On Wednesday, California lawmakers advanced an innovative legislation that could eventually give Amazon warehouse workers the power to back down against some of the draconian conditions imposed on them. Assembly Bill 701 (AB 701), Which one passed the Senate this week and is the first of its kind in the United States, specifically specifies that a worker’s productivity demands cannot reach the price of his basic good.be.
The bill you still need face a final vote of “concurrence” in the Assembly at least before passing to the governor of California. Gavin Newsom’s desk will be signed or vetoed. As it is now, the bill would require employers (like Amazon) not to be able to apply quotas that prevent workers from taking mandatory breaks or breaks from the state or taking bath breaks when they need them.. Eemployers would also be prohibited from applying any type of quota that would prevent workers from following basic occupational safety and health laws.
All of this may seem like basic rights that shouldn’t be need to be coded in a new one law, unless perhaps you work in a Amazon store. Countless stories have arisen over presumptions risks caused by incredibly high production standards were forcing Amazon workers. To meet their quotas, we have seen workers saying yes pee in bottles instead of going to the bathroom i previous apartment their breaks to eat up to date on job applications. And when the coronavirus swept the country, we read report after report describing how these same productivity quotas left them unable to follow some warehouses basic security protocols intended to hinder the spread of diseases.
Meanwhile, last June, a study of the Strategic Organizer Center, a coalition of four major unions, found that Amazon warehouse workers faced 80% higher rates of serious injury than those who worked with other employers in the storage industry on 2020. At that time, the Center faced those of Amazon. “Obsession with speed”.
Amazon has had it in the past dit their higher-than-average injury rates are due to the company being better at reporting injuries than other storage companies. Still, to that of Jeff Bezos final letter from the shareholder as CEO published in April, promised that Amazon would be the “safest workplace on Earth” and pledged a $ 300 million investment in “security projects” to the company.
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Maybe not by chance, the same day of the SOC came out the studio, Amazon announced would change some of their systems for measuring worker productivity, specifically the “free time” metric that tracks the time workers spend “outside” the “task” they were assigned. On a June 1st bregistration publication, Dave Clark, an Amazon executive, noted that the company would now be averaging this metric “over a longer period” to be less punitive for employees. In the past, this was a metric that was written write-climbs i potential shots for trapped workers taking too much time out of anything exhausting task they assigned them.
AB 701 would do give workers some power to fight insecure working conditions. In cases where warehouse workers hear this meeting their quotas would cause a violation of their work / rest / bath breaks, they would they have the right to request a written description of each fee applied to them, which would be their employer necessary to provide, thus adding more transparency to their working conditions. Plus, this entrepreneur would also be forced to offer a complete essayof the worker’s productivity data for the last 90 days. They would be former workers they are allowed to make one of these requests, while current workers would be they are allowed to do so whenever they deem it appropriate.
In cases where these workers find illegal work practices, the current bill would leave these workers pursue precautionary measures against their employer, whether Amazon or any other company. While there are multiple plets archived by Amazon warehouse workers against the company at this time, this provision would allow workers to dismiss punishing expectations of their warehouse appeal to try to get they return to their jobs.
We contacted Amazon to get their invoice, which NPR reports so far he has not done so publicly. But given his stance on labor in the past a few decades, tells me something the company is not a fan.