The Evolution and Trajectory of Ergonomic Hazards in the Warehousing Industry: A Mixed-Methods Approach

Working conditions in the warehousing industry have rightfully come under public scrutiny in recent years. Warehouse workers are a highly contingent workforce characterized by high turnover rates and the use of temporary or seasonal workers. Contributing to the burden of injuries, E-commerce growth has increased the speed, repetitiveness, and variability of warehouse work. This study looks at State of Illinois Workers’ Compensation data from 2018 through 2021 to understand and characterize injury patterns in the warehousing industry. More specifically, the project looks at 1). Differences in injury claims between peak and non-peak seasons, 2). How injury claims from E-commerce warehouses differ from more traditional warehouses, and 3). How warehousing experts thematize the shifting determinants of injury patterns in the industry. The study employed a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design in which the research process was bifurcated into two separate phases: a quantitative phase followed by a qualitative phase; the qualitative findings were used to “refine and explain” the quantitative results, as well as to provide general context for the research aims. The quantitative findings demonstrated that e-commerce warehouses differed from other warehouses in terms of both seasonality, job tenure patterns, and injury claim characteristics. Statistically significant seasonal increases in monthly injury claims were observed only among e-commerce warehouses. The qualitative analysis described a multi-level process of injury causation whereby industry-level competition for consumer demand pushed e-commerce warehouses to organize work towards faster production speeds, leading to greater biomechanical and psychosocial hazard exposures among workers in these facilities. After integrating the quantitative and qualitative finding, the observed seasonal injury claim spikes are best interpreted as a window into the growing gap between the technical capacity to move goods through e-commerce warehouses and the capacity of workers to keep pace with corresponding production quotas. The findings of this mixed-methods study help construct a model of injury causation in e-commerce warehouses that may be informative for future health and safety regulatory efforts.