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Between December and February, six Amazon warehouses have been issued citations by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration over unsafe working conditions, ergonomic hazards and failure to properly report injuries, The Guardian reports. A seventh warehouse in Colorado received a citation last month for exposing workers to ergonomic hazards.
The U.S. Department of Justice is also currently investigating the company for its injury rates and warehouse safety practices across all its warehouses in the country.
One of the law firms Amazon has retained to help in proceedings with OSHA and the Justice Department is Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, where former Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, who served during the Trump administration, is currently a partner. Scalia is the son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
“While at the firm in 1999, Scalia won an appeals case to strike down the OSHA high injury/illness rate targeting and cooperative compliance program under the Clinton administration and fought to overturn rules to establish ergonomic safety standards for workplaces, which Labor Department experts noted would have prevented 600,000 injuries a year,” The Guardian writes.
We first reported in 2019 that workers at Amazon were getting hurt on the job more than at other companies. Those records were under wraps – until our investigation uncovered them. At the time, most of the on-the-job injuries were coming from bad ergonomics. The same type of bad ergonomic practices Eugene Scalia fought to protect in the early 2000s.
🎧 We cover this full-circle moment in our A Reckoning at Amazon podcast episode. Take a listen.
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