Amazon President and CEO Andy Jassy has stated that the e-commerce behemoth wants to improve worker safety at its warehouses and fulfillment centers, as the company faces intense scrutiny over employee working conditions.
In his first shareholder letter as CEO of Amazon, Jassy, who succeeded founder Jeff Bezos last year, stated that the company is committed to further improving fulfillment network safety, “with a focus on reducing strains, sprains, falls, and repetitive stress injuries.”
“Our injury rates are frequently misunderstood. We have operations jobs in both the warehousing and the courier and delivery categories “Jassy stated late Thursday.
“According to the most recent US public data, our recordable incident rates were slightly higher than the average of our warehousing peers (6.4 vs. 5.5) and slightly lower than the average of our courier and delivery peers (7.6 vs. 9.1),” he explained.
He stated that the company is working to solve “the top 100 employee experience pain points” in a systematic manner.
In 2021, Amazon hired over 300,000 people, “many of whom were new to this type of work and required training.”
According to Jassy, getting where you want requires rigorous analysis, thoughtful problem-solving, and a willingness to invent.
“We’ve been dissecting every process path to figure out how we can improve even more,” he added.
The letter addressed issues such as supply chain disruption and labor shortages, but did not address the contentious issue of labor organization.
The e-commerce behemoth is currently embroiled in two contentious unionization elections in the United States, one in Bessemer, Alabama, and the other in Staten Island, New York.
Amazon has 253 fulfillment centers, 110 sortation centers, and 467 delivery stations in North America, as well as an additional 157 fulfillment centers, 58 sortation centers, and 588 delivery stations worldwide (by end of 2021).
“Our delivery network has grown to more than 260,000 drivers worldwide, and our Amazon Air cargo fleet now has more than 100 aircraft,” Jassy said, referring to a capital investment of more than $100 billion.