On Friday, the New York state legislature approved a bill against Amazon's quota for employees' eating, resting, toilet and other behaviors in the warehouse on the grounds of ensuring productivity, which is the latest practice of regulators targeting the labor practices of the online retailer. The state legislature passed the bill, called the warehouse worker protection act, which was approved by the State Senate on Wednesday. The bill has now been submitted to the desk of New York governor Kathy hochul, who has not yet said whether she will sign the measure.
The legislation requires Amazon and other companies operating warehouses to issue quota requirements to workers and notify them of any changes in their expectations, and prohibits companies from imposing quotas to prevent workers from eating, resting or going to the toilet.
Two months after the bill was introduced and deliberated, Amazon voted in favor of joining the Union in a warehouse in New York, which is the first time this situation has occurred in a warehouse facility of the company in the United States. The warehouse workers in Staten Island are represented by Amazon Union (ALU), a grass-roots group composed of current and former employees of the company.
New York is not the first state to take such action against the quotas of Amazon and its peers. In September, California signed a similar bill into law. Earlier this year, lawmakers in Washington and New Hampshire also introduced legislation against warehouse production quotas.
Amazon relies on sophisticated algorithms to track the productivity of its warehouse workers, recording the number of packages they pick, pack and stack per hour. If a worker takes a long rest while scanning a package, Amazon's internal system will record it as "time away from the task" and generate a warning, which may lead to the dismissal of the employee.
Amazon's productivity quota has always been the target of frequent attacks by workers' rights groups and Amazon's own employees. They believe that Amazon's unremitting attention to efficiency has led to frequent work-related injuries in warehouses. A number of studies by the center for strategic organizations, a trade union federation, attributed the high injury rate of warehouse and delivery workers to Amazon's "obsession with speed".
The Act states that as one day and next day deliveries become standard, workplace quotas are becoming more common in warehouses. "These quotas usually do not allow workers to comply with safety rules or recover from strenuous activities during productive working hours, putting warehouse and distribution center employees working under quotas at high risk of injury and illness," the Bill said.
Amazon representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The company has previously said that it has made safety a higher priority within the company, including the introduction of plans to educate employees on how to avoid work-related injuries. Amazon executives also denied that the company used production quotas in its warehouses.
"It's a misunderstanding that Amazon has quotas. We don't," Heather Macdougall, Amazon's head of workplace security, said at an event with the National Security Council on Thursday. "We are committed to ensuring that performance expectations and safe operations coexist."
Alu is promoting more reasonable quotas and striving for better compensation and benefits for employees.