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“No One Heard Me at Amazon”

Pregnant workers at the mega-corporation say they endure unsafe conditions and are punished when they asked for accommodations.

About three years ago, Key’asia Hollis’s boyfriend, now her fiancé, helped her get a job as a boxer at Amazon, which paid $23 an hour. The new job enabled her to move out of the motel where she’d been living with her sister and her sister’s family. Hollis worked 12-hour overnight shifts packing and moving heavy boxes filled with the sundry items that Amazon customers regularly order.

It was a financial lifesaver for Hollis, and all was going well—until she got pregnant. On a shift one night, she strained to lift a heavy box and started bleeding. She went to the emergency room, where medical providers advised her not to lift heavy objects for 10 days to protect her pregnancy. When she returned to work with a doctor’s note to that effect, she was fired. The termination meant that she couldn’t reapply to work at Amazon for three months. During that time, she moved into her mother’s three-bedroom house, where she lived with five other people. With no income to provide for a baby’s needs, she decided to get an abortion. “I didn’t have that baby because finances weren’t permitting,” she said.

When the three-month period ended, Hollis got another job at a smaller Amazon warehouse. When she again got pregnant in the summer of 2024, she was worried: “I didn’t want to lose my job like I did the last time,” she said. But she reasoned that she could do things “the proper way” by telling the company up front and asking for accommodations to avoid health problems while working. Unbeknownst to her, in the time between her two stints at Amazon, a new law, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, went into effect. The PWFA should have protected her on the job. But that’s not what happened.

When Hollis informed Amazon about her pregnancy, she was told to get her doctor to fill out paperwork so she could get on-the-job accommodations, but her doctor told her that, because it was so early in the pregnancy, she could continue to work normally. Hollis figured she could tough out the fatigue for a while longer, but Amazon didn’t agree. When she informed the company of her doctor’s recommendations—which would have required no immediate changes to her job—she was placed on unpaid leave.

While she was on leave, her doctor sent over paperwork outlining the accommodations Hollis would need when she returned. She wasn’t supposed to climb ladders or lift, push, or pull anything 30 pounds or heavier. She should also be given extra rest and bathroom breaks as needed.

After her unpaid leave was up, Hollis asked her supervisor if she could return to work and was told that she was being put on another unpaid leave while the company considered her request for accommodations. “I’m sitting at home for weeks, no pay in my pocket, no way to feed myself,” she said. “It was very emotionally stressful. It was physically stressful. It was just stressful all the way around.”

Finally, Hollis was told that her accommodations had been approved and that she could return to work. But when she got there, it was immediately clear that nothing had changed. Her “entire job” entailed climbing up and down a sliding ladder to stow items on a top shelf, she said. She was denied extra breaks, even just 15 minutes to sit or grab a snack. She strained herself pushing a box that was heavier than her doctor’s recommended limit. She also learned that the involuntary leaves of absence had eaten into her bank of unpaid time off. Amazon gives each new hire a bank of hours and deducts from it every time the employee misses work, threatening termination if the total goes too far into negative territory. Workers say the company approves absences very infrequently, even when they are sick or need to attend a doctor’s appointment.

When Hollis called Amazon’s human-resources department to find out why she was still assigned tasks that her doctor had said she needed to avoid, she was told she would have to work it out with the employees at that particular warehouse. But the HR team at the warehouse told her that her accommodations had been set up correctly. She felt like they were “ping-ponging” her back and forth, she told me.

Finally, she decided to take the bus to the warehouse on a day off to sort it out once and for all. Sobbing all the way there, Hollis spoke with a warehouse supervisor, who pulled up her original request and said it had been entered incorrectly. It couldn’t be fixed, she was told; instead, she had to start the process all over, asking her doctor to resend the paperwork, and go on another unpaid leave.

It was the week of her 25th birthday, but she couldn’t afford a celebration, not even a cake. “Amazon had ripped that out of my pockets,” she said.

A week later, Hollis returned to work, again with negative unpaid time off. After she clocked in, her manager said she couldn’t find the accommodations in the system and couldn’t allow her to work the shift she had been assigned to, given her restrictions. HR told her that she had to be sent home because there were no jobs she could work. Once again, she was put on unpaid leave.

Hollis kept calling HR, begging to find out how she could safely return to work. She was told that she was free to return to her job but with no assurance that her health needs would be met, so she didn’t. Finally, in August 2024, now three months pregnant, she received an e-mail stating she had been fired for abandoning her job. The entire experience left her feeling like nobody had listened to her. “It feels like you’re another number in a sea of people,” Hollis said. “It broke my heart.”

Amazon is the country’s second-largest private employer and a name brand that millions of Americans interact with every day. It’s where we turn for everything from socks to swimming pools. In 2025, it booked $426 billion in net sales in North America.

But the company’s relentless focus on moving products as fast as possible from its warehouses into American homes has often created brutal working conditions. A 2021 report from the Strategic Organizing Center found that in 2020, Amazon’s warehouse workers experienced an injury rate of 6.5 out of every 100 full-time employees, much higher than the rate of 4 percent in non-Amazon warehouses. In 2023, the company recorded 30 percent more injuries than the industry average for warehouses. “Amazon expects workers to move at unsafe rates and in unsafe conditions,” a report issued by Senator Bernie Sanders found.

At the same time, the company makes it extremely difficult for employees to take time off for medical needs. A 2020 report by the nonprofit legal organization A Better Balance on attendance policies like the one at Amazon, which penalize employees when they take unsanctioned time off, found that the companies that deploy them frequently fail to tell workers about........

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