Blog

PPI believes that worker safety and dignity is one of the key pillars of modern technological society. The evidence of the past fifty years shows that it is possible to increase productivity, keep weekly work hours about the same,  and reduce injuries at the same time. Since the early 1970s, labor productivity has risen by about 140%, and the average hours worked per week has fallen by about 10%. But over the same stretch, the work-related injury and illness rate in the private sector has fallen by 75%.

There’s a lot going on beneath the surface of these historical trends, including massive shifts in the structure of the economy away from high-risk production jobs in manufacturing, many of which moved overseas or were automated out of existence. But now the debate over worker safety has moved away from manufacturing to ecommerce.

A bill called “The Warehouse Worker Protection Act” is being introduced in the Senate by Senator Ed Markey and three co-sponsors. The bill contains some reasonable provisions, including a requirement that bathroom breaks not be counted against workers. But the core of the bill is a full-scale assault on quantifiable performance standards, which the bill misleadingly calls “quotas.”

Quantifiable performance standards are a way of life in many industries, from manufacturing to consulting. But the bill bizarrely only targets a small number of industries, creating a new federal bureaucracy and set of arcane rules for performance standards that only apply to ecommerce industries such as warehousing and shipping.

That focus is ironic, since the ecommerce/retail sector stands out as the main source of new jobs for workers with less than a bachelor’s degree. PPI analyzed data from the Current Population Survey from the first quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2024. We found that over the last five years, the ecommerce/retail sector added roughly 880,000 workers with a high school diploma, some college or an associate degree. Meanwhile, job opportunities for similarly-educated workers in the rest of the economy shrunk substantially.

To put it another way, Americans face a labor market that is mostly inhospitable to non-college-educated workers. For example, manufacturers employ about 900,000 fewer workers with a high school diploma, some college, or an associate degree today, compared to the first quarter of 2019. That’s why the role of ecommerce jobs is so crucial in many parts of the country.

The importance of ecommerce/retail jobs for non-college-educated workers does not mean we should ignore safety. Quite the contrary. Safety is important, and the efforts of companies like Amazon to improve worker safety should be acknowledged. For example, Amazon’s Lost Time Incident Rate (LTIR) — which includes any work-related injury that requires someone to take time away from work (the most serious of injuries) — has improved 60% since 2019.

Given the gains in safety combined with much-needed job growth, it seems like the industry is already moving along a path that is beneficial to non-college-educated workers without the new legislation. Policymakers should think seriously before they create an unnecessary new federal bureaucracy and rules.