Amazon.com is gaming the system to hide workplace injuries from federal regulators, Hal Bernton and Susan Kelleher report in the Seattle Times:

Three former workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Campbellsville told The Seattle Times there was pressure to manage injuries so they would not have to be reported to OSHA, such as attributing workplace injuries to pre-existing conditions or treating wounds in a way that did not trigger federal reports.

Pam Wethington, a former Campbellsville employee, took several months off work in 2002 because of stress fractures in both feet. She says her doctor attributed the injury to walking miles on the concrete floors of the warehouse, but Amazon disputed that the fractures were work-related.

A former warehouse safety official said in-house medical staff were asked to treat wounds, when possible, with bandages rather than refer workers to a doctor for stitches that could trigger federal reports. And warehouse officials tried to advise doctors on how to treat injured workers.

Dr. Jerome Dixon, a Campellsville physician who treated injured Amazon workers, told the Times that Amazon managers didn’t like it when he gave injured workers anti-inflammatory shots because a shot turns an injury into a reportable incident:

“If you give a shot of an anti-inflammatory, it makes the patient get better faster,” Dixon said. “Sometimes I did give that shot, and maybe they didn’t like that. I would say, ‘Sorry, I know it’s a recordable and makes you do paperwork.’ “

Bernton and Kelleher’s reporting on Amazon’s operations in Kentucky and Washington state builds on the work of Spencer Soper of the Morning Call, who won a Sidney Award for his expose of brutal working conditions at an Amazon warehouse complex in Pennsylvania.

Amazon is a non-union company that strategically positions its warehouses in economically depressed areas with low union density.

[Photo credit: Double-M, Creative Commons.]