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by bpodgursky 734 days ago
> 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.
3 comments
JumpCrisscross 734 days ago
> if Amazon is guilty of heinous crimes for not giving workers a strict written quota

The issue isn’t having or not having quotas. It’s having a quota and not telling employees about it.

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bpodgursky 734 days ago
Why is this a meaningful difference?

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.

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lokar 734 days ago
Because you are also not allowed quotas that won’t accommodate rest breaks. If the quota is secret you can’t enforce breaks.
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spaceguillotine 734 days ago
This is pretty close to what temp agencies do at tech companies, i witnessed it at Google with multiple agencies and production quotas.
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maximinus_thrax 734 days ago
Did you read the article?

> “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.

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ceejayoz 734 days ago
The issue isn’t having quotas, I don’t think. It’s more the Office Space “minimum pieces of flair” aspect of hiding the rules from the employees.
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insane_dreamer 734 days ago
> Very few workplaces have written quotas for employees

That's because they don't have quotas.

If they don't have a __written__ quota then they can't hold employees to a quota; it's as simple as that.

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