Amazon fined $5.9 million for breaking labor law in California

Amazon fined $5.9 million for breaking labor law in California

SAN FRANCISCO — California labor officials fined Amazon $5.9 million for violating a state law aimed at preventing warehouse workers from being pushed to work so quickly that their health and safety are at risk, according to citations issued in May.

It’s the largest fine the California Labor Commissioner’s Office has levied under the Warehouse Quota Law, which went into effect in 2022 and limits quotas for “work that must be performed at a specified speed or the worker suffers discipline,” the commission’s officer said in a news release Tuesday.

California investigated two Amazon facilities near Los Angeles and in May found that the company failed to “provide written notice of quotas to which each employee is subject,” according to a copy of the citation shared with The Washington Post by the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, a nonprofit that advocates for improving working conditions at warehouses. The labor agency levied fines of $1.2 million at one Redland, Calif., Amazon facility, and $4.7 million at another in Moreno Valley.

California Labor Commissioner Lilia García-Brower said in a statement that the “undisclosed” quota system Amazon “was using in these two warehouses is exactly the kind of system that the Warehouse Quotas law was put in place to prevent.”

“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,” the statement said.

“The fact that workers are not informed of what quotas they are supposed to meet is highly dehumanizing,” said Deogracia Cornelio, a labor activist with the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, at a news conference Tuesday. “It’s stressful. It leads people to have accidents.”

Amazon, the second-largest private employer in the United States, has long been criticized for the pace of work in its fulfillment centers and delivery stations. It is under investigation by federal labor regulators, a congressional committee and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York regarding its workplace injury rate.

“We disagree with the allegations made in the citations and have appealed,” Amazon spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel stated in an email. “The truth is, we don’t have fixed quotas.”

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.

Amazon joins Sysco and Dollar General, which were fined $318,000 and $1.3 million in October and November, respectively, according to copies of the citations shared with The Post.

The fines against Amazon are small compared with the company’s size — it brought in $574 billion in revenue last year — but significant for a state labor agency. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency charged with preventing workplace safety issues, frequently investigates Amazon workplaces and has issued dozens of citations, but is severely limited in the size of fines it can bring. For example, Amazon was fined $7,000 after an Indiana employee died in a workplace accident last year.

In Washington state, workplace safety regulators have repeatedly cited Amazon with “willful” violations over ergonomic injuries that can lead to musculoskeletal disorders. The designation means the company knowingly and repeatedly failed to improve conditions for workers. The fines involved, which Amazon is contesting, totaled $60,000 in 2022 and $85,000 in 2023.

OSHA can pursue a corporate-wide settlement with employers that are repeat offenders, as it did with Dollar Tree and Family Dollar in 2023, a deal that cost the company $1.35 million and followed six years of investigation and more than $15 million in fines. But it’s unclear whether the agency is pursuing that strategy with Amazon.

The California law, known as AB 701, was sponsored by Lorena Gonzalez, who was a union official before becoming a State Assembly member and has since returned to labor advocacy. The bill was backed by unions including the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and the Teamsters, which recently signed an affiliation deal with the Amazon Labor Union in New York.

The Teamsters, which helped UPS workers win a new contract last summer after threats of a strike, offers much-needed financial, legal and organizational resources to the previously independent Amazon Labor Union, which Amazon still hasn’t recognized or agreed to bargain with two years after the group secured the first union victory at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island in April 2022.

Warehouse quota regulations similar to the California law are now on the books in Washington state, New York, Oregon and Minnesota, according to the Warehouse Worker Resource Center statement.

Meanwhile, Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) has proposed a federal warehouse worker protection bill.

“Today, California took an essential step forward in fighting for warehouse worker protection and dignity, holding Amazon to account for a punishing work speed quota system that pushes workers to their physical limits ” he stated in an email. “But we need more than a patchwork of state laws.”