Marcio Rodriguez has worked loading planes at Amazon’s KCVG facility in northern Kentucky for the past year and a half. Part of his duties at Amazon’s largest air hub in the world include loading cargo containers weighing up to 4,000 pounds onto Amazon Air aircraft.
“You’re pushing these on the rollers onto airplanes,” Rodriguez said. “I ended up pulling my back. I strained my back and bruised my ribs from doing that.”
After his injury in April, Rodriguez was told by medical officials at the Amcare clinic that he had two choices: return to work or take an unpaid medical leave to visit a doctor outside the company’s purview.
Amcare is Amazon’s infamous in-house emergency care system. It has been the subject of federal investigations through the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for not referring injured workers to other health care providers best equipped to handle critical worksite injuries.
“Anywhere else I’ve worked and gotten hurt, they immediately made sure I got some medical care and that I never had to worry about pay,” Rodriguez said.
Hundreds of other Amazon workers across the country are reporting severe injuries while on the job, as well as taking unpaid time off due to pain management or exhaustion. Rodriguez said this is partly why he signed up to help organize the ongoing union drive at KCVG.
A recent study from the University of Illinois Chicago’s Center for Urban Economic Development (CUED) surveyed 1,484 Amazon workers across 451 facilities in 42 states and found that 41% of the company’s employees report injuries at warehouses nationwide.
Almost 70% of the surveyed workers took unpaid time off due to pain or exhaustion in the previous month. About 34% had to do so three or more times.
For Rodriguez and most workers surveyed, missing time is not an option. Rodriguez’s injury and the way Amcare handled his eventual recovery cost him about eight hours of pay at his rate of $21 per hour.
The living wage for two working adults and two children in Boone County, Kentucky, is about $25.35 per hour, according to estimates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator.
“You go to the grocery store to feed your kids, and you pay two times what you thought you were going to pay,” Rodriguez said. “It’s really difficult to keep budgeting out.”
The Rodriguez family’s monthly budget totals more than $4,000, spread across several critical expenses, including $1,400 for child care, $1,500 for the house’s mortgage, $900 in groceries, and more than $200 in gas and car insurance.
“If it wasn’t for my wife and I both working,” he said, “we would not be able to make it.”
The situation is similarly bleak for other workers. CUED data shows that 60% of those taking unpaid time off due to pain or exhaustion from working at Amazon reported one or more forms of food insecurity. Further, 56% of them were not able to pay all their bills without a remaining balance in the three months prior to being surveyed.
“Workers who need money are going to keep working there and getting more hurt because they cannot afford to take that time off,” Rodriguez said.
For Sanjay Pinto, who co-authored the report and is a senior research fellow at CUED, the survey results show the erosion of the idea that working for large and ever-profitable mega conglomerates can help workers attain middle-class status.
“It used to be the case that big, leading firms in the economy provided a path to the middle class and relative economic security,” Pinto said in a press release. “Our data indicate that roughly half of Amazon’s frontline warehouse workers are struggling with food and housing insecurity and being able to pay their bills. That’s not what economic security looks like.”
Steve Kelly, an Amazon spokesperson, responded to the findings of the study, characterizing its methodology as “deeply flawed,” adding that there were limited steps taken to verify respondents work at Amazon and to prevent multiple responses from the same person.
“The bottom line is, our goal is to be an employer of choice, and over the last five years we’ve invested more than $10 billion in hourly pay—with another $1.3 billion this year alone increasing our average to $20.50 per hour in the U.S.,” Kelly said in a statement. “We also provide benefits starting day 1 including health care, dental, 401(k), and prepaid tuition and job training.”
The CUED survey found that most workers reported hourly wages between $16 and $20.
At KCVG, Rodriguez said, a path to better wages is quickly capped for employees looking to remain with the company long term. Rodriguez, whose starting wage was $19.50, said employees at the air hub facility do not receive raises after working there for three years.
“You only get raises if the whole site gets a raise,” he added.
Rodriguez said workers at KCVG are also overworked and not fairly compensated. For instance, Rodriguez is classified as a retail employee, which he says caps his earnings. In reality, he said, his job duties go far beyond.
“I am working outside day in, day out, in the rain, in the snow, in the sun,” he said. “It is very grueling work, as far as loading the airplanes. We also get trained to push the planes out … We don’t get any extra pay for any of the extra responsibilities that we pick up. It would be nice if we’re excelling at the job for them to actually pay us what we’re worth.”
Linda Howard, a retiree who has toiled for six years at the ATL6 facility outside of Atlanta, noted that the company also constantly fails to schedule workers to labor the hours they were promised. Rodriguez initially signed up to work full time. It took more than a year on the job for him to be scheduled for 40 hours of work.
“There are people in my facility at the moment who are only working 20 to 25 hours per week,” Howard said in a press statement. “Who can survive on that kind of money? For the hard work we do and the money Amazon makes, every associate should make a livable wage.”
The levels of precarity experienced by Amazon workers have also led to severe and widespread cases of housing instability, Howard said. The CUED report indicates that 48% of workers experienced one or more forms of housing insecurity in the three months prior to being surveyed.
“Many Amazon associates cannot pay their bills, they can’t afford proper housing—some of my coworkers have been forced out of their homes,” Howard said. “We are stuck in a nightmare: living in an economy that puts no cap on worker exploitation while our wages can’t keep up with the increase in our cost of living. This cycle has to stop.”
Amazon workers struggle with injuries and low pay despite company’s profits is a story from Prism, a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places, and issues currently underreported by national media. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to support our work today.
