Amazon’s worker safety hazards come under fire from regulators and the DOJ

Published

2 years ago

April 15, 2023

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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.

Technology

Silicon Valley’s early return on Trump investment: Plunging valuations, delayed IPOs

Published

9 hours ago

April 5, 2025

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Silicon Valley's early return on Trump investment: Plunging valuations, delayed IPOs

The Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, June 9, 2023.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.

Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.

The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.

The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.

Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.

Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.

With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.

CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.

“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”

CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.

“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”

Tech will see an 'economic armageddon' if these tariffs stay, says Wedbush's Dan Ives

‘Cave rapidly’

During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”

A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.

Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.

Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”

That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.

At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”

However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.

“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.

Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington.

Stephen Brashear | Getty Images

Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.

When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.

Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.

C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.

Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.

“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”

— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.

WATCH: Chime is reportedly delaying its IPO

Technology

Tesla’s June robotaxi deadline looms as political backlash builds over Elon Musk

Published

10 hours ago

April 5, 2025

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Tesla's June robotaxi deadline looms as political backlash builds over Elon Musk

Elon Musk has been promising investors for about a decade that Tesla’s cars are on the verge of turning into robotaxis, capable of driving themselves cross-country, after one big software update.

That hasn’t happened yet.

What Tesla offers is a sophisticated, but only partially automated, driving system that’s marketed in the U.S. as its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) option, though many Tesla fans refer to it as FSD. In China, Tesla recently changed the system’s name to “intelligent assisted driving.”

Full Self-Driving, as it was previously called, relies on cameras and software to enable features like automatic navigation on highways and city streets, or automatic braking and slowing in response to traffic lights and stop signs.

Tesla owner’s manuals warn users that FSD “is a hands-on feature” that requires them to pay attention to the road at all times. “Keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times, be mindful of road conditions and surrounding traffic,” the manuals say.

But many of Tesla’s customers ignore the fine print and use the system hands-free anyway.

Tesla’s partially automated driving systems have been a source of inspiration for its stalwart fans. But they’ve also caused controversy and concern for public safety after reports of injurious and fatal collisions where Tesla’s standard Autopilot or premium FSD systems were known to be in use.

FSD does a lot of things “amazingly well,” said Guy Mangiamele, a professional test driver for automotive consulting firm AMCI Testing, during a recent long drive in Los Angeles. But he added that “the times that it trips up, you could kill somebody or you could hurt yourself.”

The pressure has never been higher on Tesla to elevate the technology and deliver on Musk’s long-delayed promises.

The Tesla CEO is the wealthiest person in the world and was the biggest financial backer of President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Since Trump’s January inauguration, Musk has been leading the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency effort to drastically slash the federal workforce and government spending.

The DOGE team has been connected to more than 280,000 layoff plans for federal workers and contractors impacting 27 agencies over the last two months, according to data tracked by Challenger Gray, the executive outplacement firm.

Musk’s work with DOGE – along with his frequently incendiary political rhetoric and endorsement of Germany’s far-right, anti-immigrant party AfD – has led to a tremendous backlash against Tesla.

Protests, boycotts and even criminal acts of vandalism have targeted the electric vehicle maker in recent months and led many prospective Tesla customers to turn to other brands. Meanwhile, existing Tesla owners have been trading in their EVs at record levels, according to data from Edmunds.

Tesla’s stock dropped 36% through the first three months of 2025, representing its steepest decline since 2022 and third-biggest slide for any quarter since the EV maker went public in June 2010. Tesla also reported 336,681 vehicle deliveries in the first quarter of 2025, a 13% decline from the same period a year ago.

Product unveilings and a “robotaxi launch” expected from Tesla in Austin, Texas, this year could revitalize investors’ sentiment about the company and hopefully lift its share price, Piper Sandler analysts wrote in a note following the worse-than-expected deliveries report.

On Tesla’s last earnings call, Musk promised investors that Tesla will finally start its driverless ride-hailing service in Austin in June.

To see whether the company’s FSD technology is anywhere close to a robotaxi-ready release, CNBC spent months riding along with Tesla owners who use Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and speaking with automotive safety experts about their impressions.

Auto-tech enthusiast and Tesla owner Chris Lee, host of the YouTube channel EverydayChris, told CNBC that Tesla’s system “definitely has a ways to go, but the fact that it’s able to go from where it was three years ago to today, is insane.”

Many experts, including Telemetry Vice President of Market Research Sam Abuelsamid, remain skeptical. There’s been “no evidence” that FSD is “anywhere close to being ready to be used in an unsupervised form” by June, said Abuelsamid, whose firms specializes in automotive intelligence.

Tesla FSD will “often work really well, particularly in daytime conditions” but then “randomly, in a scenario where it did fine previously, it will fail,” said Abuelsamid, adding that those scenarios can be unpredictable and dangerous.

Watch the video to learn more about the evolution of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and whether it will be robotaxi-ready this June.

Technology

Microsoft AI chief Suleyman sees advantage in building models ‘3 or 6 months behind’

Published

23 hours ago

April 5, 2025

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Microsoft AI chief Suleyman sees advantage in building models ‘3 or 6 months behind’

Microsoft owns lots of Nvidia graphics processing units, but it isn’t using them to develop state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.

There are good reasons for that position, Mustafa Suleyman, the company’s CEO of AI, told CNBC’s Steve Kovach in an interview on Friday. Waiting to build models that are “three or six months behind” offers several advantages, including lower costs and the ability to concentrate on specific use cases, Suleyman said.

It’s “cheaper to give a specific answer once you’ve waited for the first three or six months for the frontier to go first. We call that off-frontier,” he said. “That’s actually our strategy, is to really play a very tight second, given the capital-intensiveness of these models.”

Suleyman made a name for himself as a co-founder of DeepMind, the AI lab that Google bought in 2014, reportedly for $400 million to $650 million. Suleyman arrived at Microsoft last year alongside other employees of the startup Inflection, where he had been CEO.

More than ever, Microsoft counts on relationships with other companies to grow.

It gets AI models from San Francisco startup OpenAI and supplemental computing power from newly public CoreWeave in New Jersey. Microsoft has repeatedly enriched Bing, Windows and other products with OpenAI’s latest systems for writing human-like language and generating images.

Microsoft’s Copilot will gain “memory” to retain key facts about people who repeatedly use the assistant, Suleyman said Friday at an event in Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to commemorate the company’s 50th birthday. That feature came first to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has 500 million weekly users.

Through ChatGPT, people can access top-flight large language models such as the o1 reasoning model that takes time before spitting out an answer. OpenAI introduced that capability in September — only weeks later did Microsoft bring a similar capability called Think Deeper to Copilot.

Microsoft occasionally releases open-source small-language models that can run on PCs. They don’t require powerful server GPUs, making them different from OpenAI’s o1.

OpenAI and Microsoft have held a tight relationship shortly after the startup launched its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, effectively kicking off the generative AI race. In total, Microsoft has invested $13.75 billion in the startup, but more recently, fissures in the relationship between the two companies have begun to show.

Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors in July 2024, and OpenAI in January announced that it was working with rival cloud provider Oracle on the $500 billion Stargate project. That came after years of OpenAI exclusively relying on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Despite OpenAI partnering with Oracle, Microsoft in a blog post announced that the startup had “recently made a new, large Azure commitment.”

“Look, it’s absolutely mission-critical that long-term, we are able to do AI self-sufficiently at Microsoft,” Suleyman said. “At the same time, I think about these things over five and 10 year periods. You know, until 2030 at least, we are deeply partnered with OpenAI, who have [had an] enormously successful relationship for us.

Microsoft is focused on building its own AI internally, but the company is not pushing itself to build the most cutting-edge models, Suleyman said.

“We have an incredibly strong AI team, huge amounts of compute, and it’s very important to us that, you know, maybe we don’t develop the absolute frontier, the best model in the world first,” he said. “That’s very, very expensive to do and unnecessary to cause that duplication.”

WATCH: Microsoft Copilot beginning of a seismic shift in AI integration, says Microsoft AI CEO Suleyman