Amazon to pay $500,000 penalty for failing to notify California workers of COVID cases
Amazon must promptly notify its California warehouse workers and local health officials of COVID-19 cases and outbreaks at its worksites, under an agreement reached by the company and the state attorney general’s office.
Under the agreement, the company must notify its warehouse workers of the number of new COVID-19 cases at their workplaces within a day. The company must notify local health agencies within two days.
The agreement, which is subject to court approval, comes more than a year after California passed a law requiring employers to inform their employees and local health officials of COVID-19 cases at worksites.
The state will monitor Amazon for its compliance with the law, the attorney general’s office said in a press release on Monday. The company will also pay a $500,000 fine.
“Amazon’s practices have led to workers not knowing if they were exposed to COVID-19. It understandably left workers terrified and powerless to make informed decisions,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a press conference. “That’s coming to an end.”
When asked if the fine will make a difference, Bonta said he sees the agreement as sending a message to all the businesses in the state.
“This is the law of the state of California. You must do this to do right by the workers, to comply with the law and to do right by our collective commitment to public health,” he said.
Some Amazon workers have said the company hasn’t done enough to protect them from the coronavirus. The state has been investigating the company for months, and in December filed a petition to the Sacramento County Superior Court, alleging the company had yet to reveal how many of its workers have been infected by or died from COVID-19.
“Throughout the pandemic, Amazon... failed to adequately notify warehouse workers and local health agencies of COVID-19 case numbers, often leaving them in the dark and unable to effectively track the spread of the virus,” attorney general’s office said in the release.
In a statement, Amazon spokeswoman Barbara Agrait said the company is “glad” to have this resolved.
“We’ve worked hard from the beginning of the pandemic to keep our employees safe and deliver for our customers— incurring more than $15 billion in costs to date—and we’ll keep doing that in months and years ahead,” she said.
California in recent months has sought to regulate the warehouses of online retailers such as Amazon, which now employ hundreds of thousands of workers in the state. Gov. Gavin Newsom in September signed a law requiring employers to tell their warehouse workers of their quotas and prevent companies from using algorithms that block those employees from taking meal or bathroom breaks.
Notifying workers of COVID cases
The agreement marks the most prominent enforcement of the workplace outbreak notification law, Assembly Bill 685. Workplace advocates have said the law does not go far enough and its enforcement has been spotty.
An examination by The Sacramento Bee in February found that Cal-OSHA was significantly undercounting the number of employees in the state who have fallen seriously ill or died from the coronavirus.
Meanwhile, companies are not required to report their COVID cases and outbreaks to the general public. A bill that had sought to do so was gutted in the final days of this year’s legislative session. Health officials are only reporting the data by industries.
“Public disclosure of this data shouldn’t be as contentious as it is,” Ana Padilla, executive director at UC Merced Community and Labor Center, told The Fresno Bee in September.
The Fresno Bee’s Melissa Montalvo contributed to this report.
This story was originally published November 15, 2021 at 11:06 AM.
