Amazon fined $5.9 million for warehouse worker fees in California

Amazon.com has been fined $5.9 million by a California labor regulator who claims the online retail giant failed to adequately inform workers about productivity quotas at two warehouses, including one where some workers They are trying to unionize.

California Labor Commissioner Lilia García-Brower's office announced the fines, which were issued in May, on Tuesday.

A 2022 California law requires employers to provide written descriptions of fees to workers if they can be penalized for not completing jobs at a specific speed. The commissioner said Amazon violated that law nearly 60,000 times in a five-month period ending in March at huge warehouses in Moreno Valley and Redlands, outside Los Angeles.

Amazon spokeswoman Maureen Lynch Vogel said the company is appealing the citations and denied that warehouse workers have set fees.

“At Amazon, individual performance is evaluated over a long period of time, relative to the performance of the entire site team. Employees can, and are encouraged to, review their performance whenever they wish,” Lynch Vogel said. it's a statement.

Criticism of Amazon's alleged quota system has been the focal point of a national 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 rejected unions.

In 2022, a union filed a petition to hold elections at the Moreno Valley warehouse, known as ONT8, which was later withdrawn amid accusations of illegal anti-union activity by Amazon. An administrative law 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 greater pressure to work faster and can lead to higher rates of injuries and other violations by forcing workers to skip breaks,” he said.

Congress is considering a Democratic-backed bill that would largely mirror California law by requiring written notification of fees and prohibiting fees that prevent workers from taking breaks or using bathrooms.
Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, one of the bill's sponsors, said the fines against Amazon announced 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.