Community Corner

Amazon Defends its Safety Record at Breinigsville

Amazon's fulfillment centers are safer than working in a department store, according to a message on the company's website.

Amazon.com continues to respond to accusations that it has poor working conditions at its Breinigsville warehouse.

In a message posted on its website Sunday, Oct. 23, Amazon states that its fulfillment centers are safer for employees than auto plants, general warehouses and department stores.

To make this point, the company uses numbers from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration – the federal agency that oversees workplace safety – for the period from Jan. 2006 to Sept. 30 2011.

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More specifically, in a graph, it shows that the incidents at its Breinigsville facility, though slightly higher than other Amazon warehouses, were lower than the rates for department stores.

“In other words,” the message states, “it's safer to work in the Amazon fulfillment network than in a department store.”

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In an exposé by The Morning Call this year, current and former employees claimed that temporary workers were often threatened with termination for not keeping up with productivity quotas, and some got ill from the excessive heat in the warehouse during the summer.

In this most recent message, Amazon states: “In our Breinigsville, Pennsylvania fulfillment center, opened in July 2010, we've had multiple events related to temperature—both high and low. To handle the high temperature events, we installed industrial air-conditioning units. To handle the low temperature events, we developed a new set of procedures for re-entering the building more quickly following fire alarms. Even with these events, our recordable incidence rate in Breinigsville continues to be low.”

Since the report on the Breinigsville facility was released, Amazon has come under greater scrutiny including attention from a community action website, Change.org, that is floating a petition “to end these sweatshop conditions.”

 


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