Towards the end of the article, Amazon says: "Amazon has 43 percent fewer injuries on average than other companies conducting transportation and warehousing activities in the UK". The authors of the article don't seem to dispute this claim, so it seems its more that transportation/warehousing work is somewhat dangerous, not that Amazon is particularly bad.
I worked at Amazon in Distribution operations management in the very early days(1997-2001).<p>Culture in the distribution centers(now called fulfillment centres) was definitely one of no excuses performance.<p>I take responsibility for my role in how the culture evolved.<p>In the early days, we were hiring like crazy, trying to “average up” with every single early hire, while trying to keep the customer happy with orders backing up with exponential growth.<p>We worked nutty hours, often packing a bag to stay overnight or for a few days.<p>Hourly associates and temps were often compelled to work 50+ hours per week.<p>Terminations were very quick and cold as we didn’t feel we had the time to do it properly with customers orders clogging up.<p>Something had to give. So we were all pretty ruthless. Perform or leave.<p>I’m proud of what we achieved, but it came at a significant personal cost to many people.<p>I burned out after 3+ years.<p>I believe it’s a fair bit better now, but still a challenging environment that requires good performance or risk of termination.<p>It’s not a place to “coast” or “Be a grey man/woman”.<p>20 years ago we had scanners than could measure productivity.<p>Nowadays, everything is measured.<p>You can’t hide from your productivity data.
[edit: 200 vists stat is for UK only. Ignore everything I said here. ]<p>For scale, Amazon had 566,000 employees at the end of 2017. With 200 trips per year, that’s about one trip per 2,800 employees.<p>For comparison, US ambulances made about 16.2 million trips in 2003 on a population of 290 million, or one trip per 17.9 people.<p>If we assume that employees spend 1/4 of their week at work, then while working at Amazon you are 39.5 times less likely to need an ambulance than an average American.<p>;)