Amazon was fined $5.9 million for allegedly violating California’s Warehouse Quotas Law—AB 701—at two warehouses in southern California’s Inland Empire. Amazon has appealed the citations.
We’ve gathered articles on the news from SHRM Online and other outlets.
Alleged Violations
Amazon failed to meet requirements of the Warehouse Quotas Law, enacted in 2021 as AB 701, at warehouses in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, according to the California Department of Industrial Relations. This law requires warehouse employers to provide employees with written notice of any quotas they must follow, including the number of tasks they need to perform per hour and any discipline that could come from not meeting the quotas.
“The peer-to-peer [evaluation] 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 California Labor Commissioner Lilia García-Brower. “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.”
“We disagree with the allegations made in the citations and have appealed. The truth is, we don’t have fixed quotas,” said Amazon spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel. “At Amazon, individual performance is evaluated over a long period of time, in relation to how the entire site’s team is performing. Employees can—and are encouraged to—review their performance whenever they wish. They can always talk to a manager if they’re having trouble finding the information.”
(California Department of Industrial Relations press release)
Quotas Purportedly Not Met
García-Brower’s office said that Amazon failed to notify employees at the ONT8 warehouse in Moreno Valley and ONT9 warehouse in Redlands of any productivity quotas they were required to meet, leading workers to be disciplined without knowing why.
“If you don’t work a certain number of items per day and make sure you meet your rate, you’ll get a write-up or a verbal coaching,” said Carrie Stone, an ONT8 worker, at a press conference. “My manager said I missed it by 1%, and I got the write-up. I didn’t even know what the target was for the day. I could lose my job if I get a certain number of write-ups.”
Lynch Vogel said performance evaluations are based partly on the number of orders at a facility and its staffing levels, calling it “a very intricate process.” She said, “Critics make it sound very black-and-white, but it really isn’t at all.”
Several inspections in recent months led to the identification of 59,017 violations at the two warehouses from Oct. 20, 2023, to March 9, 2024, according to the commissioner’s office. Penalties were issued in the amount of $100 for each violation.
(CalMatters and News Channel 3)
Intent of AB 701
AB 701 established a first-in-the-nation regulation of production quotas in warehouse distribution centers. The broad scope of the bill potentially applies to many employers across a wide range of industries.
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