California fined it Amazon a total of 5.9 million USD, the e-commerce giant allegedly worked Warehouse staff work so hard that it endangers their safety, officials said Tuesday.
Two citations issued by the California Labor Commissioner’s Office in May said Amazon.com Services LLC violated the state’s Warehouse Quota Law at facilities in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, east of Los Angeles.
The law, which takes effect in 2022, “requires warehouse users to provide employees with written notice of any quotas they are subject to, including the number of tasks they need to perform per hour and any disciplinary action that may result” from failure to meet the requirements, the labor commissioner’s office said in a statement.
Amazon was fined $1.2 million at a warehouse in Redlands and $4.7 million at another warehouse in nearby Moreno Valley.
The company said Tuesday that it disagrees with the allegations and has appealed the citations.
“The truth is we don’t have a fixed quota. At Amazon, individual performance is evaluated over a long period of time, relative to the performance of the entire team on the ground,” company spokeswoman Maureen Lynch Vogel said in a statement. “Employees can – and are encouraged to – review their performance whenever they want. They can always talk to a manager if they have trouble finding information.”
The citations allege that Amazon failed to provide written notice of the quota.
Labor Commissioner Lilia García-Brower said Amazon has engaged in “the exact type of system” that the quota law was designed to prevent.
“Undisclosed quotas put workers under increasing pressure to work faster and can lead to higher injury rates and other violations by forcing them to work faster,” she said in a statement. Workers must skip breaks.”
The agency began investigating in 2022 after employees at two Southern California facilities reported they were subject to unfair quota practices, said the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, a nonprofit profits favor improving working conditions, said.
Similar laws have been enacted in Minnesota, New York, Oregon and Washington, the resource center said. In May, U.S. Senator Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, introduced a federal version of legislation protecting warehouse workers in Congress.
