In DuPont, Washington, an Amazon fulfillment center has been fined twice in the last year for, among other issues, setting grueling expectations that increase workplace injuries. When Washington State Senator Steve Conway heard about the citations from the state’s labor department (which Amazon is appealing), he asked Amazon if he could tour the facility. He’d recently read a report showing Amazon’s injury rates are nearly twice the national average for the warehousing and fulfillment industry, and, since he’d worked in warehousing earlier in his career, he wanted to see for himself what was different about this one.

The company agreed, but they sent him to a different warehouse, in Kent, Washington, instead. “I asked for documents that would lay out some of the issues that came up in terms of the quotas, and they of course didn’t provide me any information. Maybe because they have lawsuits, sometimes businesses do that,” he told Protocol about his warehouse tour. “The only thing they provided me was the job descriptions they use in recruiting workers; that was all I saw. I asked them specifically when I was at the warehouse for that information and they wouldn’t provide it.”