The birth of Proteus came 10 years after Amazon acquired Kiva Systems, the company that became Amazon Robotics. The Kiva robot transports up to 1,000 pounds of customer orders from warehouse to picker, but operates in a part of the warehouse that humans cannot reach.
Strategic Organization Center health and safety director Eric Frumin said Amazon’s promotion of a new collision avoidance robot is a distraction from the main causes of injury in their facilities.
“Amazon has an amazing ability to create new and more appealing hazards for workers,” says Frumin. “It is possible that this robot will present some new threats to workers, but I am more concerned about the company being completely blinded by the dangers it knows about.” He said those hazards include requiring workers to make rapid and repetitive movements that cause injury: for example, when stacking trucks from floor to ceiling or using a manual jack.
Frumin is a co-author on the Strategic Organization Center’s analysis of Amazon records with OSHA, published in April. It found that since 2017, the company’s only annual decline in worker injury rates occurred in 2020, when it temporarily reduced its worker quota as a result of the Covid pandemic. -19. The report found that injury rates then increase by 20% in 2021. It also found that although Amazon employs one in three warehouse workers in the United States, half of all injuries involve employees. Warehouse workers occur at facilities operated by the company. About 90% of injuries at Amazon are severe enough to force people out of work or render them unable to perform regular work functions.
In March of this year, after inspecting Amazon warehouses in the company’s home state of Washington, state regulators fined company $60,000 for “intentional, serious violations” of safety rules that could result in lower back and upper extremity injuries.
Proteus was introduced last month at Amazon’s re:MARS conference alongside other technology the company claims will improve safety for warehouse workers. A camera system called AR ID can automatically identify packages without requiring workers to hold a barcode scanner. A robot called Pinky receive packages up to 50 pounds and another, formerly known as ErniePlace items in containers for storage, a task performed by people who have to climb stairs multiple times to place items into tall carts.
Debbie Berkowitz, a senior policy adviser and OSHA chief of staff under the Obama administration, says that Amazon has significantly expanded the use of robots in its warehouses under the Trump administration, as federal officials unresponsive to reports of high injury rates. “Basically, nobody was watching when this happened,” says Berkowitz, who in the 1980s and 1990s served as safety director for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.
“Ultimately, I think robots will make it better for consumers and worse for workers, who will work harder and faster,” says Berkowitz. She believes Amazon has failed to account for the natural variation in human body size since its expansion, resulting in musculoskeletal injury from workers who make repetitive but powerful movements.
Amazon’s Brady told WIRED that the company is looking for opportunities to reduce repetitive tasks and heavy lifting to reduce musculoskeletal injuries. “Every time something goes wrong,” he says, “we look at it really sharply and ask ourselves, ‘How can we improve the system so this doesn’t happen again? “” Last month Amazon pledged to reduce bone risk. and trauma 25% by 2025.
Berkowitz said that if Amazon allowed her to control worker safety in its warehouses, she would hire ergonomic experts to visit every Amazon fulfillment center and meet workers, see Review injury logs, find out which jobs have the highest pain reports, and start looking at design changes to better protect those workers. “They can really be a leader here.”
