Technology giant Amazon was fined $5.9 million for reported violations at two warehouses in the Inland Empire, the California Labor Commissioner’s Office announced.
Lilia Garcia Bower, the state Labor Commissioner, said Amazon warehouses in Moreno Valley and Redlands violate the Warehouse Quotas Law, established in 2021 under Assembly Bill 701, a state law intended to prevent overworked workers.
Amazon said Tuesday that the fines were unjustified and will be challenged.
“The peer-to-peer system that Amazon used in these two warehouses is exactly the kind of system the law sought to prevent,” Bower said. “Undisclosed quotas expose workers to greater pressure to work faster and can lead to higher injury rates and other violations by forcing workers to miss breaks.”
Inspectors alleged that Amazon failed to inform workers of “the quotas they must follow, including the number of tasks they must complete per hour, and the discipline that could result from not meeting the quotas” , the commissioner’s office said.
Inspections on September 22, 2022, October 20, 2023 and March 9, 2024 resulted in the identification of 59,017 violations, according to the commissioner’s office.
Amazon issued a statement in response saying the company “disagrees with the allegations in the quotes and has appealed.”
“The truth is we don’t have a set quota,” said spokeswoman Maureen Lynch Vogel. “At Amazon, individual performance is evaluated over a long period of time, in relation to how the entire site team is performing. Employees can – and are encouraged to – review their performance whenever they want. They can always talk to a manager if they have trouble finding the information.”
The commissioner’s office said Amazon’s “peer-to-peer evaluation system” amounts to quotas because the work “must be done at a certain speed or the employee will be disciplined.”
“A quota may be illegal if it is not disclosed to employees or if it prevents employees from exercising legal rights,” the commissioner’s office said.
Officials noted that the Ontario-based nonprofit Warehouse Worker Resource Center provided unspecified assistance to state regulators around the time of the inspections.
According to published reports, the WWRC is working with unions, including the Service Employees International Union.
KCAL News Staff
