Amazon fined $5.9 million over warehouse worker quotas, ET BrandEquity

California labor regulators have fined online retailer Amazon.com Inc $5.9 million for failing to properly inform workers of productivity quotas at two warehouses, including one where some workers are trying to unionize.

California Labor Commissioner Lilia Garcia Brower's office announced the fines, which were imposed in May, on Tuesday.

California's 2022 law requires employers to explain quotas in writing to workers if they face disciplinary action for not completing work at the required speed. Commissioners said Amazon violated the law nearly 60,000 times in the five months through March at its giant warehouses in Moreno Valley and Redlands, outside Los Angeles.

Amazon spokeswoman Maureen Lynch Vogel said the company is appealing the charges and denied that warehouse workers have fixed quotas.

“At Amazon, individual performance is evaluated over time and in the context of the performance of teams across sites, and employees are able and encouraged to review their own performance at any time,” Lynch Vogel said in a statement.

Criticism of Amazon's quota system has become the focus of a national movement to unionize its warehouses: Workers at a New York City warehouse voted to unionize in 2022, but workers at two facilities in New York and Alabama have since refused to join a union.

The union filed a petition to hold an election at the Moreno Valley warehouse in 2022, known as ONT8, but it was later dropped due to allegations of illegal union-busting activities by Amazon. An administrative judge is scheduled to hold a hearing on those claims in August, which Amazon denies.

Garcia-Brouwer said in a statement that Amazon's quota system is exactly what California's law was designed to thwart.

“Undisclosed quotas put workers under pressure to work faster and can increase injury rates and other violations by forcing them to take breaks,” she said.

Congress is considering a Democratic-backed bill that would be largely similar to the California law, including requiring written notice of quotas and banning quotas that prevent workers from taking breaks or using the bathroom.

Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, one of the bill's sponsors, said the fine against Amazon announced Tuesday highlighted the need to crack down on “punitive” quota systems.

“We need more than a patchwork of state laws,” Markey said in a statement.