Conveyors, automated pallet wrappers, mobile robots, and other machinery are changing how goods move through American warehouses. Tasks that once required workers to repeatedly lift, carry, sort, or transport products can increasingly be handled or assisted by machines.
That shift has significant effects for an industry where workplace injuries remain relatively common. In 2024, the U.S. warehousing and storage industry recorded 77,000 nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. About 66,800 of those cases involved days away from work, job restrictions, or job transfers. The industry’s total recordable injury and illness rate was 4.8 cases per 100 full-time workers in 2024, more than twice the private-industry rate of 2.3. BLS also recorded 32 fatal occupational injuries in warehousing and storage that year.
As automation takes on a larger role, the safety question is becoming more complicated than whether machines can replace dangerous physical work. Federal safety agencies increasingly describe robotics as both a potential way to reduce existing dangers and a source of new risks when workers and machines share the same space.
To examine how automation is reshaping those risks in U.S. warehouses, Joye Law Firm Injury Lawyers, a South Carolina personal injury and workers’ compensation law firm, reviewed federal workplace injury data and safety guidance from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and Government Accountability Office. The review focuses on U.S. warehousing and storage workplaces and the hazards workers may encounter as more tasks become automated.
Physical strain remains one of warehousing’s central safety problems
Automation enters warehouses where many of the most common injuries are already tied to the physical demands of moving goods.
A 2024 Government Accountability Office report examining general warehouses and last-mile delivery operations found that overexertion and bodily reaction were the most common major causes of serious injuries. These injuries can result from repetitive movement, excessive physical effort, awkward postures, lifting, and bending, and can lead to musculoskeletal disorders such as back pain or tendonitis.
OSHA similarly identifies musculoskeletal disorders, particularly those resulting from overexertion during lifting and lowering, among the most common injuries in warehousing. Other longstanding hazards include forklifts and other powered industrial trucks, material handling, falls, and moving equipment.
This is where automation has its clearest potential safety advantage. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health says robots can improve worker safety when they perform dangerous or physically stressful tasks instead of people. In a warehouse setting, that can mean reducing the amount of manual material movement required from workers or limiting their exposure to particular high-risk tasks.
But replacing one physical demand does not automatically remove every hazard surrounding the job.
Automated equipment introduces different ways workers can be hurt
Warehouse automation covers more than humanoid robots or fully autonomous facilities. OSHA lists conveyors, labelers, automated pallet wrappers, and industrial robots among the automated systems already found in warehouses.
The agency warns in its warehousing safety guidance that automated tools can create significant struck-by and caught-between hazards when they are not properly integrated into a workplace. Collaborative robots, which operate near or directly with employees, add another layer because humans and moving machines may occupy overlapping work areas.
OSHA’s technical manual on industrial robot safety describes several possible injury scenarios. Unexpected robot movements, equipment malfunctions, or unanticipated programming changes can lead to collisions. Industrial mobile robots can strike workers as they move through facilities, while robotic arms or other machinery can create crushing or trapping hazards between equipment and fixed objects.
Research also identifies similar risks, including struck-by and caught-between injuries, crushing and trapping, electrical hazards, and slips, trips, or falls. It also notes that robots working close to people can create emerging risks through unexpected contact or by distracting workers from other hazards in their surroundings.
The result is a shift in the type of exposure workers may face: Automation can reduce contact with one hazardous task while increasing the importance of safely managing movement, machinery, sensors, programming, and human access around automated systems.
Installation and maintenance can be as important as normal operation
Automated machinery may operate predictably during routine production while presenting different risks when someone has to install, repair, adjust, inspect, or troubleshoot it.
OSHA advises employers to conduct task-based risk assessments throughout the lifecycle of a robotic application, including design, integration, operation, and maintenance. Those assessments are intended to identify possible worker exposures and determine what safeguards are needed before workers interact with the equipment.
Potential safeguards include presence-sensing devices, fixed or interlocked barriers, restricted operating spaces, written work procedures, and safety training. It is also recommended that periodic performance testing be conducted. This helps employers determine whether stopping ability, safety distances, sensors, and other safeguards continue to function as intended after equipment has been placed in service.
Training becomes especially important for employees who install, program, operate, maintain, or repair robotic systems. OSHA’s guidance says those workers should receive safety training before being assigned to robot applications and should be able to demonstrate that they can perform their jobs safely.
This matters because a warehouse worker’s interaction with automation may extend well beyond simply working beside a machine during ordinary production.
Automation does not eliminate the role of work pace and ergonomics
Technology can change the physical demands of warehouse work without eliminating ergonomic concerns. E-commerce warehouses and delivery companies use technologies both to improve productivity and to monitor worker performance. Workers, researchers, and safety advocates have raised concerns that performance expectations can contribute to injury risk when employees continue performing repetitive or physically demanding tasks at a fast pace.
GAO’s review also highlighted challenges in enforcing protections against ergonomic hazards. OSHA cited warehouse and last-mile delivery employers for more than 2,500 workplace violations from fiscal years 2018 through 2023, but only 11 involved ergonomic hazards. OSHA does not have a specific ergonomics standard and instead must rely on the Occupational Safety and Health Act’s general duty clause in such cases.
Therefore, automation can change where physical strain occurs rather than simply removing it. A machine may eliminate some lifting, for example, while workers continue performing repetitive picking, reaching, packing, or other tasks around the automated process.
The next safety challenge is coordinating people and machines
Federal guidance does not treat automation as inherently safe or inherently hazardous. Instead, agencies increasingly focus on how a specific system changes the tasks workers perform and the conditions under which people interact with machinery.
NIOSH established its Center for Occupational Robotics Research specifically to study the safety and health of workers who operate, wear, or work near robots, including collaborative robots, mobile robots, autonomous vehicles, and wearable robotic technologies. The institute’s work reflects a workplace in which robots are increasingly designed to operate alongside people rather than behind cages or completely separated from them.
OSHA’s approach likewise centers on evaluating each application: what a robot does, where workers may enter its operating area, what happens during maintenance or an emergency, and whether safeguards continue working as designed. The agency recommends involving affected workers in risk assessments because employees familiar with the tasks may help identify hazards associated with actual day-to-day operations.
As warehouse automation expands, its effect on safety will depend less on the presence of robots alone than on which hazards the technology removes, which ones it introduces, and how the workplace is designed around the people who continue working beside it.
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