Amazon opened a one-million-square-foot warehouse in Fishersville on April 30th. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
[sounds of machinery, equipment beeping]
The new fulfillment center has a footprint greater than 15 football fields. Employees work in shifts around the clock, receiving and storing Amazon merchandise. It's hard to describe how large this building is – cavernous doesn't quite cut it, when you size up the towering rows of metal shelving that recede into the distance.
Augusta County Administrator Tim Fitzgerald spoke at a ribbon-cutting event last week.
TIM FITZGERALD: In some ways, it feels like this day's been a long time coming. It is a testament to making economic development a strategic priority for the county.
In Amazon lingo, this place is referred to as a "traditional, non-sortable" facility, meaning it deals in products a bit bigger and bulkier than what can be easily managed by robotic equipment. The items here are generally 20 to 30 pounds, and consist of a lot of home goods.
IRFAAN HAFEEZ: The first product we received was a three-pack, eight-pound bag of Epsom salt, and then the first item that we stowed was an air purifier. So if you think in that range – blenders, chairs, et cetera, we house them here.
Irfaan Hafeez is the general manager. On a recent tour, he walked through the different receiving and processing areas of the warehouse.
HAFEEZ: … When it's not on a pallet, it's just in a box, we actually have our parcel identification device, and what it does is, it's establishing, where did this package, where did this carton come from?
Here, a conveyor belt fed boxes through bright red and purple scanner lights, and slapped labels on them.
HAFEEZ: So this is capable of doing over 2,000 cartons an hour.
Once identified and labeled, the merchandise gets stored until it's ordered by a customer in Virginia or another state nearby. Then, it'll get sent to a sortation center, then a delivery station, and finally, to your doorstep.
Hafeez emphasized many safety features and protocols – such as a railing separating a walkway from equipment parking.
HAFEEZ: As you can see all around us, really, safety innovation – how can Amazon continue to strive to improve there? … If something were to happen, this can sustain, it will bend, it won't break.
Worker safety – or lack thereof – in Amazon warehouses has caught the attention of Congress and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, in the past few years. Internal records obtained by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting showed that the company's serious injury rate from 2016 - 2019 was nearly double the industry average.
Their reporting includes data from four warehouses in Virginia – in Sterling, Clear Brook, Petersburg, and Chester. Those facilities reported between six and 14.5 serious injuries per 100 workers per year. During that time, the industry average was around just four.
Since then, OSHA has received four complaints about safety at Amazon's Virginia facilities. One of them resulted in a $5,000 fine for a violation of the law which requires employers to quickly report [quote] "any work-related incident resulting in … the loss of an eye." [end quote]
In April, the Strategic Organizing Center, a labor union coalition, issued a report analyzing OSHA data from 2022. The center found the serious injury rate for that year to be 6.6 per 100 workers – still twice the rate of non-Amazon warehouses, which had dropped to 3.2.
CNBC has reported that Amazon took issue with the term "serious injury rate," saying it was being used to include minor injuries, such as a strain. The article noted, however, that in 2021, Amazon set a goal to cut its warehouse injury rate in half by 2025.
At the grand opening, I asked Dean Fullerton, vice president of global engineering and security services, about this issue.
[people talking in background]
HAGI: So, Amazon has come under some public scrutiny in recent years for having higher rates of serious injury to workers than the warehouse industry average. I'm wondering if you could speak to any company-wide initiatives that might be addressing that.
He noted that worker safety is not under his purview, however –
DEAN FULLERTON: I've been in this industry for a long time … and I would say Amazon – if you were to go inside one of these buildings – is one of the safest places to work in, and there's a lot of priority and capital spent on making sure it is safe. That's not to say we don't have a lot to do and a lot that we can improve on. We're not perfect. We have a long ways to go. But there are a lot of initiatives that we have around safety, whether it's the equipment we use, whether it's the PPE we require people to wear, you know, the gloves, our vests, our hard-toed shoes to help prevent injuries, whether it's the training programs – we have a rigorous training program that we're constantly evolving and innovating on.
Hafeez and other company leaders touted the benefits of working at Amazon.
HAFEEZ: … a starting average wage of over $16, comprehensive benefits packages, a supportive work environment, includes health, vision, dental from day one, a 401k with 50 percent match, a generous paid leave, and free mental health resources.
Holly Sullivan, vice president of global economic development, explained that all hourly, full-time workers are eligible for education benefits after 90 days of employment. They're partnering with James Madison University and Blue Ridge Community College to provide some of those opportunities.
The fulfillment center currently employs around 200 people, and Hafeez plans to hire another 300 to reach full staffing levels.
