California’s Division of Industrial Relations introduced Tuesday it had fined Amazon greater than $5.9 million, saying the e-commerce large had violated labor legal guidelines that require corporations to tell warehouse workers of any quotas they have to observe.
In response to the state’s Warehouse Quotas regulation, which went into impact in January 2022, these quotas have to be supplied to staff in written type. They might embrace issues just like the variety of duties workers are anticipated to carry out in an hour and any potential penalties they may face if they don’t meet expectations.
The fines heart on Amazon’s success facilities in Moreno Valley and Redlands, the place the state Labor Commissioner’s Workplace discovered 59,017 violations between October 20, 2023, and March 9, 2024, it mentioned in a press launch.
“The peer-to-peer system that Amazon was utilizing in these two warehouses is precisely the sort of system that the Warehouse Quotas regulation was put in place to forestall,” California Labor Commissioner Lilia GarcÃa-Brower mentioned within the launch. “Undisclosed quotas expose staff to elevated stress to work quicker and may result in greater harm charges and different violations by forcing staff to skip breaks.”
Amazon spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel informed Enterprise Insider the corporate disagrees with the allegations and has appealed the fantastic. She added that Amazon doesn’t have mounted quotas.
“Particular person efficiency is evaluated over an extended time frame, in relation to how your entire website’s group is performing. Workers can — and are inspired to — evaluation their efficiency each time they need,” she mentioned. “They’ll at all times speak to a supervisor in the event that they’re having hassle discovering the knowledge.”
Lynch Vogel additionally supplied a hyperlink to an Amazon weblog submit that describes the way it manages the efficiency of success heart workers, together with its communication of labor expectations and its use of robots to enhance employee security.
Amazon operates an unlimited community of success facilities the place staff choose and pack orders earlier than they’re despatched out to prospects. Some are as massive as 1 million sq. ft and make use of greater than 1,000 staff. The corporate has attracted the eye of regulators over allegations of low pay and disturbing working situations, and in 2022, staff on the firm’s success heart in Staten Island, New York, voted to unionize.
