Texas Amazon Warehouse An Increasingly Dangerous Place To Work

Mandatory injury reports Amazon submitted to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration have thus far painted a broad picture of its operations as unusually dangerous, well above the warehousing industry average.

New logs obtained by Gizmodo for one of the company’s oldest warehouses in Texas show a meaningful increase in the rate at which its workers are getting hurt, too.

Amazon is currently the second-largest employer in the U.S. behind Walmart, but like nearly any other business, it’s required to track injuries that rise to a defined level of severity: those that result in death, loss of consciousness, require “medical treatment beyond first aid,” involve punctured eardrums, fractured bones, or the diagnosis of an irreversible chronic illness, to name a few examples.

In other words, what’s being recorded are not skinned knees and paper-cuts.

The sum total of these injuries are collected in OSHA forms 300 and 300a. The former details the exact date, variety, and result of each injury, while the latter provides an overview, as well as the facility’s overall productivity.