Amazon Fined $5.9 Mln By California For Labor Law Violations

(RTTNews) - California's Labor Commissioner has fined Amazon.com Services, LLC $5.902 million citing that the e-commerce giant failed to meet requirements of the Warehouse Quotas law at its warehouses in two counties.

The Warehouse Quotas law, which was enacted in 2021 as Assembly Bill 701 and went into effect on January 1, 2022, protects the state's workers, and prevents work quotas that are kept secret from employees or prevent meals, rest, bathroom breaks, and compliance with safety standards.

The California Department of Industrial Relations or DIR announced that the Labor Commissioner's Office cited Amazon for violations of the law, which requires warehouse employers to provide employees written notice of any quotas they must follow. This includes the number of tasks they need to perform per hour and any discipline that could come from not meeting the quota.

As per the statement, Amazon failed to provide written notice of quotas at warehouses in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, and argued they did not need a quota system because they use a peer-to-peer evaluation system.

The Labor Commissioner's Office, which began its initial inspection in September 2022, found there were 59,017 violations for the Moreno Valley and Redlands warehouses from October 20, 2023 to March 9, 2024. Penalties were issued under Labor Code 2699(f), which provides penalties of $100 for each violation.

The Labor Commissioner stated that the law defines a quota as work that must be performed at a specified speed or the worker suffers discipline. It also places limits on quotas that prevent compliance with meal or rest periods, use of bathroom facilities, or compliance with occupational health and safety laws.

A quota may be illegal if it is not disclosed to workers or precludes employees from exercising these statutory rights, it said.

Labor Commissioner Lilia Garcia-Brower said, "The peer-to-peer system that Amazon was using in these two warehouses is exactly the kind of system that the Warehouse Quotas law was put in place 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."