LOS ANGELES (AP) — California fined Amazon a total of $5.9 million, alleging the e-commerce giant worked so hard with warehouse workers that it put their safety at risk, officials said Tuesday.
The two citations issued in May by the California Labor Commissioner’s Office said Amazon.com Services LLC ran afoul of the state’s Warehouse Quota Law at facilities in Riverside and San Bernardino counties east of Los Angeles.
The law, which takes effect in 2022, “requires warehouse employers to provide employees with written notice of any quotas they must follow, including the number of tasks they must perform per hour and any discipline that may come” from failing to do so. compliance with the requirements, the labor commissioner’s office said in a statement.
Amazon was fined $1.2 million at a warehouse in Redlands and $4.7 million at another in nearby Moreno Valley.
The company said Tuesday it disagrees with the allegations and has appealed the citations.
“The truth is that we don’t have fixed quotas. At Amazon, individual performance is evaluated over a long period of time against the performance of the entire site team,” company spokeswoman Maureen Lynch Vogel said in a statement. “Employees can — and are encouraged to — evaluate their performance whenever they wish. They can always speak to a manager if they have trouble finding the information.”
The citations allege that Amazon failed to provide written notice of the quotas.
Labor Commissioner Lilia García-Brower said Amazon had engaged in “exactly the kind of system” that the quota law was created to prevent.
“Undisclosed quotas expose workers to greater pressure to work faster and can lead to higher injury rates and other violations, forcing workers to miss breaks,” she said in a statement.
The agency began investigating in 2022 after employees at the two Southern California facilities reported they were subject to unfair quota practices, said the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, a nonprofit that advocates for improved working conditions.
Similar legislation has been enacted in Minnesota, New York, Oregon and Washington, the resource center said. In May, U.S. Senator Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, introduced a federal version of the warehouse worker protection bill into Congress.
