As pointed out by a comment to the article, the headline is a classic example of poor phrasing. One could be forgiven for assuming that the workers made up, i.e. faked, their injuries. Of course the headline is trying to point out that Amazon workers constituted almost half of injuries.
I didn’t read “made up” to mean faked until your comment. I can see how someone who’s mother tongue isn’t English can easily interpret that way, but I’d be shocked if native English speakers mixed this up. “Made up” is almost always synonymous with “comprised of” when referring to fractions or percentages.
> Amazon workers only make up a third of US warehouse employees, but in 2021, they suffered 49 percent of the injuries for the entire warehouse industry, according to a report by advocacy group Strategic Organizing Center (or SOC).
According to TFA, about 1/3. With a minute's thought it occurs to me this may be the expected result for two reasons:
1. "Warehouse Work" as an industry represents a wide variety of dissimilar activities. Amazon warehouse work is obviously heavily skewed toward manually sorting, stocking, picking, packing and loading massive numbers of individual irregularly-sized small and medium parcels. This kind of activity would be more injury prone compared to warehousing consistently-sized units which lends itself to mechanization.
For example, I knew a guy who worked in the regional distribution warehouse for a furniture distributor. He basically drove a forklift every day unloading boxed sofas and recliners out of containers and onto palettes. They had safety zones marked on the floor where no one not in a forklift was permitted while forklifts were moving. Dude basically sat on an extra cushy memory foam seat surrounded by a full cage and roll bars. He and his mates were proud of their ability to coordinate and position their forklifts as precisely as synchronized ballerinas.
2. "Warehouse Workers" are not a homogeneous population. I've known some "professional" warehouse workers in the sense that they did it as a career. They tended to be "built for the job" both physically and in attitude. I've also met some Amazon warehouse workers and every one of them viewed it as a temporary gig on the way to something else and usually for a short-term (3 to 6 months). None of the ones I met seemed especially suited physically or temperamentally for repetitive warehouse work.
Without these obvious differences controlled for in the stats, the headline claim of TFA seems about what I'd expect. I'd be much more interested in a comparison with a population of non-Amazon warehouse workers who are equally short-term and who also do similar manual sorting, stocking, picking, packing and loading of individual irregularly-sized small/medium parcels.
7 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 32.1 ms ] thread> Amazon workers only make up a third of US warehouse employees, but in 2021, they suffered 49 percent of the injuries for the entire warehouse industry, according to a report by advocacy group Strategic Organizing Center (or SOC).
This looks more like "base rate with a small amount of variance" not "Amazon is significantly worse than average".
1. "Warehouse Work" as an industry represents a wide variety of dissimilar activities. Amazon warehouse work is obviously heavily skewed toward manually sorting, stocking, picking, packing and loading massive numbers of individual irregularly-sized small and medium parcels. This kind of activity would be more injury prone compared to warehousing consistently-sized units which lends itself to mechanization.
For example, I knew a guy who worked in the regional distribution warehouse for a furniture distributor. He basically drove a forklift every day unloading boxed sofas and recliners out of containers and onto palettes. They had safety zones marked on the floor where no one not in a forklift was permitted while forklifts were moving. Dude basically sat on an extra cushy memory foam seat surrounded by a full cage and roll bars. He and his mates were proud of their ability to coordinate and position their forklifts as precisely as synchronized ballerinas.
2. "Warehouse Workers" are not a homogeneous population. I've known some "professional" warehouse workers in the sense that they did it as a career. They tended to be "built for the job" both physically and in attitude. I've also met some Amazon warehouse workers and every one of them viewed it as a temporary gig on the way to something else and usually for a short-term (3 to 6 months). None of the ones I met seemed especially suited physically or temperamentally for repetitive warehouse work.
Without these obvious differences controlled for in the stats, the headline claim of TFA seems about what I'd expect. I'd be much more interested in a comparison with a population of non-Amazon warehouse workers who are equally short-term and who also do similar manual sorting, stocking, picking, packing and loading of individual irregularly-sized small/medium parcels.