A former Amazon employee has sued the US e-commerce giant for failing to schedule the mandatory 30-minute meal breaks for employees.
Lovenia Scott, a former employee of Amazon’s fulfillment center in Vacaville, Calif., Alleged the company had not given workers enough rest, The Verge reported on Saturday.
“When given their meal breaks, workers were expected to monitor their walkie-talkies in case there were problems on the floor that sometimes shorten their breaks,” the lawsuit said.
The case, which was first filed in the San Francisco County Supreme Court in February, has now been referred to the California Northern District Court in the United States.
The lawsuit also alleged that shifts were “chronically understaffed”, preventing some workers from taking short 10-minute breaks to finish their work on time.
Amazon still had to comment on the report.
Earlier this month, Amazon and an independent contractor working in California were fined $ 6.4 million for wage theft by the Labor Commission office.
The investigation found that “Green Messengers, Amazon’s subcontractor, have underpaid drivers who schedule 10-hour days but have a workload that forces drivers to skip meals and rest breaks.”
Last week, amid mounting evidence of alleged mistreatment of its poorly paid workers, Amazon denied exploitative working conditions at its facilities, including requiring exhausted workers to pee in bottles.
In response to a tweet from US representative Mark Pocan (D-WI), the e-commerce giant replied that the company’s anti-union allegations of tactics were unfounded.
“If you pay workers $ 15 an hour, you will not become a ‘progressive workplace’ if you break down unionists and urinate workers in water bottles,” Pocan said in a tweet.
Amazon replied, “You don’t really believe in peeing in bottles, do you? If that were true, no one would work for us. The truth is we have over a million incredible employees around the world who take pride in what they are doing and having good wages and health care from day one “.
“We hope that you can issue guidelines that encourage other employers to offer what we are already doing,” the company said.
As the Twitter war began, several journalists and people who documented such incidents at Amazon facilities began to flood the web.
Journalist James Bloodworth, whose 2018 book Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain documented his experience of low-paying work for companies like Amazon.
