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For years, Amazon warehouse staffers have complained about unsafe working conditions and the injury risks they face when rushing to fill packages and get them to customers in two days or less.

While Amazon claims its injury rate is coming down, facility-level data released last month from the U.S. Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration underscores worker concerns, showing that in 2022 Amazon laborers were injured at a rate of 6.9 for every 100. In January, OSHA investigators cited Amazon for “failing to keep workers safe.”

Industrywide numbers for last year won’t be released until November, but OSHA head Doug Parker said Amazon has a history of injury rates that are far higher than others in the warehouse category. In 2021, Amazon’s injury rate was almost 1.5 times the industry average. At some Amazon warehouse locations, Parker said, the rate was as high as 12 workers out of 100.

“That’s more than 10% of the workforce every year who are receiving injuries on the job that are serious enough that they have to take time away from their jobs,” Parker said, regarding those warehouses. “We know that it’s affecting thousands of workers and it’s very alarming.”

Bobby Gosvener is one former worker living with pain.

Gosvener worked at an Amazon warehouse in Tulsa, Oklahoma, until 2020. He said after a conveyor belt malfunctioned that December he was left with a herniated disk that required neck surgery. He’s now on permanent partial disability.

“I have to live with this injury for the rest of my life,” Gosvener said. “I hate to this day even to order through Amazon because it’s so convenient, but every time I look at a box, I think of the process of what went through it and who got hurt in the midst of it.”

Jennifer Crane works through pain at an Amazon warehouse in St. Peters, Missouri, after hurting her wrist in October. She said she tore a ligament from “packing a case of sparkling water repetitively all day, along with dog food and Gatorades.” She wears a brace to help her get through the day.

“After like two hours of heavy lifting, I’m taking pain meds,” Crane said.

She needs the job. Crane became a single mom to her seven sons when her husband died of a heart attack in 2019.

“I’ve got to be able to support them. I have bills to pay,” she said. Crane said she knows she could look for other work, “but right now I’m in the fight to try to make it better there for everybody.”

Amazon worker Jennifer Crane at her house outside St. Louis, Missouri, in 2022.

Missouri Workers Center

Crane is circulating a petition at her warehouse asking for a slower pace of work, more breaks, ergonomic changes and equipment updates. 

In response to those accounts of injury and pain, Amazon spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel said in a statement, “Amazon worked diligently to accommodate both employees and ensure they had what they needed not only to work safely but also to recover. Any claim to the contrary is false.”

Amazon’s self-reported injury rate fell 9% between 2021 and 2022. Beyond warehouses, the e-commerce giant says its injury rate across all worldwide operations, some 1.5 million employees, dropped nearly 24% from 2019 to 2022.

“I don’t dispute that their injury rates may have gone down some over a period of time, but they’re still not good enough,” OSHA’s Parker said.

Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition of labor unions, crunched OSHA’s new data and found Amazon’s injury rate was more than double that of all non-Amazon warehouses in 2022. According to the report, Amazon employed 36% of U.S. warehouse workers in 2022, but was responsible for more than 53% of all serious injuries in the industry.

Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, said by email that the group’s findings “paint an inaccurate picture.”

“The safety and health of our employees is, and always will be, our top priority, and any claim otherwise is inaccurate,” Nantel said. “We’re proud of the progress made by our team and we’ll continue working hard together to keep getting better every day.”

“Amazon’s apparent attitude about this is to deny that they have a problem,” said Eric Frumin, SOC’s health and safety director.

Federal scrutiny

Federal authorities are now looking into the health and safety issues, with inspections across seven Amazon warehouses in five states last summer. OSHA issued citations at all seven locations.

“At every single facility we found serious hazards that were putting workers at serious risk of bodily harm,” Parker said. “What is most concerning is the scale. We have every reason to believe that the types of processes where we found hazards in these facilities are processes that are used in Amazon facilities across the country.”

OSHA also acted on referrals from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which pointed to similar hazards in its own investigation of the facilities. Two more warehouses were cited for safety violations by Washington state’s Department of Labor. OSHA also cited Amazon for 14 record-keeping violations, finding that the company failed to properly report worker injuries and illnesses.

Amazon is appealing all the citations. If they’re upheld, the company will have to pay its first ever federal fines for worker musculoskeletal injuries. So far, they total nearly $152,000. The Washington state DOJ fines add an additional $81,000.

Amazon has a market cap of roughly $1 trillion and last year generated revenue of over $500 billion.

“There’s no amount of money that the Labor Department can impose as a penalty that’s going to make a difference to a company that runs through billions of dollars a day,” Frumin said. “What matters is, are they going to respect the need for their workers to be safe?”

In a rare case of federal cooperation, the Department of Justice is also investigating Amazon, asking if the company “engaged in a fraudulent scheme designed to hide the true number of injuries,” according to a January press release. The DOJ’s civil division is looking into whether Amazon executives made “false representations” to lenders about its safety record to obtain credit. 

In a statement, Amazon told CNBC, “We strongly disagree with the allegations and are confident that this process will ultimately show they’re unfounded.” The company said it’s expanding the team responsible for record-keeping.

‘If you’re rushing, you’re going to make mistakes’

For Daniel Olayiwola, who’s worked at Amazon since 2017, the primary concern is the pressure to work quickly.

“You have to make sure these rates are met,” Olayiwola said. “Otherwise you’re going to be getting a write-up. Then you’re not going to be getting any opportunities to switch positions or move up at all.”

Olayiwola introduced a proposal at last year’s annual shareholders meeting, asking Amazon to stop tracking workers’ rate of work and what’s called “time off task.” The measure failed. 

“It is a big contributor to the amount of injuries we get at Amazons worldwide,” Olayiwola said. “I can hands down say that. If you’re rushing, you’re going to make mistakes and someone’s going to get hurt.”

Amazon worker Daniel Olayiwola poses outside his warehouse in San Antonio, Texas, on March 9, 2023.

Lucas Mullikin

Olayiwola drives a forklift to pick up heavy items in a warehouse in San Antonio, Texas. He said the slowest acceptable rate at the facility is about 22 an hour, “meaning you’d have to pick an item every three minutes.”

“Which is crazy if the item is a mirror, a dresser, a bed frame,” Olayiwola said. “But you have to keep picking these items and you have to drop them off at these designated drop zones.”

An Amazon spokesperson said in an email that the “pace of work” isn’t referenced in any of OSHA’s citations. But the Southern DIstrict of New York’s investigations at six warehouses cited pace of work as an issue. And three states — New York, California, and Washington — have passed legislation seeking to curtail the use of productivity quotas at Amazon warehouses. 

In the meantime, Olayiwola has sought support from United for Respect, a retail worker advocacy group, and he hosts a podcast called “Surviving Scamazon.” Like Crane, he wants to support his family while working to produce change from the inside. His wife is pregnant with their second child, and he calls his work at Amazon a “necessary evil.”

OSHA says similar investigations are currently underway at 10 other Amazon sites, with broader investigations pending at dozens more.

Watch the video to learn more.

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Nvidia positioned to weather Trump tariffs, chip demand ‘off the charts,’ says Altimeter’s Gerstner

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Nvidia positioned to weather Trump tariffs, chip demand 'off the charts,' says Altimeter's Gerstner

Altimeter CEO Brad Gerstner is buying Nvidia

Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner said Thursday that he’s moving out of the “bomb shelter” with Nvidia and into a position of safety, expecting that the chipmaker is positioned to withstand President Donald Trump’s widespread tariffs.

“The growth and the demand for GPUs is off the charts,” he told CNBC’s “Fast Money Halftime Report,” referring to Nvidia’s graphics processing units that are powering the artificial intelligence boom. He said investors just need to listen to commentary from OpenAI, Google and Elon Musk.

President Trump announced an expansive and aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy in a ceremony at the White House on Wednesday. The plan established a 10% baseline tariff, though many countries like China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to steeper rates. The announcement sent stocks tumbling on Thursday, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq down more than 5%, headed for its worst day since 2022.

The big reason Nvidia may be better positioned to withstand Trump’s tariff hikes is because semiconductors are on the list of exceptions, which Gerstner called a “wise exception” due to the importance of AI.

Nvidia’s business has exploded since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, and annual revenue has more than doubled in each of the past two fiscal years. After a massive rally, Nvidia’s stock price has dropped by more than 20% this year and was down almost 7% on Thursday.

Gerstner is concerned about the potential of a recession due to the tariffs, but is relatively bullish on Nvidia, and said the “negative impact from tariffs will be much less than in other areas.”

He said it’s key for the U.S. to stay competitive in AI. And while the company’s chips are designed domestically, they’re manufactured in Taiwan “because they can’t be fabricated in the U.S.” Higher tariffs would punish companies like Meta and Microsoft, he said.

“We’re in a global race in AI,” Gerstner said. “We can’t hamper our ability to win that race.”

WATCH: Brad Gerstner is buying Nvidia

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YouTube announces Shorts editing features amid potential TikTok ban

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YouTube announces Shorts editing features amid potential TikTok ban

Jaque Silva | Nurphoto | Getty Images

YouTube on Thursday announced new video creation tools for Shorts, its short-form video feed that competes against TikTok. 

The features come at a time when TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is at risk of an effective ban in the U.S. if it’s not sold to an American owner by April 5.

Among the new tools is an updated video editor that allows creators to make precise adjustments and edits, a feature that automatically syncs video cuts to the beat of a song and AI stickers.

The creator tools will become available later this spring, said YouTube, which is owned by Google

Along with the new features, YouTube last week said it was changing the way view counts are tabulated on Shorts. Under the new guidelines, Shorts views will count the number of times the video is played or replayed with no minimum watch time requirement. 

Previously, views were only counted if a video was played for a certain number of seconds. This new tabulation method is similar to how views are counted on TikTok and Meta’s Reels, and will likely inflate view counts.

“We got this feedback from creators that this is what they wanted. It’s a way for them to better understand when their Shorts have been seen,” YouTube Chief Product Officer Johanna Voolich said in a YouTube video. “It’s useful for creators who post across multiple platforms.”

WATCH: TikTok is a digital Trojan horse, says Hayman Capital’s Kyle Bass

TikTok is a digital Trojan horse, says Hayman Capital's Kyle Bass

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Tech stocks sink after Trump tariff rollout — Apple heads for worst drop in 5 years

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Tech stocks sink after Trump tariff rollout — Apple heads for worst drop in 5 years

CEO of Meta and Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk attend the inauguration ceremony before Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th U.S. president in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, Jan. 20, 2025.

Saul Loeb | Via Reuters

Technology stocks plummeted Thursday after President Donald Trump’s new tariff policies sparked widespread market panic.

Apple led the declines among the so-called “Magnificent Seven” group, dropping nearly 9%. The iPhone maker makes its devices in China and other Asian countries. The stock is on pace for its steepest drop since 2020.

Other megacaps also felt the pressure. Meta Platforms and Amazon fell more than 7% each, while Nvidia and Tesla slumped more than 5%. Nvidia builds its new chips in Taiwan and relies on Mexico for assembling its artificial intelligence systems. Microsoft and Alphabet both fell about 2%.

Semiconductor stocks also felt the pain, with Marvell Technology, Arm Holdings and Micron Technology falling more than 8% each. Broadcom and Lam Research dropped 6%, while Advanced Micro Devices declined more than 4% Software stocks ServiceNow and Fortinet fell more than 5% each.

Read more CNBC tech news

The drop in technology stocks came amid a broader market selloff spurred by fears of a global trade war after Trump unveiled a blanket 10% tariff on all imported goods and a range of higher duties targeting specific countries after the bell Wednesday. He said the new tariffs would be a “declaration of economic independence” for the U.S.

Companies and countries worldwide have already begun responding to the wide-sweeping policy, which included a 34% tariff on China stacked on a previous 20% tax, a 46% duty on Vietnam and a 20% levy on imports from the European Union.

China’s Ministry of Commerce urged the U.S. to “immediately cancel” the unilateral tariff measures and said it would take “resolute counter-measures.”

The tariffs come on the heels of a rough quarter for the tech-heavy Nasdaq and the worst period for the index since 2022. Stocks across the board have come under pressure over concerns of a weakening U.S. economy. The Nasdaq Composite dropped nearly 5% on Thursday, bringing its year-to-date loss to 13%.

Trump applauded some megacap technology companies for investing money into the U.S. during his speech, calling attention to Apple’s plan to spend $500 billion over the next four years.

Evercore ISI's Amit Daryanani on keeping Apple's outperform rating despite tariffs

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