{"id":325548,"date":"2021-09-25T10:02:00","date_gmt":"2021-09-25T10:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/revealnews.org\/?p=168096"},"modified":"2021-09-25T10:02:00","modified_gmt":"2021-09-25T10:02:00","slug":"were-going-to-protect-workers-new-california-law-takes-aim-at-amazons-unsafe-work-quotas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/09\/25\/were-going-to-protect-workers-new-california-law-takes-aim-at-amazons-unsafe-work-quotas\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We\u2019re Going to Protect Workers\u2019: New California Law Takes Aim at Amazon\u2019s Unsafe Work Quotas"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A<\/figure>\n

A groundbreaking new California law takes direct aim at a key feature of Amazon\u2019s business model: the backbreaking production quotas that are seriously injuring warehouse workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom earlier this week<\/a>, the law prohibits warehouse companies from enforcing work quotas that prevent workers from going to the bathroom or doing their jobs safely, in line with health and safety laws. While state officials would be in charge of enforcement, the law also gives workers the right to sue to overturn unsafe quotas and any discipline they receive for not meeting them. And the bill says that if a worker is punished within 90 days of making a complaint about a quota, it will be considered unlawful retaliation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is a first step. We\u2019ve got to do more,\u201d said the bill\u2019s author<\/a>, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego. \u201cHopefully, Amazon will look at this and start to internally change things to make things safer. But we sent a clear message \u2013 and hopefully other states will, too \u2013 that we\u2019re watching. We\u2019re going to protect workers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A series of investigations<\/a> by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting showed<\/a> how Amazon\u2019s injury rates were far worse than the national average for the warehousing industry. Former Amazon safety managers blamed the company\u2019s production demands, which are enforced under threat of discipline or termination. Workers, whose pace is constantly monitored down to the second, said they had to break safety rules to keep up. Some said they even developed urinary tract infections because they had to avoid going to the bathroom to hit quotas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gonzalez said our investigations helped prompt the law, along with the warehouse workers she spoke to directly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe were starting out with a problem and not quite sure how to fix it,\u201d Gonzalez said. \u201cI\u2019m not sure our legislation will fix it. I think it is a step forward.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amazon has attempted to conceal the problem. Last year, we showed<\/a> how Amazon had misled the public and lawmakers about its safety crisis. While the company claimed it was improving, internal records showed the company\u2019s rate of serious injuries had gotten worse from 2016 to 2019. Injury rates were especially high during peak shopping times and in Amazon\u2019s robotic warehouses, where the company\u2019s hyper-efficient technology pushed workers even faster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAmazon has utilized these technologies of the future to squeeze as much as they can out of every worker \u2013 with nothing to balance it out,\u201d Gonzalez said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, center, authored the bill to crack down on Amazon’s warehouse quotas.. Credit: AP Photo\/Rich Pedroncelli<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Amazon didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment on the new law. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, in his shareholder letter<\/a> this year, wrote, \u201cWe don\u2019t set unreasonable performance goals.\u201d He said the company would become \u201cEarth\u2019s Safest Place to Work.\u201d The company then announced<\/a> a $12 million donation and five-year partnership with the National Safety Council to \u201cto invent new ways to prevent\u201d musculoskeletal injuries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Business groups, such as the California Retailers Association, opposed<\/a> the bill, saying it would increase costs for consumers and slow down warehouses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gonzalez suggested hiring more people: \u201cNext-day delivery isn\u2019t the problem. You have to have a workforce large enough to achieve that without hurting the workers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her bill initially required California\u2019s workplace safety agency to create regulations that would reduce the risk of warehouse injuries. But California\u2019s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, or Cal\/OSHA, pushed back on that, Gonzalez said, and it was eventually stripped from the legislation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, the law focuses on transparency, requiring warehouse companies to provide employees with a written description of their work quotas. Employers also have to give workers who object to quotas a copy of the data tracking their productivity. Gonzalez hopes the information to come out of that will both help workers fight unsafe quotas and lead to a new state standard regulating quotas in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

California Labor Commissioner Lilia Garc\u00eda-Brower will be in charge of enforcing the law. The commissioner will also determine whether an investigation is warranted for workplaces with injury rates at least 1.5 times higher than the industry average.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many Amazon warehouses have racked up rates of injury<\/a> much higher than that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the Southern California warehouse where Candice Dixon worked, the rate of serious injuries was more than four times the industry average in 2018. She suffered one of the 422 injuries Amazon recorded there that year. Trying to keep up with a requirement to scan and lift an item every 11 seconds, even through a shift of heavy products, Dixon ruined her back, leaving her in debilitating chronic pain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hearing about the new law brought tears to her eyes, Dixon said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLike, happy tears of thank God something good came out of this,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI understand a company needs to make sure their workers aren\u2019t slacking off,\u201d she said. \u201cBut companies take advantage as well.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dixon said she hopes the new law helps prevent other workers from getting injured, even as she remains in pain. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not going to really help me,\u201d she said, \u201cbut it\u2019s going to help other people, and that makes me happy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The year after Dixon\u2019s injury, the warehouse where she worked had one of the highest injury rates of all of Amazon\u2019s fulfillment centers. The only one with a worse record in 2019 was in DuPont, Washington, just an hour south of the company\u2019s Seattle headquarters. It logged just over 22 serious injuries per 100 employees, six times the industry average that year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following our reporting, Washington safety officials investigated and found a \u201cdirect connection\u201d<\/a> between the injuries there and Amazon\u2019s enforcement of \u201ca very high pace of work.\u201d It was the first time nationally that safety officials had found Amazon in violation of the law for its fast-paced work demands. Amazon is contesting the citation and the maximum $7,000 fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The records that show employers\u2019 injury rates used to be kept secret by the federal government. However, after we sued, a federal judge ruled<\/a> that the records must be made public. As a result of our suit and one by Public Citizen, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration now posts<\/a> online injury data for more than 200,000 workplaces, allowing companies to be held accountable for their safety records.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Washington Post<\/a> and a report<\/a> by a coalition of unions used the newly accessible data to highlight Amazon\u2019s latest rate of serious injuries, which declined in 2020 but was still much higher than non-Amazon warehouses. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This story was edited by Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.<\/em>

Will Evans can be reached at <\/em>wevans@revealnews.org<\/em><\/a>. Follow him on Twitter: <\/em>@willCIR<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/div><\/span>

‘We’re Going to Protect Workers’: New California Law Takes Aim at Amazon’s Unsafe Work Quotas<\/a> is a story from Reveal<\/a>. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Reveal<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/figure>\n

A series of Reveal investigations has shown that Amazon\u2019s injury rates have been far worse than the national average for the warehousing industry.<\/p>\n

\u2018We\u2019re Going to Protect Workers\u2019: New California Law Takes Aim at Amazon\u2019s Unsafe Work Quotas<\/a> is a story from Reveal<\/a>. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8783,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3673,26087,3389,1948,3683,3684,4084],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325548"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8783"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325548"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":371799,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325548\/revisions\/371799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}