Our Safety Performance
At Amazon, we obsess over data because it helps us assess the effectiveness of our efforts, identify where we can improve, and continue to innovate.
We’ve made meaningful and measurable progress over the last five years—but there’s more to do.
over the past five years.
Our commitment to improve is embedded in a safety management system that is aligned to the ISO 45001:2018 international standard for health and safety management—a voluntary framework that’s generally considered the best in the world.
A core part of our system is using a risk management approach to guide prioritization and decision making, which includes: identifying and removing hazards; evaluating our adherence to standards through audits; and continually improving safety in our operations. We use a variety of risk mitigation measures and prioritize them according to a hierarchy of controls. Also, we invest in high-impact solutions that reduce risk and make our machines, equipment, and processes safer, while at the same time implementing a variety of preventive measures such as training, standard operating procedures, and personal protective equipment.
Below we can see how these measures improved our safety performance between 2019-2024.
In the U.S., we report our operations data to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) under various industry codes that reflect the kind of work we do across our network. The majority of our data is reported under the General Warehousing and Storage and Courier and Express Delivery Services codes. As seen below, we continued making year-over-year progress across all categories, building on our meaningful progress over the past five years.
The following graphs illustrate our progress year over year and how we stack up against industry averages calculated by The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS calculates these averages using data from selected employers and releases them each November, so the most recent averages available are for 2023. We compare ourselves to the BLS data for General Warehousing and Storage, Courier and Express Delivery, and have added a comparison that represents our business as a whole.
Since the day that I walked through the door in 2017, Amazon’s obsession and ownership of safety was very obvious. I love that everyone has a voice and the ability to raise the bar on safety. Recently, I had the opportunity to lead an initiative that streamlines and simplifies how safety announcements and alerts are delivered to technicians in the North American Sort Center network. With the help of my team, we quickly identified a solution and implemented it across all 113 of our North American Sort Centers in a matter of weeks!
Getting unvarnished feedback about safety from both our employees and our front-line managerial leaders at our sites around the world is crucial to continuous improvement.
