What happened
It was reported that on 18 June 2024 California’s Labour Commissioner announced citations against Amazon totalling nearly six million dollars. The Commissioner found that Amazon had failed to meet requirements of the Warehouse Quotas law at warehouses in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. Assembly Bill 701 was enacted in 2021 and took effect on 1 January 2022. It requires warehouse employers to give workers written notice of the quotas they must meet, including the required number of tasks per hour and any discipline for failing to meet them. Under the law a quota cannot require a worker to miss meal or rest periods, give up reasonable access to bathroom facilities, or fall short of occupational health and safety standards. Contemporary reporting widely identified Amazon as the legislation’s principal target.
It was reported that Amazon’s warehouse productivity process had been described years earlier. In April 2019 The Verge reported on a letter dated 4 September 2018 and related documents that it said it obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. According to that reporting an Amazon lawyer told the National Labor Relations Board that approximately 300 full-time employees at the Baltimore fulfilment centre were terminated for failing to meet productivity or quality targets between August 2017 and September 2018, about ten per cent of the site’s workforce. The documents reportedly described a system that generated productivity and quality warnings or terminations without supervisor input, using a measure called time off task for periods when a worker was not scanning. Amazon rejected that account and said managers can intervene. The underlying letter has not been published and must be requested from the National Labor Relations Board, so the account rests on reporting by The Verge and CBS News rather than the document itself.
What an auditable version would have shown
The California finding concerned whether workers received written notice of what they were expected to do and what would follow if they did not. An auditable version would answer that from the organisation’s records rather than an inspection. For each worker it would retain the quota in force, when and how it was disclosed, every warning generated by the productivity count, and the identity and reasoning of the person responsible for any consequential decision. Amazon says a manager can intervene. A record of this kind would make that claim checkable by showing, case by case, whether a manager did intervene when review was required.
Where the gap was
It was reported that a productivity count generated warnings and terminations, on the account of the documents The Verge obtained. Years later the Labour Commissioner found that workers at two sites had not received the written notices required by law. A ConductRecord preserves what the system did and how any person responded, with enough detail to show whether review was meaningful and whether a manager intervened when needed. A MetricRecord converts individual events into continuing figures, allowing the organisation to monitor how often the count produces warnings and terminations and which workers are affected. The practice had been reported since 2019 and governed by legislation since 2021, rather than first emerging with the 2024 citations.
What governance should have looked like
It was reported that California enacted the written-notice requirement in 2021, with effect from January 2022. In June 2024 the Labour Commissioner found that Amazon had not met it at two warehouses. When an automated measure of work can lead to discipline, the employer should disclose the standard in writing and retain a record showing what a person decided in every consequential case. Amazon disputes the account of automatic termination and says managers can intervene. The sources reviewed identified no regulatory finding outside California concerning Amazon’s algorithmic management of warehouse workers. The California requirement had been in force for more than two years before the regulator found non-compliance at the two sites.
Failure Pattern: work was measured and disciplined by an automated productivity count, and the requirement to tell workers what the count expected of them was still not being met years after a law required it.
Governance Principle: where an automated measure of a person’s work can lead to discipline, the standard being applied should be disclosed to that person in writing, and each consequential decision should be recorded in a way that shows what a human actually decided.
The reference implementation of ConductRecord and MetricRecord is open source. It lives at github.com/saffronandindia/headlights-oss, Apache 2.0 licensed and free to install. The repository is public now.
Sources
- Labor Commissioner cites Amazon nearly $6 million for warehouse quota violations (California Department of Industrial Relations)
- Warehouse Quotas frequently asked questions (California Labor Commissioner’s Office)
- How Amazon automatically tracks and fires warehouse workers for ‘productivity’ (The Verge)
- Amazon under fire for software that recommends firing workers (CBS News)