Amazon fined $5.9 million for alleged violations at Inland Empire warehouses

Amazon was hit with $5.9 million in fines for alleged violations at two Inland Empire warehouses of a state law intended to prevent overworking employees. The company said the ruling is unjustified and will be challenged.

California Labor Commissioner Lilia Garcia Bower said the Amazon warehouses in Moreno Valley and Redlands operated in violation of the Warehouse Quotas Law, established in 2021 under Assembly Bill 701.

"The peer-to-peer system that Amazon was using in these two warehouses is exactly the kind of system that the ... law was put in place to prevent," Bower 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."

Inspectors claimed Amazon failed to notify employees 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 quota," the commissioner's office stated.

Several inspections in recent months led to the identification of 59,017 violations, according to the commissioner's office.

The commissioner's office said Amazon's "peer-to-peer evaluation system" amounted to quotas because work had to be "performed at a specified speed, or the worker suffers discipline." Quotas, however, can be illegal if it's unknown to workers or prevents employees from exercising their rights.

The Amazon corporation said Tuesday the accusal was "unjustified" and "will be challenged."

"The truth is, we don't have fixed quotas," Spokeswoman Maureen Lynch Vogel told City News Service. "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."

Officials said the Ontario-based nonprofit Warehouse Worker Resource Center provided unspecified assistance to state regulators around the time of the inspections, City News Service reported.

The WWRC is aligned with the Service Employees International Union, and other unions, according to published reports.