As an outbound packer at an Amazon warehouse in St. Peters, Missouri, Jennifer Crane has 37 seconds to assemble a cardboard box, retrieve a product from a shelf, plop it in said box, stuff it full of packing material, seal it, slap on a tracking label, and finally hoist it onto a conveyor belt. Then she has to do it all over again, for 10 hours. Last October, a case of sparkling water became her undoing.
While lifting the case, Crane says, she felt a searing pain tear down her left arm into her fingertips. She visited Amazon’s on-site first aid clinic, known as AmCare or the Wellness Center, where she says staff told her she had a small sprain and would be fine and gave her an ice pack. “I sat in there for 20 minutes until the ice pack got warm,” Crane says, by which time her shift was ending. When she got in her car to drive to work the next morning, her left hand couldn’t grip the steering wheel. Nonetheless, she says, a clinic staffer told her she needed to get back to work.
Crane, a member of a union organizing committee at her facility, pushed back, demanding to see a doctor, who prescribed work restrictions. AmCare staff plugged them into an Amazon software tool that digested the doctor’s orders and suggested a suitable alternative, less intensive job. A company safety director wrote in a 2019 email that shifting injured employees into restricted roles could cut the company’s workers’ compensation costs by keeping them in work, and also slash the number of serious injuries it had to report to the federal government, according to reporting by Reveal. Crane spent seven weeks waving a Swiffer duster around the 855,000-square-foot warehouse for 10 hours a day with her throbbing left hand slung over her shoulder for relief. When she finally got an appointment for an MRI, a doctor said she’d torn a ligament in her wrist.
Crane’s encounter with the case of sparkling water tipped her into a system developed by Amazon to manage one of the side effects of its famous logistics operation—a steady flow of injured workers. Recent OSHA investigations and WIRED interviews with 11 on-site medical representatives (OMRs) who have worked at AmCare in the last few years describe a system that can put employees at risk of further injury by keeping them working instead of referring them to appropriate medical care.
“What some companies are doing, and I think Amazon is one of them, is using their own clinics to ‘treat people’ and send them right back to the job, so that their injury doesn’t have to be recordable,” says Jordan Barab, a former deputy assistant secretary at OSHA who writes a workplace safety newsletter.
Amazon spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel disputes this characterization, saying the company does not try to hide injuries and that employees who visit AmCare can seek outside treatment at any time. “Any suggestion that we intentionally or systematically delay or discourage employees from seeking needed medical care is false,” she says.
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