Warehouses Can Be Dangerous Places To Work. Do Robots Help Or Hurt?

The holiday rush is on, bringing with it packages, boxes, bags and familiar scenes of shoppers knocking each other over.

Less visible is the peril lurking inside thousands of warehouses and distribution centers around the country. The reliance upon heavy-duty industrial equipment to haul loads combined with a hectic, unrelenting pace—exacerbated by a dearth of well-trained workers—has made the warehouse space notorious for injuries and accidents.

“It’s not as dangerous as being a cop or a firefighter, but believe me, it’s up there in terms of America’s most dangerous occupations,” says Mike Gallagher, a logistics foot soldier at Tops Friendly Markets in Buffalo and a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Gallagher, 59, spent much of his career as a “selector” in Tops’ distribution center in Lancaster, New York. It’s an 880,000-square-foot facility where on any given day (24/7/365) some 300 workers are driving carts and grabbing cases of items in 20-30-minute scavenger-hunt-type sprees, assembling pallets. It’s a rigorous task he calls “mindless labor,” and which in recent years has been guided by voice-activated navigation software.

“I’ve seen every type of incident—collisions, guys getting run over, stuff falling on top of you—you name it, it’s either happened to me or I’ve witnessed it,” Gallagher says. “It’s just the nature of this industry. Workers come and go. I’ve just managed to keep my head down and find a role and schedule here that suits me. It’s a job.”

Turnover at warehouse sites typically runs at 300% to 400% annually, according to various industry statistics.

“You can always find guys willing to buy into this ‘industrial athlete’ tag they give you,” Gallagher says. “That and $20 to $25 an hour. The faster you work, the more you can make it. But a lot of guys get burned out. That’s expected. The joke is if you have been working here as selector three years—you’ve been here too long.

The potential hazards in the fast-paced warehousing and storage industry include those associated with powered industrial trucks (forklifts and pallet movers), ergonomics, material handling, hazardous chemicals, slips/trips/falls and, in recent years, incidents connected with the rise of robotics, according to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The most common injuries are musculoskeletal disorders (mainly from overexertion in lifting and lowering) and being struck by powered industrial trucks and other materials handling equipment.

Kimberly Darby, an OSHA spokesperson, confirms that the industry has taken proactive steps since 2017 to protect the safety of warehouse workers.

“In today’s warehouse, there are many new hazards that come from new tools developed to improve efficiency,” she says. “These new hazards must be addressed by employers to protect worker safety. There are many automated tools in the warehouse such as conveyors, labelers and automated pallet wrappers. When not properly integrated into the workplace, these tools can create significant hazards.”

One ubiquitous industrial machine stands apart as a menace to the manual laborer: forklifts. Fatal forklift accidents across all industries, including warehouses, represent a disturbing trend not often discussed.

OSHA reports that approximately 85 forklift-related fatalities and 34,900 serious injuries occur every year in the U.S.

“The numbers are alarming,” proclaimed a blog post by Trainmor, a forklift training company that tracks incidents around the country.

“Operating powered industrial equipment can be dangerous, just as operating an automobile is dangerous,” says supply chain specialist Ronald Leibman, head of the transportation group at McCarter & English law firm. “Both are currently necessary though. In both cases, training and proper operation acts as a risk mitigator.”

Leibman points to powered industrial equipment training mandated by OSHA regulations. These include certification procedures to assure that only qualified and safe persons are manning the equipment.

“The question to ask then,” Leibman explains, “is what percentage of accidents are caused by improper or no training and/or driver negligence versus the inherent nature of the task?”

Some recent OSHA studies have shown manual forklift accidents annually account for 10% of injuries in warehouses/factories; and that an estimated 70% of these incidents could be prevented, particularly through improved driver training.

When warehouse hazards garner national attention it often is in connection with America’s most enormous retailer. Indeed, safety issues at Amazon
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facilities routinely attract scrutiny.

The Strategic Organizing Center—a coalition of the Service Employees International Union, Communications Workers of America and the United Farmworkers of America, and which represents some 2.3 million workers—earlier this year published a report based on an analysis of injury data that Amazon submitted to OSHA for 2022. The SOC said workers at Amazon facilities sustained nearly 39,000 injuries in 2022, representing 53% of all injuries in the warehouse industry. And, per their conclusions, “Amazon’s operations continue to be dramatically more dangerous for workers than the rest of the warehouse industry.”

Maureen Lynch Vogel, an Amazon spokesperson, strenuously refutes this assertion: “The process used to generate this claim is based on incomplete data, and the conclusion isn’t accurate,” she says. “Many large companies with similar operational footprints that should be included in such a calculation report almost all of their injuries under different reporting codes than we do. As a result, ‘industry average’ actually represents only a small subset of the companies that have businesses similar to ours, and many are much smaller.

“We believe that either the Bureau of Labor Statistics data released each fall, or comparisons to individual companies themselves, give more accurate snapshots of how we compare to others,” she continues. “Depending on the industry code and the specific metric, sometimes we’re higher and sometimes we’re lower than other companies, but to paint us as significantly worse than the rest of the industry simply isn’t true. At the same time, our goal isn’t to be average—we want to be best in class. The fact is, we’ve made progress and our numbers clearly show it.”

Since 2019, Vogel says, Amazon has reduced its rate of recordable injuries across the U.S by 23%.

Denise Stafford is the U.S. business development manager at Kuka Robotics, a German manufacturer of industrial robots. Stafford is based in Shelby Township, Michigan, where she stays in close communication with warehouses and storage facility operators connected with the manufacturing industry.

She can recall conversations with factory managers who wanted to replace all the forklifts at the site with self-driving forklifts or robots.

“Safety is one issue that came up, but the bigger problem was a shortage of employees capable and reliable enough to handle the equipment,” she said.

Once a logistics game plan starts to include robots, levels of safety and quality most likely increase, Stafford said.

But automating a manual process comes with risks as well as rewards.

This article is the first part of a three-part series. Read part two, which discusses robotics solutions and safety, on Friday. Part three, on Monday, tackles the issue of man versus machine.