dealt with that has directly lied to me,” said one tech writer, recalling instances when Amazon boasted of warehouse safety guidelines in ways that journalists who had spoken with rank-and-file employees had found not to be true.

“They’d often lie about things we had proof of,” said another reporter, citing times they had visual evidence contradicting the communications teams’ claims. “There will be videos of these big walkouts and they’ll say only a few workers participated.”

Amazon’s press team did not respond to Breland’s requests for comment about any of its communications practices.

Getting to the truth about injuries took a ton of time and effort. Pushing back against PR attacks is possible, but reporters need resources behind them to fight for transparency. 

Read the story: How Amazon hid its safety crisis and Behind the Smiles 

Listen to the episode: Catching Amazon in a lie and Behind the Smiles