From PC Mag: Two Amazon warehouses in California held quotas to evaluate worker performance without telling the employees being evaluated in writing, California state labor regulators announced Tuesday. Amazon was fined $5.9 million in May for the violations as a result. The tech and e-commerce giant has a current market cap of roughly $1.9 trillion.
Amazon violated the state's Warehouse Quotas law nearly 60,000 times between September 2022 and March this year, the regulators said in their announcement. The law was first approved in 2021 and took effect in 2022.
"The peer-to-peer system that Amazon was using in these two warehouses is exactly the kind of system that the Warehouse Quotas law was put in place to prevent," California Labor Commissioner Lilia García-Brower said. "Undisclosed quotas expose workers to increased pressure to work faster and can lead to higher injury rates and other violations by forcing workers to skip breaks."
Amazon reportedly told the state regulators that its "peer-to-peer evaluation system" is not the same as a quota system. But the state considers a work quota to be any type of evaluation that requires work to be done at a specific speed. The law also regulates any quotas around rest breaks and bathroom use.
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