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Comment by fallingknife | Hacker News Reader

The 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?

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> makes me suspicious that this isn't a good faith worker protection law but rather specifically targeted at Amazon

It seems to target Amazon, but for good reasons [1].

The law’s principal mode of enforcement is private [2]. This fine appears to be more the state laying a trail of breadcrumbs for private attorneys to follow than the last word on the matter.

> why is it allowed for all other industries?

Defining what constitutes a quota is hard. If there isn’t evidence of abuse in other settings, it doesn’t make sense to expand the regulatory burden for the hell of it.

[1] https://www.schneiderwallace.com/media/california-new-york-a...

[2] https://www.californiaemploymentlawreport.com/2021/09/califo...

They have a good reason for targeting the practice. They do not have a good reason for targeting Amazon in particular.

And I suspect the good reason you mean is this:

> Quotas must also be limited to not prevent workers from taking rest breaks, meal breaks, bathrooms breaks, or prevent compliance with health and safety standards.

Amazon is not being accused of doing this here. They are being fined for keeping the quota secret, not for the quota itself.

> do not have a good reason for targeting Amazon in particular

The law applies to all warehouses.

Are 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.

Common 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?

I 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.

What 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.

Linking my answer to another comment asking the same question: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=40724535

I'm not actually arguing that they existed for you, but if they did I wouldn't expect you to be told about secret quotas.

Well you wouldn't have been told about the secret quota, would you? But let's say you're right that it isn't common outside of warehouses. Even in that case, why would you write a law only for warehouses?

Let's say that there was a problem where cattle ranches were giving out beatings for underperforming workers. Would you fix this by writing a law that says "it is illegal for cattle ranches to beat employees" or would you just outlaw all beatings of all employees so that you won't have to revisit this when another industry decides to do it?

I really doubt there was a strict quota, more likely some kind of stack ranking.

> If this practice is so bad, why is it allowed for all other industries?

Competent lawmakers consider enforceability. Enforcing a law like this requires either the creation and funding of an enforcement agency, or additional funding to an existing agency to enforce it. If your law applies to all industries, that funding is massive and gets struck down--either the law simply isn't passed, or the law is passed but is a totally ineffective political gesture. There are rare exceptions, where there's political will to actually put together that funding (for example: ObamaCare), but then you run into the complexity of how such a law interplays with the various industries and parties impacted, and getting the enforcement of such a law right takes decades of tweaking and handling edge cases, which may never actually work.

Long story short, I'd much rather see small laws that target small, well-understood problems and fix them, than see unenforceable feel-good political gestures or some politician's magnum opus for his legacy that tries to do something too complicated for anyone to understand.

That's nonsense. You don't need any additional bureaucracy. That's just an excuse that bureaucrats use to justify their worthless existence. Do we need new courts and judges every time something new is made illegal?

> Do we need new courts and judges every time something new is made illegal?

That's not what I was talking about.

If you make a law saying that quotas have to be communicated to employees so they can know what they're working up to, then you need someone to physically go to the workplaces and make sure that quotas are being communicated. It's as simple as that.

If you are enforcing this in, say, 500 warehouses, one person can probably do all the inspections, as that's a little less than two locations per day to go to all the locations in a year.

If you're enforcing this in every workplace in a state the size of California, the inspection apparatus necessary becomes unwieldy, and likely doesn't happen, making the law unenforced and ineffective.

As an aside, while this isn't what I was talking about, creating new laws does in fact mean you need more courts and judges. I'm not sure how you think this could not be the case--do you think you can just add more cases and the same number of workers will simply work more to absorb the additional workload? Keep in mind that most courts in the US have massive case backlogs, and create incentives to settle out of court to avoid court time, which results in all sorts of problems such as dangerous criminals getting away with slaps on the wrist on the one hand, and non-violent offenders being pressured into dangerous CI situations to avoid jail time on the other hand.

Or you could be smart and do no inspections at all and say whoever reports it gets 20% of the fine.

Sure, and then hire someone to handle all the reports from people who don't understand the rule, while real reports are inhibited by warehouse owner propaganda such as "your reports won't be confidential" or "a 20% cut of this fine won't cover your lost career" and the more basic fact that almost nobody will know your law exists unless you launch a publicity campaign.

Fiddling economic knobs to try to indirectly get the invisible hand to do what you can do is a terrible enforcement strategy.

Two other companies were hit with fines before Amazon. Amazon may have innovative ways of abusing workers but they don't have a monopoly.

Did you even read the article?

Amazon is the third company in California to be hit with fines under this law, joining Sysco and Dollar General, which were fined $318,000 and $1.3 million in October and November, respectively, according to copies of the citations shared with The Post.

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