The Occupational Security and Well being Administration, or OSHA, has issued a quotation towards Amazon, alleging that the corporate violated security legal guidelines and didn’t hold employees in three warehouses protected. The regulator has additionally proposed $60,269 in penalties associated to the violations — a drop within the bucket for an organization that recorded over $127 billion in gross sales in the course of the third quarter of 2022 alone however a comparatively excessive penalty in comparison with most of the ones it confronted from OSHA earlier than.

In response to a press launch, the quotation stems from inspections at three warehouses positioned in Deltona, Florida, Waukegan, Illinois, and New Windsor, New York. OSHA says that Amazon “uncovered employees to ergonomic, struck-by hazards” within the location, placing them at “excessive danger for decrease again accidents and different musculoskeletal issues.”

Doug Parker, assistant secretary for Occupational Security and Well being, laid a part of the blame on the tempo that Amazon units for its warehouse workers. “Every of those inspections discovered work processes that have been designed for pace however not security,” he stated, stating that the system on the warehouses appeared geared towards getting packages shipped out fairly than employee security.

It’s a criticism Amazon has confronted for years, together with from OSHA itself. Final yr, advocacy group The Strategic Organizing Heart launched a report saying that Amazon employees make up a disproportionately excessive share of all warehouse business accidents within the US. Outdoors of the warehouse, a 2019 report from Buzzfeed and ProPublica accused the corporate of buying and selling security for pace in its supply community, and that time was reiterated final yr by the SOC.

A press release from the activist group Athena Coalition quotes Daniel Olayiwola, an Amazon warehouse employee in San Antonio: “OSHA’s findings are a mirrored image of the expertise of Amazon employees like me in warehouses everywhere in the nation.” Olayiwola says that employees have been “talking out for years in regards to the grueling tempo of labor and exploitative insurance policies that straight trigger burnout, extreme stress on our our bodies, and unsafe conditions.”

For its half, Amazon doesn’t agree with OSHA’s newest allegations. “We take the security and well being of our workers very critically, and we strongly disagree with these allegations and intend to attraction,” reads an announcement from spokesperson Kelly Nantel. “We’ve cooperated totally, and the federal government’s allegations don’t mirror the truth of security at our websites.” Nantel additionally cites an enchancment within the firm’s damage charges between 2019 and 2021 (a declare much like one Amazon made in response to the 2022 SOC report) and says that “We stay up for sharing extra throughout our attraction in regards to the quite a few security improvements, course of enhancements, and investments we’re making to additional cut back accidents.”

In response to OSHA, Amazon acquired citations for 14 record-keeping violations final yr for “failing to file accidents and sicknesses, misclassifying accidents and sicknesses, not recording accidents and sicknesses inside the required time, and never offering OSHA with well timed damage and sickness information.” These got here with proposed fines of round $29,008 and have been a part of the identical investigation because the citations introduced Wednesday.

The regulator dinging Amazon is uncommon however not extraordinary. The corporate acquired a quotation in 2015 for failing to correctly file work-related accidents and sicknesses, in addition to a handful of covid-related citations in 2020.

OSHA says that it’s additionally conducting investigations at three different Amazon warehouses in Aurora, Colorado, Nampa, Idaho, and Castleton, New York, after the US Lawyer’s Workplace for the Southern District of New York referred it to take action final summer season.