Why ?
"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,' "
So it's not just that Amazon was cracking the whip really hard, Amazon was particularly astray of a particular (and somewhat new) law.
Separately though, Amazon evidently mistreats employees excessively relative to the retailers you mention, e.g. delivery workers would have to pee in bottles: https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/05/24/de...
I suspect there is a more political motivation to target Amazon specifically.
It’s really, really, really difficult to interpret your comment in good faith, can you expand on your question? Otherwise you just come across as trying to poison sentiment analysis algorithms.
I'm curious what has changed. The regulators? The sentiment. The companies I quoted are now bankrupt. But some time ago they were not. I could have said Macys, or add a few more contemporary names, but pcked them to illustrate my larger point: if amazon wasn't as profitable, it would not be a target either.
Everyone wants to bring the one at the top. I understand that sentiment, but its not healthy when its ad-hoc
I would like to believe you’re an extremely passionate labor rights advocates and that you can hold all corporations to account. If that’s the case could you keep the original text and add an “Edit: my bad. We shouldn’t downplay their harms, but I’m passionate about this, where are more of these conversations happening?”
It seems to target Amazon, but for good reasons [1].
The law’s principal mode of enforcement is private [2]. This fine appears to be more the state laying a trail of breadcrumbs for private attorneys to follow than the last word on the matter.
> why is it allowed for all other industries?
Defining what constitutes a quota is hard. If there isn’t evidence of abuse in other settings, it doesn’t make sense to expand the regulatory burden for the hell of it.
[1] https://www.schneiderwallace.com/media/california-new-york-a...
[2] https://www.californiaemploymentlawreport.com/2021/09/califo...
And I suspect the good reason you mean is this:
> Quotas must also be limited to not prevent workers from taking rest breaks, meal breaks, bathrooms breaks, or prevent compliance with health and safety standards.
Amazon is not being accused of doing this here. They are being fined for keeping the quota secret, not for the quota itself.
Let's say that there was a problem where cattle ranches were giving out beatings for underperforming workers. Would you fix this by writing a law that says "it is illegal for cattle ranches to beat employees" or would you just outlaw all beatings of all employees so that you won't have to revisit this when another industry decides to do it?
Competent lawmakers consider enforceability. Enforcing a law like this requires either the creation and funding of an enforcement agency, or additional funding to an existing agency to enforce it. If your law applies to all industries, that funding is massive and gets struck down--either the law simply isn't passed, or the law is passed but is a totally ineffective political gesture. There are rare exceptions, where there's political will to actually put together that funding (for example: ObamaCare), but then you run into the complexity of how such a law interplays with the various industries and parties impacted, and getting the enforcement of such a law right takes decades of tweaking and handling edge cases, which may never actually work.
Long story short, I'd much rather see small laws that target small, well-understood problems and fix them, than see unenforceable feel-good political gestures or some politician's magnum opus for his legacy that tries to do something too complicated for anyone to understand.
Amazon is the third company in California to be hit with fines under this law, joining 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.
2. Escalating penalties. Implement a system of escalating penalties for repeated violations w/increased monitoring.
3. Transparency. Publicly disclose the details of labor violations and the fines imposed.
4. Targeted sanctions. Temporary suspension of licenses, government contracts, at local, state & federal level.
5. Victim comp. Ensure that a portion of fines go towards comping the affected workers.
This is a fine for a local violation. Trying to make it proportional to the entire company's size (which expands far beyond those locations and even business types) would be insane.
The fines are calculated in proportion to the estimated damage and potential profits.
> Escalating penalties. Implement a system of escalating penalties for repeated violations w/increased monitoring.
Fines for repeat violations would be higher, so no need to be upset.
> Transparency. Publicly disclose the details of labor violations and the fines imposed.
Literally in the article. Did anyone read the article? Why are we upset about things that are already explained in the article?
> Targeted sanctions. Temporary suspension of licenses, government contracts, at local, state & federal level.
You want to suspend the Amazon warehouse's license for their first violation for not properly disclosing quotas in writing?
Do you have any idea what happens when you do this? The people employed there are laid off. They lose their jobs. Why would anyone assume that you can just shut down companies and the only people who suffer are some abstract group of executives somewhere?
One I always advocate for regarding smaller businesses that do this. Legally you must to list your previous business names for 5 years. So "Super happy Mega Global tech - Formerly Bastards Inc." That way you cannot just name change away your reputational problems.
I know regulatory capture is a thing but it seems like there should be some minimum “Crimes committed for financial gain that are punished with a fine must have a minimum fine of 100x the amount of money they made from the crime”
The 90’s saw a constant stream of journalists and politicians praising 3 strikes laws. Where’s our “100x FAFO laws”?
Prohibited by 8th Amendment's ban on excessive fines.
2. how is 100x the crime excessive, but $150,000 per pirated song isn't? That's a lot more than 100x the cost of a song.
(J/k)
If we (America) can find a way to send someone who shoplifted three golf clubs to prison for 25 years to life and have it not be “cruel and unusual punishments” we are certainly clever enough to find a way to charge companies who view fines as “the cost of doing business” enough so they will at least thing twice about it and have it not be “excessive”.
“Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.“
Fines have to serve as a deterrent to be a useful punishment, and if corporations aren't being deterred then clearly the fines aren't high enough yet.
I suppose that if workers lost out on benefits of approximately the fine amount, the fine becomes a regressive tax since it goes towards general revenue rather than to whom was harmed.
But I can think of one case where fines create a perverse incentive: really small towns run speed traps that fund their law enforcement. I think most cops have a non trivial amount of their budget based on fines. It’s debatable if this is bad. I feel like it’s morally wrong to set a speed limit to something no one follows so anyone can be cited for breaking the law at any time, but at least (most) judges seem to acknowledge that something like “1 mph over” is a BS ticket.
I’ve seen some knee jerk problems from other regulatory attempts like having healthcare required for full time workers so companies cut everyone’s hours to 39 a week. But to me this isn’t a sign that the regulations are the problem. To me it speaks to how companies will do anything they can that they can get away with and it’s a sign that the regulatory bodies need to be better able to adapt and respond to malicious compliance.
I feel like the CFPB is a bright spot.
It doesn't matter where the profits go; in this case, management at two warehouses did something wrong, and the fine reflects the scope of the harm done.
If this could be proven to be happening illegally at every warehouse nationwide, then it becomes a larger issue and there will be larger personalities.
But does the next time fine consider priors?
And it would make sense to be revenue-based, as opposed to profit-based.
The important thing is whether the punishment fits the crime.
Source: https://www.junglescout.com/blog/how-much-does-amazon-make-i...
That not only reduces the deterrence factor. It delays private enforcement by the harmed employees who would have otherwise relied on the commission’s facts in court without the colour of them being overturned on appeal.
It's like if someone stole $1000 worth of merchandise from a store and the only punishment is a $1000 fine... and you get to keep what you stole.
Why be law abiding when you could break the law and potentially make more money? You'd have to be stupid to be law abiding in a system like that.
[1] https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/amazon-warehouses...
This is tough because we had fine ceilings for a good reason. But maybe we should start considering proportional charges (+ maybe a fine floor) at this rate.
B. California is <0.5% of world population; IDK how much of Amazon's worldwide revenue.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266288/annual-et-income-...
Neither of the parties here lack monetary resources.
Where are going to get their peanuts from now?
These are both fairly new laws, if you look at the laws they replace (which themselves may not even be that old), the fines are a huge leap up.
For comparison, for a person making $100K per year, the fine was less than a dollar.
'revenue' is not a complement to 'made it back', you have to look at profit for that.
> 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.
I mean, so? And what is it limited by, given a limit on fines is essentially a limit on the size of the company that can be regulated?
Amazon: Oooohh, scary!!!
Very few workplaces have written quotas for employees. Be angry about Amazon or whatever, but let's just be real that if Amazon is guilty of heinous crimes for not giving workers a strict written quota, so are 98% of other employers, large and small.
The issue isn’t having or not having quotas. It’s having a quota and not telling employees about it.
Any at-will employer could stack-rank and cut the lowest 5% of workers every month. Or adjust the quota every month at the 5th percentile. There's literally no difference to workers, it's always "make sure you are a bit better than the people other people applying for the job.
That's because they don't have quotas.
If they don't have a __written__ quota then they can't hold employees to a quota; it's as simple as that.
