Inland Empire Warehouse Worker Sues Amazon for Disability Discrimination and Retaliation After Speaking Up Following a Workplace Injury
ONTARIO, Calif. – Juan Loera, a former Amazon warehouse worker in San Bernardino, filed a lawsuit Thursday against Amazon alleging the corporation failed to accommodate and then wrongfully terminated him after he suffered a life-altering workplace injury and spoke up for worker safety.
After two years of working at Amazon warehouses in San Bernardino, the nation’s largest hub for warehousing and logistics, Mr. Loera sustained injuries related to repeatedly pushing and pulling heavy boxes – many over 50 pounds.
“Warehouse work can be very dangerous work,” Mr. Loera said. “When I started talking to my coworkers and finding out that many had also been injured on the job I knew we had to say something to protect our safety. As my lawsuit alleges, when we spoke up that’s when Amazon clamped down. They accommodated my work restrictions after my injury at first but then suddenly forced me out on unpaid leave, even though I was still able to work. I was later fired by a single email. What Amazon did was very hard on my family. We depended on my job to pay for our house, food, and monthly expenses for my children.”
Amazon’s warehouse operations are dramatically more dangerous for workers than the rest of the industry. According to a report by the Strategic Organizing Center, in 2024 the serious injury rate at Amazon warehouses was almost double the rate at non-Amazon warehouses. While Amazon employed 39% of all U.S. warehouse workers in 2024, the company was responsible for more than half (56%) of all serious injuries in the industry.
“As we allege in the lawsuit, Juan sacrificed his health for Amazon, and they repaid him by placing him on unpaid leave and eventually terminating him,” said Lauren Teukolsky, an attorney representing Mr. Loera. “Juan is taking an important step to hold this corporation responsible for its treatment of injured workers and the health and safety of the people on which Amazon depends for its profit.”
Workplace Safety Crisis at Amazon
The Strategic Organizing Center has analyzed data that Amazon and other employers provided to OSHA annually from 2017 to 2023. All employers are legally required to submit annual injury and illness reports to OSHA for any warehouse, delivery, grocery or wholesale trade facility with 20 or more employees. Amazon reported injury and illness information for 1,073 warehouse, logistics and delivery facilities in 2023. Those reports covered an average annual workforce of 742,654 in 2023.
Every year, tens of thousands of Amazon workers are injured on the job. In 2023, there were 38,348 total recordable injuries—defined as those requiring medical treatment beyond first aid or requiring time off a worker’s regular job—at Amazon facilities. The vast majority of these were serious: 36,170, or 94 percent, of the injuries, were categorized as either light duty or lost time injuries—that is, injuries where workers were hurt so badly that they were either unable to perform their regular job functions (light duty) or forced to miss work entirely (lost time).
According to a May 2024 report from the National Employment Law Project, “Injuries at Amazon warehouses are much more likely to be serious enough to require time off work or job transfer than at other comparable warehouse employers (with at least 10 facilities that employ 1,000 or more workers).”
Amazon has already faced multiple legal challenges to its practices regarding workers with disabilities and injuries, including a class action lawsuit in New York and complaint by the New Jersey Attorney General.
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For more information contact: media@warehouseworkers.org
About the WWRC
The Warehouse Worker Resource Center is a nonprofit, 501(c)(3), organization founded in 2011 dedicated to improving working conditions in the warehouse industry in Southern California. We focus on education, advocacy and action to change poor working conditions in the largest warehousing hub in the country.
About Teukolsky Law
Teukolsky Law is a full-service litigation firm in Los Angeles dedicated exclusively to representing employees in vindicating their workplace rights. We handle individual cases as well as class actions.
