[jinpan]

At the risk of defending a faceless megacorporation, I'm curious what injuries per package look like at Amazon vs "Industry Average".

According to the article, productivity expectations per worker doubled with robotics, and Amazon has about double the injury rate per worker, so my super rough back of the envelope calculation says they should fare similarly on that metric.

If the industry alternative takes twice as many workers to do the same job, ultimately leading to approximately the same number of injured workers, has Amazon really created a safety crisis?

[gorbypark]

Yes, they have. It doesn’t matter if an employee is twice as efficient if their injury rate is twice as high. If you are going to work and have twice the risk of injury, that’s a very bad thing. This is about injuries per employee, not injuries per item picked.

Theoretically, a system could be designed where all safety standards were ignored and productivity was n times more per employee, with lower injuries per item picked, but would result in astronomical injury rates. If you were an Amazon employee, would you want to go to work where there was a 1/10 chance per day you’d be injured? A 10x more efficient warehouse employee isn’t making 10x more money, so they are seeing increased risk for no personal gain.