A California labor regulator said Tuesday it has fined Amazon nearly $6 million for thousands of violations of a safety law that takes effect in 2022.
The measure, known as the Warehouse Quotas Law, allows employees to request a written explanation of any productivity quotas that apply to them, as well as an explanation of any discipline they may face if they don’t meet the quotas.
The state labor commissioner’s office said Amazon violated the law more than 59,000 times at two warehouses in Southern California between October and March.
The system Amazon used in the two warehouses “is exactly the kind of system the warehouse quota law was put in place to prevent,” Labor Commissioner Lilia GarcÃa-Brower said in a statement.
An Amazon spokeswoman said in a statement that the company is appealing the penalties and denied that the company used “fixed quotas.” The spokeswoman, Maureen Lynch Vogel, said that “individual performance is evaluated over a long period of time, relative to how the entire site team performs” and that employees can “review their performance whenever they want.”
California law also prohibits quotas that interfere with workers’ ability to take breaks or use the state-mandated restroom or that prevent employers from following state health and safety laws.
Experts said the law was among the first in the country to regulate warehouse quotas monitored by algorithms and require employers to make quotas transparent to workers. The penalties announced Tuesday are the largest imposed under the law.
The Labor Commissioner’s office said its investigation had been assisted by a labor advocacy group, the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, which issued a statement citing a worker at one of Amazon’s penalized facilities who described significant pressure to meet quotas.
“If you don’t scan enough items they’ll write you up,” said employee Carrie Stone. “This happened to me. They wrote to me that I did not make a percentage. They said I lost by a point, but I didn’t even know what the target was.”
Other Amazon workers raised similar concerns while the Legislature debated the bill in 2021, and studies by labor advocacy groups have shown that Amazon has significantly higher rates of serious injuries than other warehouse employers such as Walmart.
The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has cited Amazon several times in recent years for exposing workers to ergonomic injuries and excessive recordkeeping of such injuries, and the Justice Department is investigating whether the company made false statements about its safety record when filing application for loans. .
Amazon has reported investing hundreds of millions of dollars in security improvements in recent years, including more than $300 million in 2021.
Other states, including New York and Washington, have since enacted similar laws, and Senator Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., introduced a federal version last month.
