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The
office of California Labor Commissioner Lilia Garcia-Brower
announced the fines, which were issued in May, on Tuesday.
A 2022 California law requires employers to provide written
descriptions of quotas to workers if they can be disciplined for
failing to complete jobs at a specified speed. The commissioner
said Amazon violated that law nearly 60,000 times in a
five-month period ending in March at massive warehouses in
Moreno Valley and Redlands, outside of Los Angeles.
Amazon spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel said the company is
appealing the citations and denied that warehouse workers have
fixed quotas.
"At Amazon, individual performance is evaluated over a long
period of time, in relation to how the entire site’s team is
performing. Employees can – and are encouraged to – review their
performance whenever they wish," Lynch Vogel said in a
statement.
Criticisms of Amazon's alleged quota system have been a focal
point of a nationwide campaign to unionize its warehouses.
Workers at a New York City warehouse voted to join a union in
2022, while others at two facilities in New York and Alabama
have since spurned unions.
A union in 2022 filed a petition to hold an election at the
Moreno Valley warehouse, known as ONT8, which was later
withdrawn amid allegations of illegal union-busting activity by
Amazon. An administrative judge is scheduled to hold a hearing
on those claims, which Amazon has denied, in August.
Garcia-Brower in a statement said Amazon's quota system is
exactly what the California law was designed to prevent.
"Undisclosed quotas expose workers to increased pressure to work
faster and can lead to higher injury rates and other violations
by forcing workers to skip breaks," she said.
Congress is considering a Democratic-backed bill that would
largely mirror the California law by requiring written notice of
quotas and prohibiting quotas that prevent workers from taking
breaks or using bathrooms.
Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, one of the bill's sponsors,
said the fines against Amazon announced on Tuesday highlighted
the need to crack down on "punishing" quota systems.
"We need more than a patchwork of state laws," Markey said in a
statement.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York, Editing by
Alexia Garamfalvi and Rod Nickel)
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