California AB 701 Passes Senate, Targets Amazon Labor Quotas

California lawmakers advanced on Wednesday groundbreaking legislation that could finally give Amazon warehouse workers the power to push back some of the draconian conditions was imposed on them. Assembly Bill 701 (AB 701), who passed the Senate this week and is the first of its kind in the United States, specifically states that a worker’s productivity demands cannot come at the cost of their basic good-being.

The law project still needs face a final “competition” vote in the Assembly at least before being forwarded to the Governor of California. Gavin Newsom’s office to sign or veto. In the current state of things, the bill would require employers (like Amazon) not to enforce quotas that prevent workers from taking state-imposed meal or rest breaks, or taking bathroom breaks when they need them. EEmployers would also be prohibited from applying any type of quota that would prevent workers from complying with basic occupational health and safety laws.

All of these may seem like pretty basic rights that shouldn’t be need be codified in a new law – unless, maybe, you work in a Amazon warehouse. Countless stories emerged about alleged dangers caused by incredibly high production standards imposed on Amazon workers. To meet their quotas, we have seen workers say they were pee in bottles instead of going out to the bathroom and first of all their meal breaks to keep abreast of work requests. And when the coronavirus swept across the country, we read report after report describing how those same productivity quotas left some warehouses unable to keep up basic security protocols intended to curb the spread of the disease.

Meanwhile, last June, a study of the Strategic Organization Center, a coalition of four major unions, found that Amazon warehouse workers faced 80% higher rates of serious injury than other employers in the warehousing industry in 2020. “the obsession with speed”.

Amazon has in the past noted its higher than average injury rates are due to the fact that the company is better able to report injuries than other warehousing companies. Yet in Jeff Bezos last letter to shareholders as CEO released in April, he pledged to make Amazon “the safest place to work on the planet” and pledged to invest $ 300 million in “security projects” at the company.

It might not be a coincidence, the same day the SOC study came out, Amazon announcement that would change some of its systems to measure worker productivity, in particular measuring “job downtime” which tracks how much time workers spend “off” the “job” assigned to them. In a June 1 bnewspaper publicationAmazon executive Dave Clark noted that the company would now average this metric “over a longer period” to be less punitive to employees. In the past, this was a metric that was written write-UPS and potential layoffs for workers caught taking too long away from anything exhausting task they were affected.

AB 701 would be empower workers to tackle unsafe working conditions. In cases where warehouse workers feel that the meeting their quotas would result in a violation of their work / rest / bathroom breaks, they have the right to request a written description of each quota imposed on them, which their employer would required to provide, thus adding more transparency to their working conditions. In addition, this employer be too required to offer a complete writing-worker productivity data over the last 90 days. Former workers would allowed to make any of these requests, while current workers would be allowed to do them whenever they want.

In cases where these workers discover illegal labor practices, the current bill would leave these workers seek an injunction against their employer, whether it is Amazon or any other company. While there is various lawsuits deposit by Amazon warehouse workers against the company right now, this provision would allow workers to fire due to punitive expectations of their warehouse appeal to try to get their jobs back.

We reached out to Amazon to find out their take on the bill, which NPR reports this has not yet been done publicly. But given his stance on labor issues for the past a few decades, something tells me the company is not a fan.