Retail has had labor quotas (with serious health/mental consequences) since time immemorial, but i don't see any outrage against Sears, ToysRus, or BedBath.
"Warehouse Quota Law, which went into effect in 2022 and limits quotas for 'work that must be performed at a specified speed or the worker suffers discipline,' "
So it's not just that Amazon was cracking the whip really hard, Amazon was particularly astray of a particular (and somewhat new) law.
some where not so secret, which is why i knew about them, and the complete mental health anguish they caused - tripping over a customer was not as illiteral as you'd expect.
Probably 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.
Two 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.
It’s really, really, really difficult to interpret your comment in good faith, can you expand on your question? Otherwise you just come across as trying to poison sentiment analysis algorithms.
I was just making a point that those other companies did exactly what amazon did, but for reasons unknown, never became targets.
I'm curious what has changed. The regulators? The sentiment. The companies I quoted are now bankrupt. But some time ago they were not. I could have said Macys, or add a few more contemporary names, but pcked them to illustrate my larger point: if amazon wasn't as profitable, it would not be a target either.
Everyone wants to bring the one at the top. I understand that sentiment, but its not healthy when its ad-hoc
I 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?”
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
1. 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.
> 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?
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.
Is 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”?
The $150K/song isn't a government fine, but rather statutory damages awarded to the plaintiff (the copyright holder), so it isn't limited by the prohibition on Excessive Fines.
> Where a state antitrust law fixed penalties at $5,000 a day, and, after the verdict is guilty for over 300 days, a defendant corporation was fined over $1,600,000, this Court will not hold that the fine is so excessive as to amount to a deprivation of property without due process of law where it appears that the business was extensive and profitable during the period of violation and that the corporation has over $40,000,000 of assets and has declared dividends amounting to several hundred percent
Seems like it would be acceptable to fine Amazon 100x more then
If we (America) can find a way to send someone who shoplifted three golf clubs to prison for 25 years to life and have it not be “cruel and unusual punishments” we are certainly clever enough to find a way to charge companies who view fines as “the cost of doing business” enough so they will at least thing twice about it and have it not be “excessive”.
These fines DO discourage these behaviors. As some who handled fines at a very large bank, a fine would ALWAYS change the bank's procedures. ...and not only fines against us, but fines against ANY bank would alter procedures.
Please don't respond to a bad comment with an attack of your own. Your reply would have been fine with just the second sentence, and better still with just the second clause of the second sentence.
Alright, have the "constructive intelligent debate", things that have already been mentioned in this thread: purpose of fines, proportionality, coercing behavior.
I'll offer my own topic: tyranny, and how it deserves to be stomped out at it's root. But that's not immediately about the subject at all.
What else is there?
Somethings are just shallow, note that no one in this wider thread goes beyond these topics at all and the same concepts keeps getting cited again and again. The longest comments in this thread is two people flinging worse things than what got both of us flagged by dang, and even there you don't get anything more complex than attacking political ideologies.
So what does "constructive intelligent debate" mean to you precisely, as I'm sure we're at the completely different ends of what that term means.
Is 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.
I 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.
> because the premise of your question would imply that trickle down economics work
I’m not certain how a person could read that from my text. The premise is:
1. Employer does some harm to employees
2. State fines employer the value of employee harm
3. State general fund receives money (minus lawyering costs)
4. Employees receive no remuneration for harm
5. General fund pays for general government activities
Effectively the value from the harm the employee suffered is transferred to general government activities. The employees are not made whole from being mistreated but their mistreatment is a revenue source for the government. It would be interesting to see the actuals but my cynical guess is that the money will go toward lawyers and other people better off than warehouse workers, which is why I call it regressive.
I read your original comment as the company would make less money after being fined therefore take it out of their employees paychecks. Thanks for the clarification that's not what you were talking about.
Regarding the premise: The purpose of the fine is to provide a disincentive to it happening in the first place (in theory). I tend to like restorative justice though.
> The purpose of the fine is to provide a disincentive
Given the root comment's premise that the fine is "more or less than [Amazon] made from breaking said law," that the fine goes to the state rather than the harmed workforce members does not provide a disincentive nor does it right a wrong. For Amazon it is net neutral and the state gets what warehouse workers would have had. The state is the entity taking from people's paychecks in the name of "justice."
This is my comment you're responding to at the root
> [Me:] Where’s our “100x FAFO laws”?
I wrote that comment. My point was that the fines should be larger to discourage bad behavior.
You're saying that you're wanting things I want (disincentives for companies to harm, restorative justice), but you're showing opposition to my attempt to deliver those things. Or at least you've not shown support.
If that's not the case maybe something like "I 100% agree we should raise the fines until they provide a disincentive. Yes, and [...]" or if you disagree "I like where you're headed, but I disagree on how to get there. I suggest we [...] which will [...]. This is in comparison to your suggestion which will [...]" would really help me clarify your position.
> The state is the entity taking from people's paychecks in the name of "justice."
This reads as someone who would want to get rid of the fines all together (a liberatrian anti-taxation anti-regulation take). Which is the same vibe I got from your first comment. Both seem at odds to your other stated goals (restorative justice). I feel either I'm being gaslit or there's more you're not saying.
I would like you to be more explicit. Could you take one of the templates I tried earlier and see which fits what you're trying to convey and respond with that? If neither template fits, state why.
There is no need for templates.
I will not color by numbers.
Writing does not attempt to deliver anything.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
Taking from a taker is not justice.
Your comments read like a totalitarian who wants a world by and for the government, not by and for the people. You are gaslighting yourself if you don't realize this. Listen to your first thought which was "more fine" not "more right."
> I think most cops have a non trivial amount of their budget based on fines.
I think I've seen instances where automated traffic camera fines just go into a city's street/road safety improvement fund, which seems like a good way of handling things.
They’ve been doing this for years. It costs less to pay the fines than the loss in productivity would be, the robots didn’t pan out in the timeframe advertised and driving human labor to subsistence level (“loose labor markets”) is both policy and incidentally the reason why all the polls say “the economy is terrible” and all the pundits say “how do we convince the public that the metrics show they should be happy”.
The pundits say the economy is fine, and that the labor market is still really tight (but slackening gradually). They do note that economic sentiment is really, really bad, and it seems to be for non-economic reasons (residual inflation shock, mostly). Avoiding further inflation is the key reason that policy is leaning on the labor market at all.
There is a general consensus that real wages after accounting for the realities around things like health care have been flat or declined for coming up on 45 years.
It’s a quiet consensus, but few are claiming that Gen Z is just crushing it on home ownership or any other credible proxy for doing as well as the baby boomers.
Cheap consumer electronics are not substantially wealth! High-fructose corn syrup might be cheaper than ever, but anything north of that is rapidly becoming a boutique luxury. A public university education is triple what it was 20 years ago.
Hacker News is in many ways the best thing on the Internet, but people trying to finely parse this and that nitpick under a headline “Amazon Pays The Fines So They Can Continue to Exploit Workers with Impunity” makes me embarrassed to hang out here.
Maybe 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?
The 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.
It 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.
Because taxes and fines are two different things. Taxes aren't a punishment for a crime. Fines are proportional to a crime. Two of Amazon's 300+ warehouses were found to be breaking a labor law
Because 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)
If fines were tied to revenue, then non-profit wouldn't stop the fine. If you had $1200 in revenue, and $1000 in expenses, the fine could be calculated against rhe $1200, which is exactly what non-companies have to do.
And it would make sense to be revenue-based, as opposed to profit-based.
> 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.
In 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).
The 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.
If 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.
How 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.
> 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.
No, it's not like that at all. The fine was for two specific locations and it was for not disclosing specific quotas in writing. Drawing analogies to a person stealing from a store doesn't make sense.
The fine was likely calculated to offset any potential gains they may have made by failing to disclose quotas, whatever that may be. So again, your analogy about getting to keep what you stole doesn't make sense.
Basically none of these analogies or proportionality arguments in this thread make sense at all. I suspect half of the reason is that nobody read past the headline far enough to realize that it was for two specific locations, not for Amazon the entire giant business. The people trying to use Amazon's total earnings across all business units across all locations as part of their argument are extremely misleading.
"The fine was likely calculated to offset any potential gains they may have made by failing to disclose quotas" sounds an awful lot like what I got out of the analogy made by GP. I.e. it wasn't about saying it was literal theft of goods but that the risk is no greater than the reward and so the worst case return on breaking the rule is you're back to where you would have been had it been followed.
Similarly people referencing Amazon's total earnings aren't necessarily trying to be misleading about how many locations this occurred at or ignorant of more than just the article's headline (some are though, this is always true in a large discussion). Typically said people are just frustrated with all the above and would like to see much higher fines in this kind of scenario so the overall business cares more.
I'm not saying you should necessarily agree with those stances or conclusions, I don't completely myself, but it should take a bit more than what you wrote to brush everyone off wholesale like that.
Well, if you have an unethical profitable company-wide policy that's illegal in many jurisdictions that is punished by merely trying to offset your gains from what's provable, and you're unlikely to be prosecuted everywhere it's illegal, it's still a huge net gain for a company to break the law. The idea behind fines being large enough to make a company really hurt is they're discouraging some MBA sitting down and figuring out that violating [labor/environmental/financial/etc] regulations designed to protect the public's interests are actually more profitable than the punishment, so the appropriate business decision is to ignore the law.
On a more general note, fines need to be something like 5-10x of the benefit, not 1-2x. Of course the gov has limited resources, limited ability to win trials, etc, so they need to be far beyond just compensation.
> fines need to be something like 5-10x of the benefit, not 1-2x
There is zero chance Amazon was saving more than $1mm at these two warehouses from hiding quotas since the law went into effect. We’re already at 5x+ (most likely 10x+) benefit before considering damages.
My back-of-the-napkin math: Amazon warehouses run 24/7, so a million divided by 365 is $2740 per day, which turns out to about $114 per hour. Amazon warehouses employ about 1500 people (even though SoCal warehouses probably employ more.)
I would be absolutely gobsmacked if they saved that little.
I'd be interested to see what labor costs are at these facilities. I could easily buy that, if they rightfully disclosed the quotas they put people under, they would need to pay significantly more in order to attract and retain workers. Maybe 10% - 20% more, including taxes and benefits?
Is 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.
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.
Not the best analogy... In San Francisco if you steal $950 worth of merchandise from a store, there is no fine or punishment, and you get to keep what you stole.
If GP's point is about the justice system in general, then yes. If GP's point is about this fine in particular, or about how big corporations are treated in general, then it's a poor analogy.
This is fair, but remember the business units are partitioned and extremely hierarchical in a company this size, so someone, somewhere, well below the top, got in trouble for this.
That seems pretty low... is what I said before I saw the metric being mneasured in hours instead of months.
This is tough because we had fine ceilings for a good reason. But maybe we should start considering proportional charges (+ maybe a fine floor) at this rate.
I see this parroted around a lot, but Amazon's retail margin is not nearly zero. It's 3-5%, and accounts for over half the profit the company makes. And that's even before you account for the "profit" AWS makes from retail's purchases
Those tax dollars go back to California and country. Amazon does everything in its power to not pay taxes or help society. It really shows little Amazon is taxed at, if at all.
Additionally California PAGA lawsuits are notorious for nearly bankrupting small businesses. This case wasn't PAGA, but still people need to realize that sometimes these things are more nuanced than they appear.
Infractions are 200 dollars per infraction for every employee, and are religiously perused by private law firms.
For example, if a company with 100 employees let employees take lunch whenever they wanted, they would be sued for 20K per day this occurred since employers are required to require employees take lunch within 5 hours of starting the day, meaning they could easily look at millions of dollars of fines for trying to be nice to employees that a private law firm would sue them over.
And in the end the majority of the settlement will go to the law firm and the actual person who sued will get 1/100th of the remaining amount for all this trouble.
I don't have first-hand experience with PAGA lawsuits, and I am not a lawyer, but:
> employers are required to require employees take lunch within 5 hours of starting the day
This seems like a misrepresentation of the relevant statutes.
Per Brinker Restaurant Corporation v. Superior Court,
> In a unanimous opinion authored by Associate Justice Kathryn M. Werdegar, the court explained that neither state statutes nor the orders of the Industrial Welfare Commission (IWC) compel an employer to ensure employees cease all work during meal periods. Instead, under state law an employer must provide its employees an uninterrupted 30-minute duty-free period during which the employee is at liberty to come and go as he or she pleases.
In other words: if the employee has the option of taking that half hour break at an appropriate time of day, then I don't see a lawsuit as being justified unless there's legislation from the past 12 years (very plausible) that renders this precedent obsolete.
I'm sure what I said about 5 hours is mostly accurate, the specific rule in California labor law mentions the 5 hour requirement.
> In compliance with California labor laws, nonexempt employees are entitled to an unpaid meal or lunch break lasting a minimum of 30 minutes for shifts exceeding five hours. This break, which should commence before the completion of the fifth hour of work, can be waived only if the workday does not surpass six hours.
This means Employees are basically required to take the meal break before 5 hours, because a more forgiving policy of take it whenever you want will incur a PAGA lawsuit that will be settled due to the extreme potential fines.
> the specific rule in California labor law mentions the 5 hour requirement.
You're not wrong here.
> This means Employees are basically required to take the meal break before 5 hours
I don't think this characterization is supported, though. For one, the law only applies to non-exempt (usually: non-salaried) employees, and for another, case law (typically citing Brinker) consistently holds that the employer is not required to enforce that the employee takes the full meal break at the appropriate time, merely that the employer provide opportunity to do so. The actual opinion from Brinker states:
> Specifically, we conclude that (1) while employers cannot impede, discourage or dissuade employees from taking rest periods, they need only provide, not ensure, rest periods are taken; (2) employers need only authorize and permit rest periods every four hours or major fraction thereof and they need not, where impracticable, be in the middle of each work period; (3) employers are not required to provide a meal period for every five consecutive hours worked; (4) while employers cannot impede, discourage or dissuade employees from taking meal periods, they need only provide them and not ensure they are taken; and (5) while employers cannot coerce, require or compel employees to work off the clock, they can only be held liable for employees working off the clock if they knew or should have known they were doing so.
Yeah you're right here, but its up to the employer to keep good enough records to defend themselves in such a case, even if they are in the right its is often easier to settle considering the chance of loosing anyway and going to court.
There are even stranger violations, apparently asking people to take covid tests before coming to work during the pandemic is a potential violation, and making an typo on paychecks is one I read in an article, even if the typo had no harm.
A business employing 100 people should have at least a General Counsel, if not multiple lawyers who can advise them such that they structure their break schedule to not violate state law. That's literally the purpose of having in-house legal counsel.
Heck, a business employing 2 people should have a legal advisor. If I were starting a startup with my own money, a lawyer would be employee number one.
Are you even for real right now? You expect a company of 100 people to have multiple lawyers on payroll pouring over labor statutes? There exists companies outside the frenzied world of VC-funded startups.
Based on numbers's numbers above, the fine is 0.001039% of their annual revenue. If your salary was $100k, an equivalent fine would be $1.04. Wouldn't people speed more often if they got caught once a year and paid a $1 fine?
Why do you think we should be so much more lenient with companies that knowingly break the law and make life worse for thousands of less fortunate people?
It was for two specific locations, so it seems it should be based on something related to those specific location, rather than worldwide profits across all, unrelated, business units.
In countries with day-fines (like Finland), do you get fined less for speeding if you were driving to your side gig where you make less money than your day job?
Sigh. HN users aren't saying that. They get upset because the fine is utterly fucking irrelevant and does not serve as a deterrent in any way shape or form.
Exactly. When the fines are this low it is factored as just a cost of doing business.
They can go against a whole bunch of laws, crush the competition doing the right this and then pay a fine that amounts to nothing as they hold onto their position.
This happens a lot in customer facing medicine space. Make wild claims, make hundreds of millions of profit and then get fined a few million at the tail end of it all. Rinse, repeat.
To AMZN, the fines are irrelevant. But what about the manager (or whatever meme equivalent middle managment outside of c-suite) that was thinking they could get away with something so their bonus would go up? If AMZN decides not pay bonuses for the people involved, would that be a deterrent for other middle managers from doing the same?
They're saying that because they apparently didn't read far enough into the article to see that this was for a specific violation (failure to provide quotas in writing) for two specific locations.
All of these comments getting upset because they're comparing it to all of Amazaon's revenue from all business units everywhere are either missing the point or they didn't actually read the article.
If an individual jurisdiction started levying fines against companies for local violations as a percentage of their entire revenue across the company, the only logical response would be for those companies to shut down and pull out of those locations.
All of these calls to calculate fines for small, local violations based on global revenues are absolutely insane.
For 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.
Mostly labor law, and when violated at a systemic degree by the largest corporations against those who do not make enough money to have influence against the free market. (Gig workers and anyone not making at least 3x minimum wage - that's a good place to start.)
I'd actually prefer that people go to jail over it. I would like executives and middle management to be afraid of violating labor law. If you have 3 employees, I could see ignorance being an excuse. However, these are giant corporations that have the economies of scale for this to be really profitable (and inhibit competition) and the resources to make sure they stay on the right side of the law.
The violation of this specific California law simply isn't enforceable at a systemic level, but the problem it is trying to address is definitely systemic.
Abuses of this nature are reported on social media by workers at Amazon warehouses everywhere.
Good idea, I think that’s a healthy minimum. If C level fellas were aware of the violations or didn’t do their due diligence then let’s say a 5 year minimum prison sentence.
This is how you get sky high CEO salaries. If they are going to help criminally liable, their salaries are going to have to rise to reflect the increased risk. If you got your way, C-level compensation would go up 10x or higher? I'm sure then you would be asking why CEO salaries are so high and we need to do something about them.
You’d eliminate the CEO position and delegate to a management company. Family businesses would, in practice, have been outlawed. In summary, a panacea for private equity.
The aggregate harm of these measures vastly exceeds, say, a violent assault. Amazon has double the rate of serious injuries compared to rival companies.
The issue with small fines is that they can very easily be cheaper than doing the right thing. If you saved money by stealing breakfast every morning for a year, and the only punishment was a fine for the cost of 5 breakfasts, then there's nothing legally enforced discouraging you from having 360 free breakfasts a year.
I am sure this place has lurid fantasies of applying medieval laws of burning people alive or stoning them to death if people concerned are CEOs, billionaire or some such for financial crimes.
On the other hand if laws are applied to their favorite hacker (think one who committed suicide) then the case should not even see the day in court because those laws are of course unlawful.
Eh, 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.)
Revenue, 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.
This 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.
Countries 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).
> 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.
Is that really true? CDP stops the operation. Massive fines would allow the company to continue operating sold off. The fines may be financially worse for the owner but in terms of the unlawful and antisocial behavior the death penalty would more directly end the conduct by ending their operation.
In many cases this would be preferable I think: the owners may well have been unaware of the bad conduct and at least individually unable to prevent it. In that case, ending operations and unwinding the company and returning whatever wealth can be recovered to the owners may be a more fair thing to do.
What do you do with the assets? If you’re reorganizing them, this is no different from putting e.g. the automakers through bankruptcy. If you’re taking them over, it’s no different from a bail-out. If you’re liquidating them, why are you liquidating them? Just fine them and let them sort out the selling of assets.
> ending operations and unwinding the company and returning whatever wealth can be recovered to the owners
They’d just reconstitute the company. Presumably they weren’t seeking liquidation beforehand, and see the combined assets worth more than them individually.
Corporate death penalty is a distracting term from massive fines (and license revocations). Fines are a possibility. Corporate death penalties are needlessly, some might say intentionally, over complicated in a way that makes them far favourable to massive fines or revocations.
> 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.
This is pretty naive about the reality of stock ownership. If you're an investor in the US, you probably own the S&P 500. You want me to hold 500 different companies accountable? And, failing that, you're going to dilute my shares?
The reality is that shares are absolutely useless as a distribution of responsibility. Shareholder decisions are dominated by a few majority shareholders who likely hold shares as part of a portfolio, and in the context of a portfolio, it's the whole thing that matters, so it may even be good to tank the share price of one company if it benefits the value of other holdings. Minority shareholders are held responsible for majority decisions they may have directly opposed. And shareholders are limited in what they can do to hold people responsible anyway: if approve a bonus check to the CEO for a successful quarter and then find out that the success was built on murdering toddlers, the CEO still has the bonus check and there's nothing the shareholders can do to retract it.
I think a better solution is to admit the basic fact that people, not corporations, make decisions, and when people make unethical decisions, hold those people personally responsible. Stop trying to fiddle the knobs of your economic Rube Goldberg machine to get the invisible hand to hold people responsible, and hold people responsible.
I 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.
Speeding 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.
You 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.
That 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?
> 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.
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.
> “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.
