After clearing each homes of the New York State Legislature in June, Governor Kathy Hochul has lastly signed the Warehouse Employee Safety Act. Broadly modeled after AB-701, the landmark labor regulation California enacted earlier this yr, the laws goals to guard staff from unreasonable productiveness quotas. Below the regulation, New York State would require main warehouse firms, together with Amazon, to supply new hires and present staff with documentation detailing their productiveness expectations.
The regulation additionally offers staff the appropriate to request their quota at any time, together with after their employment ends. Moreover, the laws prohibits firms from imposing quotas that intrude with a employee’s state-mandated meal and restroom breaks. Firms additionally can not fireplace somebody for failing to satisfy an undisclosed quota.
“Laws defending staff within the warehousing business have lagged far behind its fast development till in the present day,” stated the Retail, Wholesale and Division Retailer Union (RWDSU), one of many labor teams that pushed for the laws. “The RWDSU has lengthy prioritized the problem of defending warehouse staff from stress-induced accidents and sickness from limitless quotas and it’s why we pushed for the introduction of the Warehouse Employee Safety Act this yr.”
As you possibly can think about, Warehouse Employee Safety Act advocates had Amazon in thoughts once they campaigned for the invoice. The retail large operates greater than 70 amenities throughout the state, greater than half of which have opened for the reason that begin of 2021. In 2020, a report from the Middle for Investigative Reporting discovered the corporate anticipated staff at its newer and extra automated success facilities to satisfy unrealistic productiveness quotas that made them extra more likely to maintain critical accidents.
Earlier than handing the reins of the retail large to Andy Jassy in 2021, former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos denied the corporate had unreasonable productiveness quotas. In his last letter to firm shareholders, he stated Amazon gave staff alternatives to “take casual breaks all through their shifts,” including the corporate “set achievable efficiency objectives that have in mind tenure and precise worker efficiency knowledge.”
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