Amazon fined nearly $6 million for alleged violations at Inland Empire warehouses

Tech giant Amazon has been fined $5.9 million for reported violations at two Inland Empire warehouses, the California Labor Commissioner's Office announced.

Lilia Garcia Bower, state labor commissioner, said Amazon warehouses in Moreno Valley and Redlands were operating in violation of the warehouse quota law, established in 2021 under House Bill 701. Assembly, which is a state law intended to prevent employees from overworking.

Amazon said Tuesday the fines were unjustified and would be challenged.

“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 alleged that 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.” quota,” according to the commissioner’s office.

The inspections of September 22, 2022, October 20, 2023 and March 9, 2024 revealed 59,017 violations, according to the police station.

Amazon issued a statement in response, saying the company disagreed “with the allegations made in the citations and has appealed.”

“The truth is we don’t have fixed quotas,” said spokeswoman Maureen Lynch Vogel. “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.

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.”

“A quota may be illegal if it is not disclosed to workers or if it prevents employees from exercising … their statutory rights,” the commissioner's office said.

Officials noted that the Warehouse Worker Resource Centre, a non-profit organization based in Ontario, provided unspecified assistance to state regulators at the time of the inspections.

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