Driver Training Was Reportedly Too Much of “a Bottleneck” for Amazon
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:
Driver training was reportedly too much of "a bottleneck" for Amazon:
Amazon is rapidly dispensing with carriers such as FedEx for its retail deliveries, bringing the logistics business in-house to ship more Prime packages more quickly. The speed and money savings, though, seem to be coming at the cost of health and safety concerns-and a new report says the company is well aware, and Amazon is letting it happen anyway.
Internal documents show the company had plans to implement driver safety training courses but scrapped them in order to get drivers up and running faster, ProPublica and BuzzFeed News report.
"We chose not to have onroad practical training because it was a bottleneck" to getting drivers on the road, a senior manager wrote.
It was just one of many examples the reporters found of Amazon ignoring evidence its logistics business was overburdened.
[...] Amazon strenuously objected to the new story, calling the report "another attempt by ProPublica and BuzzFeed to push a preconceived narrative that is simply untrue."
The company told ProPublica it provided more than 1 million hours of safety training to employees and contractors in the last year but did not say how many of its 750,000 worldwide employees participated in said training. Amazon also said it spent $55 million on "safety improvement projects" last year-"about one-fifth of 1% of the $27.7 billion the company spent on shipping last year," the reporters write.
"Nothing is more important to us than safety," the company added.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.