Join Healthy Roster and the National Safety Council in welcoming in the 25th anniversary of National Safety Month!

As an industrial employer, you want to keep your workers healthy. They are your most important company asset. When employees miss time at work due to injury or illness it can create significant costs for the business in productivity, loss of the employee, training new ones, employee morale, and reputation. Costs can be overwhelming for the workers and their families in lost wages, medical bills, and travel.

Amazon has over 80 distribution and warehouse facilities in the U.S. and can employ 1,000 to over 1,500 full-time workers to handle the demand of storing, sorting and shipping packages. That many people, doing that much heavy lifting and repetitive motion, can lead to a lot of musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) in the workplace. 

Injuries happen to us humans all the time. But never more so than when we're involved in physical activity—like playing a sport of working hard on our feet. We twist our ankles, strain our backs, and tweak our rotator cuffs.  

What are MSDs? 

People hate change. Whenever you introduce anything new, people work hard to avoid whatever is new, hoping it'll go away. This is especially true of new technology (which most people usually grow accustomed to and soon cannot live without it!) 

Before the pandemic hit in 2020, the labor shortage in U.S. factories was already problematic. They found it difficult to fill a large amount of open positions. For many manufacturers and distributors, production got pushed into high gear to handle the increased demand from consumers. Despite the high demand for factory workers, most of the people who had lost service jobs did not migrate to the open jobs on assembly lines. 

Musculoskeletal disorders wreak havoc on nearly every business in this country. 40% of all work-related injuries are MSDs and millions of employees are affected every single year. The majority of these injuries are in the manufacturing and distribution industries because they require heavy lifting and repetitive motion.

Survey after survey finds that people were forced to adapt to virtual care through telehealth out of necessity during the pandemic but a large majority were satisfied with the experience and enjoyed the convenience.

What is interesting is they want to continue with those video visits after the health crisis has ended - as an alternative to in-person visits.

As people go back to work, find new jobs, and businesses open their doors again, the economy will expand rapidly. A direct result of this will be a greater demand for goods.