A California labor regulator said Tuesday that it had fined Amazon nearly $6 million for thousands of violations of a safety law that took effect in 2022.
The measure, known as the stock quota law, allows employees to request written explanations of the productivity quotas that apply to them, as well as explanations of any disciplinary action they may face if they do not meet the quotas.
The state labor commissioner’s office said Amazon violated the law more than 59,000 times between October and March at two warehouses in Southern California.
The system that Amazon used in the two warehouses “is exactly the type of system that the warehouse quota law was intended to prevent,” Labor Commissioner Lilia García-Brower said in a statement.
An Amazon spokeswoman said in a statement that the company had appealed the penalties and denied that the company had used “fixed quotas.” Spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel said that “individual performance is evaluated over time in relation to the performance of the entire team at the site” and that employees “can review their performance at any time.”
California law also prohibits quotas that impair workers’ ability to take state-mandated breaks or use the restroom or prevent employers from complying with state health and safety laws.
Experts say the law was one of the first in the country to regulate inventory quotas monitored by algorithms and required employers to make quotas transparent to workers. The penalties announced Tuesday are the highest imposed by the law.
The labor commissioner’s office said its investigation was assisted by a labor rights group, the Warehouse Worker Resource Center released a statement quoting a worker at one of the punished Amazon facilities who described significant pressure to meet quotas.
“If you don’t scan enough items, you will be written up,” said employee Carrie Stone. “That happened to me. I was contacted because I didn’t meet the price. They said I missed a point, but I didn’t even know what the goal was.”
Other Amazon workers raised similar concerns as lawmakers debated the bill in 2021, and studies by workplace safety groups have shown that Amazon has a significantly higher rate of serious injuries than other warehouse employers such as Walmart.
The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has repeatedly cited Amazon in recent years for exposing its workers to ergonomic injuries and keeping too many records of such injuries. The Justice Department is investigating whether the company made false statements about its safety record when applying for loans.
Amazon has cited hundreds of millions of dollars in investments in security improvements in recent years, including more than $300 million in 2021.
Other states such as New York and Washington have since passed similar laws, and Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, introduced a federal version last month.
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2024-06-19 00:02:47
www.nytimes.com
