For years, people in cars stuck in traffic behind blue vans have resonated with media reports criticizing Amazon for clogging American roads. The Amazon drivers who operate these fleets of trucks and vans are known to not actually work for Amazon, but are hired by companies contracted by Amazon, and Amazon has repeatedly denied liability for any reported dangerous driving.
Because Amazon has contracts with more than 50,000 companies, it remains a difficult question to trace just how dangerous Amazon’s contracted drivers really are. However, The Information reported last year that horrific car accidents are an essential part of Amazon’s culture of convenience. And more recently, The Wall Street Journal gave new insight into just how deadly America’s favorite express delivery service can be. Since 2015, WSJ reported this week, “Truck companies carrying freight for Amazon have been involved in crashes that killed more than 75 people.”
To arrive at this number, WSJ teamed up with Jason Miller — a Michigan State University professor who researches transportation safety — to analyze several sources of government data from “3,512 truck companies inspected three or more times by authorities while trailers for Amazon since February 2020.”
The resulting report, WSJ said, “showed for the first time how the safety performance of Amazon’s truck contractors compared to their peers.” And their results didn’t seem right for Amazon. For example, a review of Department of Transportation data on unsafe driving scores of more than 1,300 Amazon trucking contractors from February 2020 to early August 2022 found that the contractors who worked the most with Amazon were “more than twice as likely as any other. comparable companies to get bad scores for unsafe driving.”
WSJ also found evidence of dozens of companies that Amazon had contracted that had “conditional” ratings, akin to DOT probing them — a black spot that typically alienates most companies from contracting them. An Illinois-based company contracted by Amazon “scored worse than the level DOT officials consider problematic” each month of WSJ’s assessment period.
DOT did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.
Response from Amazon
Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel told Ars that WSJ’s report contains “misleading and inaccurate claims”.
“First of all, the insinuation that Amazon values meeting deadlines more than human lives is absolutely false,” Nantel told Ars. “Any accident involving one of our partners or community members is a tragedy, and we always work with our contractors to prevent accidents or learn from them so they don’t happen again.”
However, WSJ reported that even though Amazon suspends contractors who violate safety standards, it doesn’t always end concerns about dangerous driving. A review of government data by the magazine found that an Amazon contractor continued to transport 55 loads after Amazon suspended its contract.
Amazon’s freight forwarder security director, Steve DasGupta, told WSJ that Amazon’s goal for its “highly secure network of tens of thousands of carriers” is “zero accidents, zero fatalities.” A company spokesperson told WSJ that Amazon “provides condolences to families of people who have died in accidents involving its contractors” and noted that Amazon contractors “had a fatality rate per vehicle mile that was approximately 7 percent lower than the industry average in 2020.”
Since WSJ first contacted Amazon about their report more than two months ago, Amazon has suspended or terminated all contractors involved in the car accidents described in WSJ’s report, suspending or terminating 80 percent of contracts. WSJ found unsafe driving scores, and made changes to the screening process.
Amazon also told WSJ that it has “warned or suspended about 1,200 companies over violations so far this year” with WSJ finding that contractors were subcontracting deliveries — yet another scenario where the keys to the big blue vans could end up in the hands of drivers. that may not meet Amazon security standards.
Nantel told Ars that another problem with WSJ’s report was that the thousands of companies in WSJ’s sample were not representative of Amazon’s network, which contains more than 50,000 contractors. Amazon’s DasGupta told WSJ that the company also prefers to analyze a company’s security score over a monthly period, not the nearly two-year period WSJ relied on for its analysis. However, Miller, who helped WSJ with the methodology for their data analysis, told Ars that the two-year period is more appropriate because inspections can be so rare.
“Amazon’s criticism that only one month’s worth of scores should be examined has minimal value,” Miller told Ars, noting that the longer window ensures that “enough inspections are in place to make meaningful decisions.”
Could Amazon ever be held liable for drivers?
WSJ reported that Amazon has argued in court that it “plays little role in overseeing the safety of its contractors on the road.”
Last year, after an Amazon delivery man traveling on a highway at nearly 14 miles per hour crashed into a Tesla, the Tesla driver, Ans Rana, suffered life-threatening injuries, including spinal cord damage and traumatic brain injuries.
Rana sued Amazon, and his case appeared to be the first test of whether Amazon could be held liable for the drivers it contracts. Rana accused the company of everything from informing the driver about the wrong speed limit in his app to negligent practices such as sending SMS reminders to seemingly urge drivers to go faster when they fall short of promised delivery times – or risk the risk. run to be terminated.
Among the claims Rana made about Amazon’s negligence in the lawsuit was a claim that he “imposed a delivery schedule that was unrealistic so that it forced drivers to rush to the point that it was unsafe and made it practically impossible to to drive safely.”
Rana’s case would drag on for many more months, with the discovery being extended to 2023, but Rana’s trial attorney Scott Harrison of Monge & Associates told Ars that mediation has begun. In the coming weeks, the mediation results could reveal more about the greater role the courts could see Amazon play when it contracts services from supposedly insecure delivery drivers. Amazon declined to comment on the lawsuit.
