Amazon fined $5.9 million for alleged violations at Inland Empire warehouses

Amazon has been fined $5.9 million for alleged violations at two Inland Empire warehouses of a state law intended to prevent employee overwork. The company said the decision was unjustified and would be appealed.

California Labor Commissioner Lilia Garcia Bower said Amazon's warehouses in Moreno Valley and Redlands were operating in violation of the warehouse quota law, established in 2021 under House Bill 701. Assembly.

“The peer-to-peer system that Amazon was using in these two warehouses is exactly the kind of system that the law was put in place to prevent,” Bower said. “Undisclosed quotas expose workers to increased pressure to work faster and can lead to increased accident rates and other violations by forcing workers to skip breaks.”

Inspectors claimed Amazon failed to inform employees of “the quotas they were required to meet, including the number of tasks they were required to complete per hour, and any disciplinary action that might result from non-compliance.” of the quota,” the commissioner’s office said.

Several inspections in recent months have identified 59,017 violations, according to the police station.

The commissioner's office said Amazon's “peer-to-peer rating system” amounted to quotas because work had to be “performed at a specified speed or the worker would be subject to disciplinary action.” Quotas, however, can be illegal if they are unknown to workers or if they prevent them from exercising their rights.

The Amazon company said Tuesday that the accusation was “unjustified” and “will be contested.”

“The truth is we don’t have fixed quotas,” spokeswoman Maureen Lynch Vogel told City News Service. “At Amazon, individual performance is evaluated over an extended period of time, in relation to the performance of the entire site team. Employees can – and are encouraged to – review their performance whenever they wish. They can always talk to a manager if they have difficulty finding the information.

Officials said the Warehouse Worker Resource Centre, a nonprofit based in Ontario, provided unspecified assistance to state regulators at the time of the inspections, City News Service reported.

The WWRC is aligned with the Service Employees International Union and other unions, according to published reports.