Amazon has been fined over $6 million for breaking labor regulations in California, the United States.
In a statement, the California Department of Industrial Relations claimed that the e-commerce behemoth had failed to give workers written notice of the quotas they were required to adhere to, as required by the Warehouse Quotas statute.
“The employer argued that they did not need a quota system because they use a peer-to-peer evaluation system”, the statement reads.
The legislation requires warehouse owners to provide employees with the number of jobs they must do per hour as well as any disciplinary action that may result from failing to meet this quota.
“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”, said Labour Commissioner Lilia Garcia-Brower.
Garcia-Brower went on to say, “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 Labour Commissioner’s Office launched its initial inspection on September 22, 2022. The inquiry discovered 59,017 infractions at the Moreno Valley and Redlands warehouses between October 20, 2023, and March 9, 2024.
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