Warehouse work is the fastest-growing kind of work on Staten Island. Between 2019 and 2021 the borough’s transportation and warehousing employment rose by roughly two thirds, the largest percentage increase of any borough in the city, and Staten Island now holds about an eighth of all of New York City’s transportation and warehousing jobs on about a twentieth of its population. Most of that growth sits in the Bloomfield and Gulf Avenue corridor, in buildings measured in hundreds of thousands of square feet.
Those jobs pay. They also break people, and they break people in a particular way that the workers’ compensation system handles badly if nobody is paying attention.
The largest of those buildings is Amazon’s JFK8 fulfillment center on Gulf Avenue, which employs thousands of people. In December 2024 the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions published an investigation into injuries at Amazon warehouses across the country. It found that in 2023 Amazon warehouses recorded 6.54 injuries per 100 workers, against 4.8 per 100 across the warehousing industry as a whole, and that more than two thirds of Amazon’s warehouses were above the industry average that year. The committee published no figure for the Staten Island facility specifically, and a national injury rate does not decide anybody’s individual claim. What it does tell you is that if your shoulder or your back gave out working in a building like that one, you are not an outlier, and you are not imagining the pace.
There are two kinds of warehouse claim, and they run on different clocks
The second kind — the injury that builds up rather than happening on a given day — is an occupational disease, and the most common one in this work is carpal tunnel syndrome. Its deadlines and its causation test are different from an accident claim’s.
The first kind is the one everybody pictures. A pallet comes down. A forklift catches you. You slip on a wet dock plate, or a load shifts while you are pulling it. There is a moment, a date, and usually a witness. New York calls that an accident, and the law defines injury to mean only accidental injuries arising out of and in the course of employment, together with any disease or infection that naturally and unavoidably results from them.
The second kind has no moment. Your shoulder gets worse over eleven months. Your lower back stops recovering between shifts. Your wrist starts waking you up at night. Nothing dropped on you and nothing struck you — the job simply asked the same movement of your body several thousand times a day until the body stopped absorbing it.
New York can treat that second kind as an occupational disease, which the statute defines as a disease resulting from the nature of employment and contracted therein. It is not a lesser claim. It is a differently proved one, and the difference decides the deadlines — which is where more warehouse claims are lost than in any medical argument.
The deadlines are not what most people are told
If it was an accident, you must give your employer notice within thirty days of the accident, and the claim must generally be filed within two years.
If it built up, the rule is different and far more forgiving, and almost nobody knows it. For an occupational disease, notice to the employer must be given within two years after disablement, or after you knew or should have known that the condition is due to the nature of your employment, whichever of those is the later date. The filing deadline follows the same logic: a claim is not barred where it is filed within two years after disablement and after the claimant knew or should have known that the disease is or was due to the nature of the employment — which the courts read as running from whichever of those two dates is later.
That matters enormously in practice. A worker who spent a year being told the shoulder was just age is not out of time. The clock does not start until the connection to the work was, or should have been, apparent. But once it is apparent, it runs, and it does not stop while you think about it.
So if your injury built up rather than happened, the safest thing you can do is report it in writing the day you first connect it to the work, and keep a copy. Not the day it becomes unbearable, and not after you have waited to see whether it settles down.
What the carrier will argue, and why warehouses are now different
In a cumulative claim the fight is almost never about whether you are hurt. It is about whether the job caused it. The carrier’s position writes itself: you are forty-six, discs degenerate, rotator cuffs tear in people who have never lifted anything heavier than a briefcase, and nothing in your file identifies a single thing at work that did this.
That argument used to be difficult to answer, because the only evidence about what the job actually demanded was the worker’s own description of it.
That changed in New York on June 1, 2025.
Your employer may be required to have written the risk down
New York’s Warehouse Worker Injury Reduction Program applies to employers who employ 100 or more employees at a single warehouse distribution center, or 1,000 or more employees at one or more warehouse distribution centers in the state. “Warehouse distribution center” is defined by industry classification and takes in warehousing and storage, merchant wholesalers, electronic shopping and mail-order houses, and couriers and express delivery. Staten Island’s larger fulfillment and distribution operations are the kind of facility the law was written for. Whether a particular employer is covered depends on its headcount, and that is worth checking rather than assuming.
Since June 1, 2025, a covered employer must establish and implement an injury reduction program. The program has to contain:
- a written worksite evaluation that identifies and assesses ergonomic risk factors,
- the actions the employer has taken to limit and reduce those factors and conditions,
- injury reduction training for employees and for supervisors,
- on-site medical and first aid practices,
- and it must be developed with feedback and input from employees.
The worksite evaluation itself is not a formality. It must be written and completed by a competent person, it must incorporate input from the workers who do the jobs being evaluated, and it must evaluate each job, process, shift and operation. It must identify specific ergonomic risk factors by name: rapid pace, forceful exertions, extreme or static postures, repetitive motions, direct pressure, contact stress, vibration, and cold temperature. It must determine whether the employees exposed to those risk factors are also responsible for meeting quotas, and what consequences, if any, they face for failing to meet one. Where a risk factor cannot be corrected within thirty days, the employer must provide a schedule for correcting it. The evaluation has to be reviewed and updated by a competent person every year.
Read that list again with a contested shoulder claim in mind. Rapid pace. Forceful exertions. Repetitive motions. Vibration, if you spend your shift on a pallet jack. Cold temperature, if you pick in a freezer. Those are the things a carrier spends a hearing insisting were not present in your job, and New York now requires your employer to have assessed them, in writing, for your job and your shift.
There is also a training requirement, and it tells you what you were supposed to have been taught. Training must happen once a year, during normal work hours and on paid time, in a language and vocabulary workers understand, for everyone who performs manual jobs or tasks handling materials and for their supervisors. It must cover the early symptoms of musculoskeletal disorders; ergonomic risk factors, including the danger posed by excessive work rates; methods of reducing that risk; the employer’s own injury reduction program; musculoskeletal treatment plans prepared by a medical professional; the rights and functions of workplace safety committees; your right to report risk factors, hazards, injuries and health and safety concerns; and illegal retaliation, including the employer’s policy on disciplinary action for any manager or supervisor who retaliates.
If you were never trained on the early symptoms of a musculoskeletal disorder, that is worth mentioning to your attorney. It is not itself a compensation issue — but it goes some way to explaining why an injury that builds up gets reported late, which is the very thing the carrier will hold against you.
The one thing you can do yourself, in writing, today
Separately from all of that, New York’s Warehouse Worker Protection Act gives you a personal right that most warehouse workers have never heard of.
You are entitled to a written description of any quota that applies to you — the number of tasks or amount of material, the time period, and what happens to you if you miss it — and you are supposed to get it when you are hired, with written notice of any change within two business days.
More usefully: a current or former employee can request their own work speed data for the most recent ninety days, together with the aggregate data for employees doing similar work at the same establishment over the same period. The employer must respond within fourteen calendar days, and at no cost. A former employee gets one such request.
Together, that is the employer’s own record of the pace you were held to and the pace you actually worked, produced on a fourteen-day deadline and available to you personally. In a claim that turns on whether the job was physically demanding enough to cause what it caused, that is not nothing.
The law also sets limits on what a quota can do. A quota cannot prevent you from taking a lawful meal or rest period or from using a bathroom, including reasonable travel time to and from it. Paid and unpaid breaks cannot be counted as productive time for the purpose of a quota unless you are required to remain on call. And you cannot be disciplined for failing to meet a quota that was never disclosed to you.
Two honest caveats. These are Labor Law rights, enforced by the New York State Department of Labor, and a Labor Law complaint is not a workers’ compensation claim and does not advance one. And the worksite evaluation is not a document you can simply demand as an individual — where a workplace safety committee exists, the employer must share the records it has created about the injury reduction program, and that committee can ask for the evaluation to be reviewed by a board-certified ergonomist. Whether any of it reaches your compensation case is a separate question, and one for your attorney. What you can obtain yourself is your own quota description and your own work speed data.
If you work at Amazon JFK8 or another West Shore warehouse
The Matrix Global Logistics Park on Gulf Avenue in Bloomfield, beneath the Goethals Bridge, holds some of the largest workplaces on Staten Island: Amazon’s JFK8 fulfillment center, a second Amazon building next to it, and IKEA’s e-commerce fulfillment center. Thousands of people from all five boroughs and New Jersey work there, many on overnight and peak-season shifts. A few things come up again and again for workers in these buildings.
For what the injury reports on these buildings have found, see Staten Island’s Amazon warehouses and their injury numbers.
AmCare is first aid, not your doctor
Amazon buildings have an on-site first aid station called AmCare. It can wrap a wrist, hand you ice and send you back to your station, and a visit there does not file a workers’ compensation claim. You are not required to keep treating there. In most claims you have the right to see a Board-authorized doctor of your own choosing (see using your own doctor). Whatever you tell AmCare may end up in the record, so say plainly what happened and that it happened on the job.
Reporting in the app is not the same as filing a claim
Telling a manager, stopping at AmCare or logging an incident through the company’s systems is not a workers’ compensation claim. Give written notice of the injury within 30 days and keep a copy or a screenshot of it. Then make sure a claim is actually filed with the Workers’ Compensation Board on a C-3 form, which we can do for you.
A leave of absence is not workers’ comp
Large employers have their own leave and disability processes, often run through a third-party administrator, and it is easy to end up on a leave of absence or short-term disability without ever opening a comp claim. Short-term disability is meant for injuries that did not happen at work. If the job caused your injury, it belongs in workers’ compensation, where the benefits and protections are different. If the carrier is fighting the claim, you may be able to collect disability benefits in the meantime; see disability benefits while your comp claim is contested.
Pick, stow and pack: injuries that build up
Many fulfillment center injuries do not come from one accident. They come from thousands of repetitions at a set rate: reaching overhead to stow, twisting to pick, lifting totes all shift. Those injuries are covered too. See shoulder injuries, carpal tunnel syndrome and back and neck injuries, and read the section above on the written ergonomic record your employer may be required to keep.
Drivers in Amazon vans usually work for a delivery partner
Most drivers delivering Amazon packages are employed by an independent delivery company, not by Amazon itself, and their comp claim runs against that company’s insurance. See delivery worker injuries.
Seasonal and agency workers are covered too
A peak-season hire is covered from the first shift. If a staffing agency placed you in the building, the agency is usually responsible for your comp coverage, though the warehouse can matter too. See general and special employers. And it is illegal for an employer to fire or punish you for filing a claim (see fired for filing workers’ comp).
What to do in the first week
- Report it in writing, to a supervisor, and keep a copy. Text and email count.
- If it was an accident, do that within thirty days. If the injury built up, report it as soon as you connect it to the work — you have longer, but there is nothing to gain by waiting and a great deal to lose.
- Say plainly in the report whether it happened at a moment or built up over time, and if it built up, when you first connected it to the work.
- Go to a doctor and tell them it is a work injury. That sentence is what makes the visit part of the claim rather than part of your health insurance.
- Request your ninety days of work speed data in writing. Note the date you asked.
- File your own claim with the Workers’ Compensation Board. An incident report to your employer is not a claim, and a great many warehouse workers find out too late that nobody filed one for them.
- Do not assume a light-duty offer settles anything. What you are paid, what you can do, and what the claim is worth are three different questions.
Where a warehouse claim goes from here
Once the claim is established, the parts of the system that decide what it is worth are the same ones that decide every other comp claim, and they are where warehouse workers tend to lose ground quietly.
Treatment has to be authorized, related to the work injury, and the claim has to stay open. If the carrier disputes the claim it will not pay for treatment in the meantime, and you may need to use your health insurance and let the insurers sort out repayment later. Going untreated is the one thing that helps nobody, least of all you.
You will almost certainly be sent to an examination arranged by the carrier. It is worth knowing in advance what that examination is and is not.
If the injury is to a shoulder, an arm, a hand, a knee or a leg, the case may end in a schedule loss of use award, measured in weeks of benefits according to the Board’s own guidelines. A back injury usually will not — the spine is not a scheduled body part, and those cases run to classification instead, which is a different calculation and a longer conversation.
If the claim is turned down, that is not the end of it. Denied claims are appealable, and a surprising number of denials are about paperwork rather than medicine.
And if your benefits simply stopped without explanation, the reason is often not the one people assume. We have written separately about why compensation payments stop, and it is frequently a medical reporting problem rather than a decision by the carrier.
If you want to read the whole thing first
We wrote the book on New York workers’ comp. The New York Workers’ Compensation Book runs fifty-eight pages on what actually happens after you are hurt at work in New York, from the first report through to settlement. It is free, it downloads immediately, and it asks you for nothing first. Download it here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I get workers’ comp if I was hurt at the Amazon warehouse on Staten Island?
Yes. Amazon workers in New York, including at the JFK8 fulfillment center in Bloomfield, are covered by workers’ compensation from their first shift. That includes injuries from a single accident and injuries that build up from repetitive work. Give written notice within 30 days and make sure a claim is filed with the Workers’ Compensation Board.
Do I have to keep going to AmCare?
No. AmCare is an on-site first aid station. In most claims you have the right to treat with a Board-authorized doctor of your own choosing, and a visit to AmCare does not file a workers’ compensation claim.
I reported my injury at work. Does that mean I have a workers’ comp claim?
Not necessarily. Telling a manager, visiting AmCare or logging an incident internally is not the same as a claim. A claim is filed with the Workers’ Compensation Board, usually on a C-3 form.
Can I be fired for filing a workers’ comp claim against Amazon?
It is illegal in New York for any employer to fire, discipline or discriminate against a worker for filing a workers’ compensation claim. If that happens, a separate complaint can be brought before the Workers’ Compensation Board.
Talk to a New York workers’ compensation attorney
The Law Offices of Frank J. Dito, Jr. handles workers’ compensation claims from the office on Staten Island, a short drive from the West Shore warehouse corridor. Compensation hearings in New York are held virtually, so a claim is not limited by where you live or where you were hurt.
Call 718.701.2776 or 800.310.5520. Consultations are free. If we don’t recover money for you, we don’t get paid.
1610 Richmond Road #200, Staten Island, NY 10304