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Amazon fined $5.9M for breaking labor law in California
- StarterPro 2y agoThat's, what? Half an hour of operation to them?
- mananaysiempre 2y agoThat would even be okay if there were an understanding the fines would continue until the problematic behaviour stops, but it’s unclear from the article whether that’s actually the case. > 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?
- barnabask 2y agoIn Finland, speeding fines are based on your income. Can we have that, but for corporations?
- ysacfanboi 2y agoSecond this.
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoCountries should take stock equity over fines. It dilutes the owners share value and punishes stockholders who don't make a company's' boards accountable. With ownership, the government also then has the ability to 'peer behind the veil' more easily and make sure management is behaving. Finally, if a company continues to misbehave the government over time takes ownership and can then replace the board (think a corporate equiv to a death penalty, since under the law corporations are treated as people).
- j-bos 2y agoIs this a novel concept?
- mananaysiempre 2y agoSounds like expropriation by another name, honestly.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> With ownership, the government also then has the ability to 'peer behind the veil' more easily and make sure management is behaving You want every politician you don’t like in the country having this power? > if a company continues to misbehave the government over time takes ownership and can then replace the board This is expropriation. (It’s also fines with extra steps and ongoing costs.) > think a corporate equiv to a death penalty Corporate death penalties are fines with extra steps. They’re a red herring to avoid what companies actually fear, massive fines that force them into liquidation. Anything you want with a corporate death penalty, massive fines achieve more cleanly. The only function bringing the former up has is to distract from the latter.
- cde-v 2y agoIf it reduces corporate power enough we might actually be able to get some trustworthy people into office.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> reduces corporate power enough we might actually be able to get some trustworthy people into office If what did? The history of expropriation is one way: the rulers and their families accumulate the jewels. OpenAI gets fined and given to Biden, Meta gets fined and given to Trump. The economy gets divided by the people who have the power to seize.
- the_optimist 2y agoCan you articulate an equilibrium of political economy that reflects your redesign? Like what’s the role of politics in economics?
- gnicholas 2y agoThis happens to some extent via punitive damages, which are designed to be large enough to get the attention of the offender. I don't think it happens outside of punitive damages though.
- doe_eyes 2y agoI like the idea. If you're a startup that's losing money, you can get paid by the government to commit crime?
- recursive 2y agoMaybe proportional to revenue (not profit). Plus standard baseline?
- Nasrudith 2y agoRevenue, while it would solve the fact that profit-taking vs reinvestment is arbitrary there are other flaws. For one that would make it disproportionately ruinous on low margin businesses. If the fix was so simple I suspect that we would see it tried in more places.
- recursive 2y agoI don't think it's just simplicity. It's probably also contrary to the interests of some of the law-makers' biggest donors.
- kerkeslager 2y agoIt's really frustrating to see this disingenuous comment repeated whenever this conversation comes up.
- jamesrr39 2y agoYes. See GDPR (max fine 4% of global annual revenue) or the new EU Digital Services Act (max fine 6% of global annual revenue). 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.
- markus_zhang 2y agoYou can't. In a Capitalistic world, companies, large companies control the world. You are asking for the hand to cut itself. It might work for a few countries but is unthinkable for any medium-large countries when companies are allowed to grow to a certain extent.
- dylan604 2y agoI was told that in Monaco, if you are caught speeding in a supercar, your fine is much more than if you are caught speeding on your moped. I thought that seemed fair to me. Whether it is true or not is something I never looked up as I will never be in the situation of needing to know. If it's not true, then seems like a waste of a good idea that people seem to want to be true.
- Nasrudith 2y agoSpeeding fines are often based on how much over the limit you are going, which is perfectly sensible given that reflects the danger and discourages petty over-enforcement of very low margin speeding. Adding mass of the vehicle as a component to fines would also be a sensible measure to make the fine reflect the hazard.
- dylan604 2y agowhile all of that might be true, I'm pretty sure none of that had anything to do with the supercar policy.
- fwungy 2y agoThe corporations finance.the politicians, so no. It's all for show, and lines the pockets of the lawyers, who are the primary political class.
- grapescheesee 2y agoA small rounding error.
- ryandrake 2y agoIt's 5 minutes of revenue. They made it back 12X since an hour ago when the article hit HN. For comparison, for a person making $100K per year, the fine was less than a dollar.
- elwell 2y ago> 5 minutes of revenue. They made it back 'revenue' is not a complement to 'made it back', you have to look at profit for that.
- Arch-TK 2y ago5.9 cents? Where did they get the decicents from?
- nielsbot 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_(currency) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_(currency)
- system2 2y agoAmazon makes that money in mere minutes. This is not even a slap on the wrist.
- riiii 2y agoWow, that won't teach them.
- green-eclipse 2y agohttps://archive.ph/HoERr https://archive.ph/HoERr
- fallingknife 2y agoThe issue here is that Amazon had productivity quotas for its workers that were kept secret from the workers. It's the keeping a secret part that is illegal. On the one hand, this seems reasonable, but the fact that the law only applies to warehouse workers (the "Warehouse Quota Law") and was passed in 2022 makes me suspicious that this isn't a good faith worker protection law but rather specifically targeted at Amazon for political reasons. If this practice is so bad, why is it allowed for all other industries?
- kstrauser 2y agoAre secret quotas common in other settings? I don't think I've ever been told about one, and I had a whole lot of other jobs before starting this career.
- RexM 2y agoCommon or not, if the practice is bad why make the law specific to warehouse workers instead of making it a general law that applies to everyone?
- jxf 2y agoI think it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" thing. If you make the law sweeping, businesses will complain it's an infringement of big government. If you make the law targeted, businesses will complain they're being unfairly selective.
- akira2501 2y agoWhat other industries do you think would benefit from this? Warehouse work might be unique enough to be afforded unique protections. There a lot of dark patterns you can employ against your workers in those settings, creating orders that are hard to fulfill on time, arranging your warehouse in ways that reduce worker productivity or even safety. Since many warehouses are moving consumer items and often food items there does seem to be reason to consider them separately from other industries. They also have a separate labor union in many regions.
- bpodgursky 2y ago> California investigated two Amazon facilities near Los Angeles and in May found that the company failed to “provide written notice of quotas to which each employee is subject,” according to a copy of the citation shared with The Washington Post by the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, a nonprofit that advocates for improving working conditions at warehouses. 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.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> if Amazon is guilty of heinous crimes for not giving workers a strict written quota The issue isn’t having or not having quotas. It’s having a quota and not telling employees about it.
- bpodgursky 2y agoWhy is this a meaningful difference? 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.
- lokar 2y agoBecause you are also not allowed quotas that won’t accommodate rest breaks. If the quota is secret you can’t enforce breaks.
- maximinus_thrax 2y agoDid you read the article? > “Undisclosed quotas expose workers to increased pressure to work faster and can lead to higher injury rates and other violations by forcing workers to skip breaks,” What you're saying about: > make sure you are a bit better than the people other people applying for the job. Is literally that. It just adds pressure which leads to accidents. When you don't know the playing field, you're going to assume the worst and then work yourself to death. It's sad to see HN defending this approach.
- cush 2y agoThey make that every 5 minutes
- shreezus 2y ago$5.9M is not even a rounding error for a $2T corporation.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- paulddraper 2y agoHow much of that corporation is California?
- givemeethekeys 2y agoYou mean the 4th largest economy in the world? I'd imagine it is quite significant.
- lukan 2y ago"If California were a sovereign nation (2024), it would rank in terms of nominal GDP as the world's fifth largest economy" (wikipedia) Still surprising.
- paulddraper 2y agoBecause Google, Meta, etc are based on CA doesn't mean that Amazon does a promotional amount of business or employment there.
- Dylan16807 2y agoThe crime was also not even a rounding error. The important thing is whether the punishment fits the crime.
- anigbrowl 2y agoIn terms of profits gained, perhaps. It might have catastrophic consequences for workers who suffered accidents directly or indirectly (eg crashing a car while driving home from an exhausting shift).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ryandrake 2y agoCan Amazon even count that low?
- m463 2y agointeresting that this is published on Jeff Bezos' newspaper.
- mouse_ 2y agohumiliation ritual
- numbers 2y agoAmazon made $64,809,782.60 in revenue every hour in Q3 2023. Source: https://www.junglescout.com/blog/how-much-does-amazon-make-in-a-year/ https://www.junglescout.com/blog/how-much-does-amazon-make-i...
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoHow much of that was from Californian warehouses? Because if you don’t do that math, the fine gets overturned by the courts. 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.
- dolni 2y agoThe fine doesn't even amount to a slap on the wrist. 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.
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoIs this why Europe fines American companies based only on their global income? Like, hey you violated this privacy thing in the EU, and you made a lot of money outside of the EU, so give us a few billion.
- Mo3 2y agoSurely the fines will become exponentially bigger every time they are caught doing the same, right?
- erikaww 2y agoThey’ll learn to cover their tracks better
- elevatedastalt 2y ago[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoEh, it’s the same retributive frustration that leads people to conclude that any violation of any law should result in massive jail time. (And a history, in America, of too-low corporate fines.)
- optimalsolver 2y agoThat's a start. Plus jail time for all executives involved.
- altairprime 2y agoFor labor laws, I’m not sure that’s as bad idea as your sarcasm might indicate. Perhaps, instead, “a mandatory fine shall be levied of 100% of direct and indirect labor expenses (including benefits, unpaid wages, and court-ordered wages) during each calendar year in which labor violations occurred”. That way there’s a natural cap on it to satisfy the courts, but it’s still large enough that any violations are actually a threat to megacorps.
- ipaddr 2y agoOr amazon moves to hire workers who are employed by other agencies to reduce risk.
- harimau777 2y agoThen pass a law to make them liable even if the employees are employed by other agencies.
- altairprime 2y agoThat’s already in place, I think, with recent labor law changes — not that FedEx Home Delivery or Amazon Logistics want to acknowledge that!
- the_optimist 2y agoThe company “failed to provide written notice of quotas” to employees, as required. Tape a sheet of paper on the wall with the numbers, done. Meanwhile, the antipathy of jealousy is palpable.
- nickff 2y agoIf you taped a paper on the wall to notify employees of each disclosure required, you'd probably run out of viable wall space before you ran out of notices.
- ivanjermakov 2y agoWhy taxes are proportional to income but fines aren't?
- ipaddr 2y agoBecause you create a loophole where non-profitable companies commit the offense and get cash back (if fines were connected to revenue, negative revenue would become a reward)
- jedberg 2y agoObviously you would have a floor, just like taxes do.
- Brybry 2y agoYep, plenty of fines work this way. It's how GDPR works: percent of turnover (revenue) or a floor, whichever is higher [1]. And worst case scenario define revenue in the fine's terms in a way that it disallows accounting tricks. [1] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-83-gdpr/#:~:text=turnover https://gdpr-info.eu/art-83-gdpr/#:~:text=turnover
- lupire 2y agoThat the max fine for GDPR, not the min. GDPR is really a "fine whatever they want" regime, starting small and increasing for non compliance.
- Brybry 2y ago> up to 20,000,000 EUR, or in the case of an undertaking [economic entity], up to 4% of the total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher I think the "whichever is higher" wording does make it a floor but you're right that the "up to" makes it whatever they want. So I guess it's a meaningless variable floor. It still works out similarly: they could fine a company like Amazon, with a lot of revenue, up to around 21 billion (regardless of profit) while they could only fine a small company up to 20 million.
- IG_Semmelweiss 2y agoRetail has had labor quotas (with serious health/mental consequences) since time immemorial, but i don't see any outrage against Sears, ToysRus, or BedBath. Why ?
- eropple 2y agoTwo of those are dead and the third has coded several times over the last ten years. Amazon, on the other hand, is one of the world's biggest businesses.
- maximinus_thrax 2y agoProbably because it's the largest employer of warehouse workers in the nation and the second largest employer overall? Also, the issue is not having quotas, it's having quotas and keeping them secret from the workers.
- schneems 2y agoI read your commment and I feel like it is indistinguishable from a talking head on TV using a “whataboutism” to defend the actions of Amazon without seeming to defend the actions of Amazon. Which makes me feel mad if that’s your goal and somewhat curious if you knew that before you posted. 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?”
- insane_dreamer 2y agoDid they have secret quotas that were not revealed to their employees? That's why.
- q1w2 2y agoYes, usually they do. I suspect there is a more political motivation to target Amazon specifically.
- 23B1 2y ago1. Proportionality. Fines should be proportional to the company's size, revenue, and the severity of the violation. The financial impact should be significant enough to grab the company's attention and incentivize change. 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.
- DaoVeles 2y agoThese a 5 very reasonable proposals. 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.
- Aurornis 2y ago> Proportionality. Fines should be proportional to the company's size, revenue, and the severity of the violation. The financial impact should be significant enough to grab the company's attention and incentivize change. 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?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- timetraveller26 2y agothis is an insult to all working force
- sleepybrett 2y agoman, this is going to set them back at least 15 seconds.
- dorothybraith 2y ago[dead]
- harimau777 2y agoMaybe I'm not following, but I'm seeing tons of responses saying that a low fine is alright because this is a local violation. What is the reasoning there? Doesn't the profit go to the corporation as a whole?
- zdragnar 2y agoThe penalty must be proportionate to the crime. Otherwise, there's a good chance a higher court will overturn it. 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.
- harimau777 2y agoIt seems to me that it matters where the profit goes because part of "proportionate to the crime" means that the fine is sufficient to discourage the behavior.
- schneems 2y agoIs this more or less than they made from breaking said law. 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”?
- adolph 2y agoIs there a term similar to “regulatory capture” but where the government becomes dependent on fines? 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.
- eru 2y agoPeople don't want to hear this.
- schneems 2y agoI think you’re being downvoted because the premise of your question would imply that trickle down economics works, it does not. 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.
- TulliusCicero 2y ago
- insane_dreamer 2y agoCalifornia: You're breaking the law. You must treat your employees better, or else! Amazon: Oooohh, scary!!!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- metadat 2y agohttps://archive.today/HoERr https://archive.today/HoERr
- otikik 2y agoOh wow $5.9M Where are going to get their peanuts from now?
- ourmandave 2y agoEverybody saying slap-on-the-wrist. But does the next time fine consider priors?
- EasyMark 2y agoI doubt. The USA needs to inflict more pain like “1% of global revenue per infraction” and things would change quickly.
- solarkraft 2y agoI would be devastated if I was fined 6 cents after robbing an entire store
- itsTyrion 2y ago5.9 mil?? that's like fining a working class citizen 5 cents LMAO