ST. PETERS — Amazon workers have filed a federal complaint over conditions at the company’s warehouse in St. Peters, alleging that employees are rushed to pack and carry containers and that the repetitive motions are causing frequent injuries.
And when employees are injured, their complaints are downplayed, a group of workers said at a Thursday news conference announcing the complaint filed with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
“When people get injured at Amazon, their pain is ignored,†said Paul Irving, one of the workers filing the complaint.
In a prepared statement, Amazon spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel said the company welcomes OSHA to its sites at any time and is “confident they’ll see a clean, safe facility in St. Peters.â€
The St. Peters warehouse recordable injury rate is below the industry average and has improved in recent years, Vogel said, and that in anonymous surveys workers there report they feel safe.
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Eleven workers provided descriptions of the conditions at the St. Peters warehouse in the complaint. Multiple people described injuries and muscle strains from the repetitive motions of lifting and packing containers. Several said that they are written up when they don’t meet the required hourly pace for the numbers of bins they must pack or lift.
The workers requested an OSHA inspection of the warehouse.
The company doesn’t support employees who are hurt in the workplace, said Wendy Taylor, who has worked as a packer at the facility for three years.
“They repeatedly gaslit my injuries,†Taylor said during the news conference, which was organized by the Missouri Workers Center.
Taylor said leg pain kept her up at night after she tripped over a misplaced crate in March. An on-site medical team gave her ice and heat treatment. After that, the company sent her back to work and told her that she’d need to seek medical care on her own time, she said.
“Amazon don’t care about our complaints, don’t care about our injuries, don’t care about us,†Taylor said.
Amazon said Thursday that employees who are hurt are not sent back to the floor. If workers require more than basic first aid, they are urged to seek outside care, the company said.
Another packer, Jennifer Crane, said her tasks at the warehouse are timed to the second. The single mother of seven said workers can get fired for having a bad day. Crane said everyday tasks such as lifting a pan or opening a jar were difficult after she tore a ligament in her thumb at the warehouse.
“The truth is the company is more concerned with its stock price than worker safety,†Crane said.
Amazon has faced scrutiny for safety at ºüÀêÊÓƵ-area warehouses in the past.
Amazon previously received calls for the creation of a worker-led committee to ensure job accommodations for people working at the St. Peters warehouse after injuries. And a lawsuit claimed Amazon put profits ahead of workers’ lives when a tornado hit an Edwardsville warehouse, killing six people.
In Colorado, Idaho and New York, OSHA Amazon exposed workers to unsafe conditions.